Fictional Practice: Magic, Narration, and the Power of Imagination

The Entangled Imagination: W.B. Yeats’ “Moods” and the Psychologization of Magic

“…All art "that is not mere storytelling" has "the purpose of those symbolic talismans which mediaeval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily […] for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the divine essence" (Horton and Yeats 1898, 10). In the Golden Dawn, Yeats had learned the practice of creating painted talismans, and he created his poems accordingly (Johannsen 2021). In a laborious process, he weaved words into symbolic scenes, where allusions, images, and sounds would interact just in the right way to evoke "a perfect emotion," an "immortal mood" (Horton and Yeats 1898, 11).…”

“…In her study of British occultism, Alex Owen has already highlighted the spectrum of cultural debates of the nineteenth century that revolved around the "psychologization of the self" and the resulting mystery of consciousness, making it quite natural for magic to be "conceived in psychologized terms" (Owen 2004, 149, 115-47; see also Hanegraaff 2013, 135-37). Bernd-Christian Otto and I have recently argued that the learned magical discourse of the late nineteenth century experienced major transformations in response to the re-interpretation of the faculty of imagination that took place in the emerging modern literary discourse (Otto and Johannsen 2021). Here, Otto raises the broader question "whether it was not the emerging psychological, but the emerging literary discourse that had sparked the so-called 'psychologisation of magic' of the 20th century" (2021,363).…”

“…The system of magic that he found in the Golden Dawn catered to emerging artists (Denisoff 2013), and it allowed him to perceive his poetic work as "no different" from the practice of magic (Graf 2015, 27). The initiations outlined a transformative process of attaining a higher consciousness; 2 practices such as astral visions cultivated the "formative" imagination of the adepts (King 1997, 51; see Otto and Johannsen 2021); and the teachings mapped symbolic correspondences between the "mortal world" and "immortal essences" (Yeats 1896, 58). By 1900, during the internal struggles that soon led to the disintegration of the original Order (Gilbert 1997), Yeats became the Golden Dawn's Instructor of Mystical Philosophy, and even served a short term as its Imperator (Harper 1974).…”

“…While it may seem counterintuitive at first, Yeats relied on the pronounced naturalistic framework of psychological associationism, which he sought to subvert through his poetry and his magic. Reinterpreting the psychological creation of mental associations as a revelation of symbolic correspondences and using them to evoke spirits in the form of moods, Yeats made poetry an act of magic (Johannsen 2021) and magic a psychological therapeutic. While his theorizing remains deeply indebted to a long history of esoteric ideas, it first manifested itself in the early 1890s, embedded in a lively contemporary culture of public artistic debate and casual ritual practice.…”