William Butler Yeats
There are adepts outside of what is called alchemy who have achieved great things in these areas and there are alchemists before Socrates and Aristotle, or Da Vinci and Newton; who all true experts know were alchemists. For any author or journalist who would produce a TV documentary on the subject and not even interview a hermeticist (much less an alchemist) it is obvious their intent is not to educate. So when you see Time/Life videos doing that kind of show I hope you know you are being fed lies. In February, 1925 Yeats wrote this in Capri.
“The End of the Cycle
A Vision A
In the first edition of A Vision the section ‘Dove or Swan’ contains a relatively long passage on the relationship of the gyres to the contemporary period and the near future (AV A 210-215), which was omitted in the second edition. It is given here for reference, with the page breaks indicated. The first sentence given here (in italics) is the last on AV B 300, and the text continues from there.
Having bruised their hands upon that limit men, for the first time since the seventeenth century, see the world as an object of contemplation, not as something to be remade, and some few, meeting the limit in their special study, even doubt if there is any common experience, that is to say doubt the possibility of science.
It is said that at Phase 8 there is always civil war, and at Phase 22 always war, and as this war is always a defeat for those who have conquered, we have repeated the wars of Alexander.
I discover already the first phasePhase 23of the last quarter in certain friends of mine, and in writers, poets and sculptors admired by those friends, who have a form of strong love and hate hitherto unknown in the arts. It is with them a matter of conscience to live in their own exact instant of time, and they defend their conscience like theologians. They are all absorbed in some technical research to the entire exclusion of the personal dream. It is as though the forms in the stone or in their reverie began to move with an energy which is not that of the human mind. Very often these forms are mechanical, are as it were the mathematical forms that sustain the physical primaryI think of the work of Mr Wyndham Lewis, his powerful “cacophony of sardine tins,” and of those marble eggs, or objects of burnished steel too drawn up or tapered out to be called eggs, of M. Brancussi [sic], who has gone further than Mr Wyndham Lewis from recognisable subject matter and so from personality; of sculptors who would certainly be rejected as impure by a true sectary of this moment, the Scandinavian Milles, Me
Tags: Alchemy, Bard, Crowley