“Magicians do exist,” declared Marcel Mauss in 1902, and Yeats certainly agreed. However, as Mauss also notes, magical rites “are always considered unauthorized, abnormal and, at the very least, not highly estimable,” and this assertion has certainly proved true within the community of Yeatsians. Historically, the study of Yeats's occultism has been, to use a deliberate pejorative, the ill-favored stepchild in an otherwise completely canonical and academically orthodox field. Outright mockery of all that “mumbo-jumbo” has not been out of bounds. Perhaps this was the natural reaction of rational academics faced with texts whose complex esoteric metaphors require “a Rose or secret explanation,” for as Kathleen Raine asserts: “The merely academic study of magical symbolism may be likened to the analysis of musical scores by a student who does not know that the documents he meticulously annotates are merely indications for the evocation of music from instruments of whose very existence he is ignorant.”

What, then, can be said about that Everest of the Yeatsian canon, A Vision and its horrible occult system of gyres within phases within cycles? It is clearly an esoteric document, in every sense of the word “a book for specialists only” (L700): composed by two Golden Dawn adepts, dedicated to Golden Dawn adepts, and reserved for their pragmatic use (CW13 lv; AVA xii).

For example, one of key cabalistic tropes behind the foundational 1925 edition, the archer who shows the way of the soul between sun and moon, appeared to Yeats—in August 1896, not November 1917—after a nine-day evocation of the “lunar power,” and Yeats elucidated this vision using the Order's cabalistic symbolism, based on information obtained from Wynn Westcott, one of the Golden Dawn's three founders (CW3280ff & 485; Au372ff & 576; Mem100ff).

Moreover, Yeats's original expositor for the system, Michael Robartes, is presented as the only true knower of its secrets, and he is certainly Yeats's mask of an idealized 8°=3;▫ Golden Dawn adept “resurrected” from “Rosa Alchemica.” Yet without the shared curricular knowledge of every Golden Dawn adept that Yeats broadly enumerates in Section XIII of “A Packet for Ezra Pound,” the symbolism of his metaphysical algebra is seemingly arbitrary, harsh, and difficult, easily confused with that distasteful “popular spiritualism” that “clings to all that is vague and obvious in popular Christianity” (AVB23–24).