Thelemites tend to have extreme reactions to the poem, since in several ways it evokes Thelemic imagery and the symbology of the Book of the Law, or Liber L, while apparently decrying what it represents. The opening lines: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer” bring in a key image of the Thelemic mythos, the hawk-god Horus. This deity, in Liber AL, announces that he has “Crushed an Universe; & naught remains,” and the next line in Yeats’ poem is: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

Then, in Liber L, III, v 2, Horus says “let blood flow to my name,” while Yeats in line five of his poem has, “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed.” Spontaneously, the poet sees, out of the Spiritus Mundi, or World-Soul, the Great Beast himself: “somewhere in sands of the desert/A shape with lion body and the head of a man.” The poem ends with the famous couplet, “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” Which is a virtual paraphrase of the whole Thelemic notion that Ra-Hoor-Khuit (the special form of Horus on the Stele of Revealing and in Liber L) has inaugurated a new Aeon: “Ra-Hoor Khuit hath taken his seat in the East at the Equinox of the Gods; and let Asar (Osiris) be with Isa (Jesus), who also are one; but they are not of me.” (Liber L, I, v. 49).

And so on. The mood of The Second Coming is one of gloom and foreboding, and it isn’t a stretch to imagine Yeats, who had no love for Crowley long before this was written in 1919, penning it in fear that the Aeon of Horus might well be arrived, and in a form far from conducive to Celtic dreaming. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity” could easily refer to the scapegrace side of Crowley in person.

Now, a danger with Yeats, just as with Liber L and the other Holy Books of Thelema, is to take him only on one level. Anyone versed in Golden Dawn-style Hermetic Qabalah finds that order’s fingerprints all over his early poems. For example, the equally famous The Lake Isle of Innisfree has him announcing “nine rows of beans will I have there,” which hints at Yesod, the ninth sephirah of the Tree of Life, and embodiment of fecundity. The very title of another example, The Rose Upon the Rood of Time is manifestly a Rosicrucian symbol, and this poem is highly evocative of the altered consciousness of the Minor Adept, whose Rose should have descended on to his own Cross of the elements, following the 5=6 ritual.

But Yeats was a poet first, last and always, and master of his symbols; they did not dominate him, so much as they enlivened and expanded his verse. In the case of his writing the The Second Coming, Ireland was still reeling from the combined blood-loss of World War I and the Easter 1916 uprising. It would not be long before the country fell into civil war. The gloom of the poem isn’t hard to grasp, in that context.

But where Yeats and Crowley were on common ground, albeit unwillingly, was in their mutual assumptions about a new Aeon. Yeats had at this time received, through his wife Georgina (George, in his letters), the channeled transmissions that later formed the basis of A Vision. Most readers find this to be Yeats’ least accessible work, and his published comments scarcely elucidate it. Following the scheme of A Vision, the ‘gyres’ of the opening of The Second Coming are the patterns formed by spirals that in manner of their motion form cones. The point or apex of one rests on the broad base of another which it interpenetrates. As one gyre or cone reaches its furthest expansion, and “the centre cannot Hold,” so “some new revelation is at hand;/Surely the Second Coming is at hand.” The tight apex of the newly active gyre means its energies are far more focused, but the character of this new phase is bound to seem foreboding to those imbued with the values, ideas and perspective of the preceding one. “Now I know/That twenty centuries of stony sleep/Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,” Yeats comments in lines 19 and 20.

Which was pretty much Crowley’s own reaction to Liber L when he first received that text. He disliked its contradiction of his Theravada Buddhist opinions, and he found much of the imagery distastefully savage, as do most people on first (or umpteenth) reading. In his case, he published extensive commentaries on his text, and while he was never fully satisfied with his exegeses, they remain invaluable to navigating Liber L’s strange and often intimidating phrasing, symbolism and Qabalistic puns. Crowley always aimed for lucidity, where Yeats is frequently difficult, and his comments can obfuscate as much as his most obtusely personal verse.

Drawing too close parallels between the Thelemic view of history and Yeats’ is a fraught exercise. I tried something similar once with Jung’s Seven Sermons to the Dead, which has certain notions in common with Liber L, though it lacks the historically predictive reference points of either Aeons and gyres. But each man’s vision (or Vision) must be taken on its own merits. Yeats’ remains a curiosity for scholars and people with spare time to expend. Jung’s work, while having no official cultus, is still widely read and studied privately, and underpins at least part of the analytical psychology movement. Liber L is the exception, being debated enthusiastically and furiously on Thelemic forums, and is published in print in a dozen places, as well as being readily available online in even more.

But back to my initial notion: was Yeats thinking of Crowley when he wrote The Second Coming?

Liber L was first published in 1909, and again in 1913. Since Yeats was still very active in English occult circles at the time, it is hardly possible he would have been unaware of his old adversary’s new gospel. In any country, occultists constitute a small, gossipy circle, and the networks of allies and enemies that arose in the wake of the collapse of the old Golden Dawn in 1901 would surely have passed on word of what Crowley had produced to Yeats’ and his Ordo Stella Matutina. The Book is, in fact, incomprehensible to anyone not versed in basic notions of Golden Dawn Hermeticism. Those who moved in such circles would doubtless have registered both the advent of the Book and Crowley’s continued activities as an occult group leader, and as an initiate who had laid claim to the exalted grade of Magister Templi.

For this reason, I don’t doubt that the coincidence of themes in The Second Coming with the notions of Thelema is not accidental. Yeats’ disdain for Crowley and all his doings – as a mage, as a philosopher, as a poet and most of all, as a conservative-minded Englishman with little love or respect for Ireland – surely coloured this poem on the changing of the celestial tides. Much more is clearly involved though, with Yeats trying to stake out his own territory. His own biography, friends and political leanings, as well as his Hermetic views, combine in a seamless way in the poems, and while he never stoops to pettiness in his verse, he is ever true to his own beliefs.

I find myself convinced that the poem includes (though not at all exclusively) a reference to Crowley as the Beast, to the new Thelemic Aeon of Horus, as well as to Yeats’ own dismay that “the centre cannot hold” and the old things are being swept away in a fierce wind. To Yeats, as to many others over the next century, what Crowley and his circle represented was destruction, turmoil: and the fact that “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

To Crowley, Yeats represented the old Aeon, with its Christian mysticism (even if Yeats was scarcely a believer in Christ), and the centre that must not hold if the old world was to give way to renewal by fire. This poem, to my mind, captures that division which, apart from old squabbles stemming from the schism in the Golden Dawn, underlay the impossibility of the two men ever finding common ground. As they both, in their different ways, moved to accommodate the changing gyres that are still remaking our world, the rough beast has completed its journey to Bethlehem, and has been born. Superficially, that stony sleep “vexed to nightmare” has come to dark fruition; but in reality, there is more hope in that event than in Yeats’ weary dismissal of possible goodness to come.