This document discusses the influence of occultism and mythology on modernist literature, using W.B. Yeats as an example. It explains that many modernist writers, including Yeats, incorporated occult themes and imagery from ancient myths into their works to escape the sterility of modern rational thought. Yeats was a member of occult societies and incorporated these beliefs into his poetry. The document analyzes Yeats' poem "The Two Trees" to demonstrate his occult influences. It argues that supernaturalism continues to inspire writers regardless of social trends away from superstition.

1. OCCULTISM AND
MYTHOLOGY
IN TWENTIETH
CENTURY
LITERATURE
AN EXAMINATION
OF THE
MODERNIST
POETRY OF
WILLIAM BUTLER
YEATS
CHRISTINA FERRARI

2. If we cannot expunge the occult from the history of
Modernism then the sensible thing is to learn more
about it, so that we can recognize it in a literary setting
and have a clearer sense of what it is.
---Leon Surette

3. The “Occult” is an umbrella
term which covers a wide
range of hidden, secret or
unknown knowledge.
It comes from the Latin
“occulo” which means “to
hide.”

4. Mystical and religious
philosophies regarded as
occult today were fairly
mainstream from ancient
times until the 17th century,
when the Age of Reason and
scientific rationalism, drove
such beliefs underground.
With the rise of science,
nature was explained and
there was no need for mystical
or religious rituals to make
sense of the world.

5. The Occult includes :
• Ghosts
• UFO’s
• Astrology
• Mythology
• Superstition
• Magic
• Mediums
• Psychics
• The Paranormal
• Supernatural creatures—
vampires, zombies, werewolves, monsters, dragons.

6. AT FIRST GLANCE THE PAIRING OF OCCULT AND
MODERNIST LITERATURE SEEMS INCONGRUOUS.
THE ONE DENOTES OBSCURE MYSTICAL PRACTICES OF
A DUBIOUS NATURE, THE OTHER THE STABILITY OF
REASON AND LOGIC; YET SIMMERING BELOW THE
SURFACE OF SOME MAINSTREAM MODERNIST
LITERATURE LURKS THE SPECTER OF ANCIENT MYTH,
AND ESOTERIC SYMBOLISM.

7. In the early twentieth-century, the cultural aesthetic
began to reflect feelings of isolation and alienation.
Modernists frequently chose stark, confrontational
expression.

8. Writing became
utilitarian and realistic.
Imaginative flights of
fancy and maximalist
imagery were replaced
by minimal imagery.

9. Supernaturalism and mythology, which had proved a
fertile ground for the literary imagination, were
discredited and disparaged as superstitious absurdity.

10. YOU MIGHT BE
SURPRISED TO
LEARN JUST
HOW MANY
WRITERS HAVE
BEEN
INFLUENCED BY
OCCULT IDEAS.

11. Few of these writers were practicing occultists, most simply
borrowed ideas and images to enrich their storytelling.
• Honoré de Balzac
• Geoffrey Chaucer
• Ben Jonson
• Charles Baudelaire
• William Blake
• Jorge Luis Borges
• Elizabeth Browning
• Robert Browning
• Thomas Carlyle
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Ralph Waldo Emerson

12. • Charles Dickens
• E.T. A. Hoffmann
• Mark Twain
• Virginia Woolf
• Lord Byron
• Anton Chekov
• Ruben Dario
• Leo Tolstoy
• Joseph Conrad
• Arthur Conan Doyle
• Gustave Flaubert
• Alexandre Dumas
• Nikolay Gogol
• Washington Irving
• Rudyard Kipling
• Heinrich Von Kleist

13. • John Donne
• Dante
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti
• John Milton
• George Herbert
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Marcel Proust
• Ted Hughes
• Sylvia Plath
• James Joyce
• T.S Eliot
• Edgar Allen Poe
• Ezra Pound
• H.P Lovecraft
• Henry Miller
• Umberto Eco
• Aldous Huxley
• Stephen King

14. • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Henry James
• Henry Vaughan
• Edmund Spenser
• William Shakespeare
• Mary Shelley
• Alfred Lord Tennyson
• Walt Whitman
• James Joyce
• Hilda Doolittle
• Robert Merrill
• Robert Duncan
• William Butler Yeats
• Victor Hugo
• Thomas Mann
• J.K. Rowling

15. This incomplete list demonstrates the pervasiveness of
occult themes in literature, even in the modern age!

16. WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
WAS A MODERNIST AUTHOR WHO UTILIZED
MYTHOLOGY AND OCCULT THEMES.

