Order of the Golden Dawn, and William Butler Yeats’s Poetry

From the 1880s onwards, the Order of the Golden Dawn counted many artists and illustrious figures among its members, who were undoubtedly attracted by its theosophical ideology as much as by its performative rituals. With its colourful pictures, occult tradition and wealth of arcane symbols, the Tarot easily formed an integral part of the Golden Dawn: it was one of the divination methods taught to adepts, while, on another level, it represented the Order’s organisation. This omnipresence of the Tarot left its traces in its members’ artistic pursuits. Some of them created new Tarot decks; others assimilated their occult experiences in different ways. It has been argued that William Butler Yeats, one of the Golden Dawn’s most prominent members, chose to use Tarot imagery in his poetry. However, a closer look at Yeats’s poetic imagery shows this to be too complex to constitute exact correspondences with the Tarot. Indeed, as I shall argue in this piece, W.B. Yeats’s poetic images transcend the mere representation of images: they may have been intended to function as a ‘linguistic Tarot’. 1 A young man of high ambitions, W.B. Yeats left the Theosophical Society when he found it not only disapproved of his interest in practical magic, but even actively hindered him from conducting experiments with which he hoped to gain practical understanding of the Society’s lore. In the Order of the Golden Dawn he met “Pictures passing before the mind’s eye”: the Tarot, the Order of the Golden Dawn, and William Butler Yeats’s Poetry