Overview

Much of the difficulty in approaching the Yeatses’ system lies in the lack of a clear exposition of the system's central premises, themes, and propositions. There is detail about the movement of the gyres of Faculties and Principles, but little about the system's conception of the nature of the human being; there are glimpses of the nature of the Daimon or the Thirteenth Cone, but no sustained treatment.

At the most fundamental level:

• Yeats's conception of cosmos is idealist: ultimately everything is mind or spirit, and reality is created by spirits perceiving each other (§5.0, §5.1).

• The ultimate reality is symbolized as a unified Sphere, close to the concept of God or to the spiritual totality of the cosmos (§10.2).

• This spiritual totality is unknowable to human consciousness, because human consciousness is intrinsically dualistic, so that everything is expressed in a series of pairs of opposites or antinomies (§4.4).

• These antinomies are in dynamic tension, moving constantly from one extreme to the other then back in a continual cycle (§4.5).

• Within these cycles, the same basic pattern applies to “every completed movement of thought or life, twenty-eight incarnations, a single incarnation, a single judgment or act of thought” (AVB 81, CW14 60).

The cycle starts at the extreme of undifferentiated unity, emerges and gradually achieves greater definition and then full manifest expression, before it passes to fragmentation and returns to the simplicity of unity. This can be modeled as a movement from a minimum to a maximum and back again and can be represented by a spiral or gyre, moving in time from a point to a broad circle and then back (Fig. 4.1a). Since the maximum of one quality is also the minimum of its opposite—and the minimum of that quality is the maximum of its opposite—the duality is perhaps more clearly represented by two gyres that interpenetrate, with the apex of one at the center of the widest expansion of the other (Fig. 4.1b). The cycle can also be expressed as a circle in which the extremes are diametrically opposite one another, and where movement around the circumference expresses the movement from one extreme toward the other and then back again (Fig. 4.1c).