17. W. B. YEATS 1865-
1939
Yeats was a member of the Order
of the Golden Dawn, a Rosicrucian
and an alchemist.
He was a practitioner of occultism
and his poetry was inspired by his
beliefs.
Click Here for more information
on Yeats.

18. Yeats turned towards mythology and
superstition as a reaction against “the
barren intellectual age,” which had dried
up imagination and had “cut off the
passionate depths of the unconscious”
(Gorski 22).

19. He found in the past a tradition of
creativity that provided an antidote to the
sterility of the present.

20. His fin-de-siècle fiction, The Rosa Alchemica is part of
trilogy chronicling Ireland’s history during the Christian
era. The text is a part of the secret history of occult
tradition, much like Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. Yeats
chose not to set the story in modern day Ireland like
Joyce’s Dubliners, choosing to explore the spiritual
orientation of Ireland instead.
CLICK HERE to read Rosa online

21. “THE TWO TREES” BY W.B. YEATS
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy the holy branches start,
And all the trembling flowers they bear.
The changing colours of its fruit
Have dowered the stars with merry light;
The surety of its hidden root
Has planted quiet in the night;
The shaking of its leafy head
Has given the waves their melody,
And made my lips and music wed,
Murmuring a wizard song for thee

22. There the Loves a circle go,
The flaming circle of our days,
Gyring, spiring to and fro
In those great ignorant leafy ways;
Remembering all that shaken hair
And how the winged sandals dart,
Thine eyes grow full of tender care:
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.
Gaze no more in the bitter glass
The demons, with their subtle guile,
Lift up before us when they pass,
Or only gaze a little while;

23. For there a fatal image grows
That the stormy night receives,
Roots half hidden under snows,
Broken boughs and blackened leaves.
For all things turn to barrenness
In the dim glass the demons hold,
The glass of outer weariness,
Made when God slept in times of old.
There, through the broken branches, go
The ravens of unresting thought;
Flying, crying, to and fro,
Cruel claw and hungry throat,
Or else they stand and sniff the wind,
And shake their ragged wings alas!
Thy tender eyes grow all unkind:
Gaze no more in the bitter glass.

24. • The “bitter glass” raised by demons reflects man’s guilt over
the original sin and keep humanity shackled in a state of
purgatory.
• The narrator urges, “Gaze no more in the bitter glass,” and
therefore be released from condemnation fostered upon
prelapsarian consciousness.
• The poem suggests that happiness can be found by returning
to a mythic time when trees were laden with fruit which
“dowered the stars with merry light” and which inspired the
narrator who began “Murmuring a wizard song for thee”
(Yeats 1277).

25. Yeats, views were shaped by the modern world and his
response to the post-war world.
His views were extreme.
Yeats tried to impart the teachings
of the secret societies he belonged to, but this is mostly
glossed over today.

26. Modernist writers such as W.B. Yeats reimagined modern
literature by replacing stylistic sterility with metaphysical
imagery of the occult past to escape from “the preponderant
void” (Duncan 39).

27. Supernaturalism and mythology are rich sources of artistic inspiration that continue
to influence writers, regardless of the social milieu.
Modernist writers, despite living in age which shunned superstition as anachronistic
vestiges of unenlightened thought, frequently turned to ghosts and pagan gods as
sources of inspiration.

28. Texts cited
Gorski, William T. Yeats and Alchemy. Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1996.
Print.
Surette, Leon. The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the
Occult. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1993. Print.
Yeats, W. B. The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York:
Collier, 1989. Kindle.