Over the last year, I’ve thought a lot about the idea of cyclical time, time without beginning or end, as opposed to the view time as linear, which implies a start and an ending.
Time as a never ending series of cycles is a core feature of eastern cosmology, but has also shown up in the west. The Greek deity, Aion, representing “unbounded” time, was associated with the Hellenistic mystery religions.
Time without beginning or end is also feature of more recent western esoteric groups, such as The Golden Dawn, a secret society founded in the 19th century, that sought to restore the knowledge and practice of western mystery traditions. W.B. Yeats was an initiate, and his visionary poem, The Second Coming, (1919) gives a vivid picture of time as a rising and falling series of spirals, or “gyres:”
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The tone of The Second Coming is consistent with all sources, eastern and western, that deal with time cycles. They are unanimous in saying this is the dark time, the Iron Age, the Kali Yuga, and in Buddhist terms, the time of “Five Degenerations.” Continue reading →
William Butler Yeats by George Charles Beresford, 1911
I posted William Butler Yeats’ best known poem, The Second Coming five years ago. Its time has come round again. Yeats (1865-1939), one of our greatest English language poets, had an abiding interest in the mythology and folklore of his native Ireland.
He was also a member of The Golden Dawn, an organization devoted to western esotericism. The Golden Dawn developed a series of visualizations and meditations designed to awaken subtle areas of consciousness. Yeats presented The Second Coming as a breakthrough of visionary experience, framed within his personal theory of “gyres,” or cycles of time, analogous to the eastern idea of “yugas,” or ages.
Written in 1919 and published in 1921 The Second Coming was naturally read at the time as a reaction to the horrors of World War I. But the archetypal imagery Yeats brought up from the depths cuts deeper than specific personal or historical issues. It speaks as clearly to our own times, as if the forces that break and end eras and empires and civilizations are not exhausted in a decade or two. And though we can all identify our own Rough Beasts du jour, that doesn’t answer the key question of where the forces that drive such men to loose the blood-dimmed tide may come from…
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
We have all heard and read more words this week than we want or need. The ones that keep coming back to me were written in 1919, in a poem called “The Second Coming,” a haunting vision written by William Butler Yeats in the wake of the first world war.
W.B. Yeats by John Singer Sargent. Public Domain
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
***
Yeats was a member of The Golden Dawn, an early 20th century occult organization centered in Britain that sought to recover lost elements of the western mystery traditions. Their once-secret teachings are now posted online, where we can see that the group practiced the kind of visualizations that could give rise to spontaneous “images out of Spiritus Mundi,” the World Spirit, one of the Golden Dawn’s concepts.
Elsewhere we can read that the poet worked out his own concept of world cycles or “gyres” as he put it here. We find theories of world cycles from many cultures in many times. The Greeks said there once was a Golden Age, but now it is Iron. We’ve all heard of the Age of Aquarius, though unfortunately astrologers now tell us it won’t begin for a few hundred years. Eastern cultures envision vast cycles that rise and fall and rise again eternally.
In all of these visions, this is the Iron Age, the Kali Yuga, a time of degeneration, where the ceremony of innocence is drowned. Different traditions differ on where it goes from here.
In one account, offered by Paramahansa Yogananda, the crucifixion marked the nadir of this particular world age. Things are getting better; right now we are experiencing inertia, a last gasp of the dark ages. Even in this hopeful account, nothing is fixed or pre-determined. It’s up to us. How we live our lives, what we think, and what we do, matter more than we know. More than we can imagine.
In truth, we already know this, just as we know that despair is not an option. It seems to me the only choice we have is to live moment by moment as if we are the people we want to be, living in the world we want to live in. There may not be anything more important. Isn’t it true that the sum of our collective thoughts and actions is going to shape our world and the one future generations are going to inherit?
The First Gates 