W.B. Yeats became a member of the magical Order of the Golden Dawn on 7 March 1890. According to its founder, W. W. Wescott, the Order was based on certain magical manuscripts written in code, and discovered on a book barrow in the Farringdon Road. Subsequent research proved this to be an invention, so everyone concluded that the Golden Dawn was a fraud. When I was doing a night class on Yeats in Leicester in 1948, I remember our professor, Philip Collins, explaining that we simply had to accept that the great poet was also a credulous idiot, the only extenuating circumstance being that he wanted to believe such rubbish because it gave him ‘material for poetry’.
Yeats himself would have rejected this with fury. And The Place of Enchantment offers much support for his view. Alex Owen explains that Yeats himself, the actress Florence Farr, and the Irish patriot Maude Gonne all joined the Golden Dawn to learn the techniques of ‘astral projection’, and that there is evidence that they succeeded.
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