ALTERNATIVE SPIRITUALITY IN W.B. YEATS’S WRITINGS
ALTERNATIVE SPIRITUALITY IN W.B. YEATS’S WRITINGS

Summary/Abstract: Yeats’s works appear to be dominated by a constant pursuit of the collectivesacred knowledge that must have been passed down from generations and which is often reveledin the tension between the material reality and the spiritual world. Drawing on and challenging atthe same time the Christian tradition of his country, but also Neo-Platonism, Hinduism and theoccult (Theosophy, The Order of the Golden Dawn, spiritualism and folklore), Yeats placedspirituality at the center of his life and writings. Visions of on Irish occult secret order, of anAnima Mundi that stores everything that has been humanly thought, the belief in reincarnationand a cyclical theory of time, symbolism and the power of evocation and invocation of language,all these aspects offered Yeats a life-long belief that he was on the edge of a revelation. In hisdesire to gain access to a world religion, to have a revelation of a universal pattern or of theUnitary Being and to liberate the Irish consciousness, Yeats harmonized all these religious,philosophical, supernatural, folk and literary traditions.

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