ABSTRACT
The standard account is very familiar: Yeats is the dotty – or sinister – mystifying mage and Joyce the rational satirist of the Protestant fad for saturnalian excess; we are brought back once more to the mythic and its parodic antithesis. However, when one examines the encounters these two writers had with the Hermetic tradition, a far more complex picture emerges. It is interesting to note the persistent interest in the occult shown by post-war writers and critics.2 This, in itself, is perhaps reason enough to suggest that a reappraisal of the influence on Irish modernism of this tradition is timely.
