The feud between Yeats and Aleister Crowley is a famous one. Yeats derided Crowley in 1900 as “a mad person,” and there’s also his famous jibe about Crowley's presence in the G.D.: “A mystical society is not intended to be a reformatory.”
Crowley lampooned him as the character Gates in his novel Moonchild, a member of the Black Lodge who is killed, then features in a scene of necromancy in Chapter XV. Gates, Crowley wrote in Chapter XI, was “a lean, cadaverous Protestant-Irishman … tall, with the scholar’s stoop. He possessed real original talent, with now and then a flash of insight which came close to genius. But though his intellect was keen and fine, it was in some way confused; and there was a lack of virility in his make-up. His hair was long, lank and unkempt; his teeth were neglected; and he had a habit of physical dirt which was so obvious as to be repulsive even to a stranger.”
Some photos of the younger Yeats vouch for the unkempt hair, though he was also a bit of a dandy. The older man was clearly a snappy dresser, conscious of his place in the world and his needing to fit into it. I’ve seen no other accounts that describe him as physically dirty.
That Crowley disliked his poetry is plain. He also described the Celtic revival as having “all the mincing, posturing qualities of the literary Plymouth Brother.” Despite this opinion, he called on the older, already recognised poet for an assessment of some poetry he was about to have published (see Crowley’s Confessions, Chapter 19), but Yeats was unimpressed.
“He forced himself to utter a few polite conventionalities, but I would see what the truth of the matter was,” Crowley wrote. “..it would have been a very dull person indeed who failed to recognize the black, bilious rage that shook him to the soul. I instance this as a proof that Yeats was a genuine poet at heart, for a mere charlatan would have known that he had no cause to fear an authentic poet. What hurt him was the knowledge of his own incomparable inferiority.”
Alas, the world has not shared Crowley’s perspective. Yeats was given the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923, shortly after Crowley was kicked out of his Abbey of Thelema Sicily and found himself penniless, a condition that was not unfamiliar to him then or later. Apart from the Holy Books, Crowley’s poetry is little known today, and hard to find. The principle exception is the scatological Leah Sublime http://www.rahoorkhuit.net/library/crowley/sublime.html, a work that, despite its fevered inventiveness, does little to commend Crowley to serious scholarship. Yeats died, comfortably off, respected and honoured, in 1939. Crowley died in penury, neglected and widely rejected, in 1947. Only in the past two decades has his total body of work been rescued and restored to the public domain.
Still, looking at the Yeats exhibit on my monitor, I felt gripped by the passion that consumed all the Golden Dawn members in the early 1990s. There you can see Yeats’ Second Order lamen, ragged but with its colours still clear. His uncle George Pollexfen’s notebooks display what were once supremely secret coloured diagrams. What did it do to one, I wonder, to spend hours and hours copying out the order’s documents by hand, and painting those diagrams? It shifted my perception of the G.D as an order where little was required of members. If you have to do that much copying, the information goes in, and goes in deeply.
Both Crowley and Yeats speak much of stars, Crowley making a goddess of them, and Yeats writing of them reverently as oracular or otherwise significant emblems of divinity. Yeats does not betray clear signs of that penetrating mystical consciousness we call the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, yet his devotion to mystical Ireland was surely the work of a man who knew and did his True Will. He seriously explored Hindu teachings only in his last years, while Crowley made them a crucial pursuit in his twenties, but both men found themselves living and working in remarkably similar territory. Crowley in the previously quoted passage from the Confessions derides Ireland as a “political, ethnological and literary corpse,” yet like countless others, I still read Yeats poetry today. The two men, though beyond reconciliation well before Crowley received The Book of the Law share much more than Celtic blood and membership in a “mystical society”.
On that topic, I do demur with Yeats. I contend such mystic fraternities are indeed reformatories. They change our minds, then our souls, and that is their true function.
Neither Yeats nor Crowley displayed lack of pride during his life, but I honour both their accomplishments. That strange, chaotic yet truly magical Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, lampooned in its collapse in the early 1900s, and still often derided by people who care to learn nothing about its core teachings, lifted both their spirits to soar where they would never have gone otherwise. Looking at Yeats' wand and dagger, the sash and lamen in the website of the exhibit in Dublin, is to look back into a time when magic was not an excuse for psychological exegesis or scholarly dissection, but a passionate pursuit for men and women who could gaze far beyond the confines of their everyday rounds.