ABSTRACT
The Tower, published in 1928, initially picks up on the closing themes of Michael Robartes and the Dancer. As the Control had specified, "sun in moon" brought "sanity of feeling and thinking". W. B. Yeats' fault had been to overemphasise the lunar, through his obsession with Gonne and the suppression of his own solar fire. In The Tower it will be the transplanting of the individual heart to the "One" heart that will be evident, often enacted in an Egyptian context. Yeats mentioned in February 1928 that Hegel was certainly one of the philosophers that he had read. For Hegel, his own era was the realisation of the Absolute in history, as it incorporated his own apparent realisation of Absolute Spirit. The "Great Mind" or Absolute, for the two Hermeticist sympathisers, Yeats and Hegel, is envisaged as spiritual in Nature, and therefore ultimately transcendent of time and the gyres of historical transition.
