ABSTRACT

In 1885, when he was merely twenty years of age, W. B. Yeats began his studentship in the Dublin Theosophical Society, soon enrolling as a member of the Esoteric Section and immersing himself in the meditation techniques of the magical tradition, particularly the Cabala. The Theosophical Society became, as Roy Foster aptly characterizes it, his university,1 and Yeats included among his extra-curricular activities a study of the pre-Christian mythologies of ancient Ireland, the Fenian and Red Branch cycles. He had lost his Irish Protestant faith at seventeen, bored as he says he was by ‘a point of view that suggested by it blank abstraction chloride of lime’ (not mentioning that chloride of lime was prized as a bleaching and fumigating compound, used to destroy offensive odours and prevent putrefaction),2 and he had been eagerly in search of new spiritual pathways that the Theosophists provided. Thus, when he launched his poetic career it was as convert to a richer elixir, wholly committed to a magical vision of spiritual life, not only for himself but for Ireland, whose spiritually ‘sick children’, as he describes them in ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’, were suffering under the sway of the ‘Grey truth’ of science and an austere Christian dispensation.3 ‘I was unlike others of my generation in one thing only’, wrote Yeats. ‘I am very religious, and deprived by Huxley and Tyndall [...] of the simple-minded religion of my childhood, I had made a new religion’.4 And with that religion the radical young Fenian and occultist boldly began to construct a new, anti-Christian paradise by fusing the magical and the mythical in a long narrative poem, The Wanderings of Oisin.