An Infant Avatar: The Mature Occultism of W. B. Yeats

Yeats's esoteric beliefs regarding marriage, the conception of children, and reincarnation facilitated his elitism and, thus, his later reactionary views—including his glorification of the Ascendancy and his interest in eugenics. Ceremonial magic is not commonly associated with eugenics and the Ascendancy; however, as they developed between 1917 and 1939, Yeats's ideas arose from a curious admixture of history, passion, literature, current events, and occult philosophy. Yeats's practice of sexual magic, his concern with preserving the Protestant Ascendancy, his interest in the science of eugenics, and his belief that an avatar was going to incarnate, all grew from his concerns about the future of humanity, particularly in Ireland. Disparate as these components of Yeats's thought may seem, they are all interrelated, integral parts of his thinking. Sexual magic was a part of the occult philosophy that informed Yeats's world view from the 1880s on, as was his belief in an imminent avatar. His idealization of the Protestant Ascendancy was strengthened by the Easter Rising in 1916 and the consequent revolution and civil war. Eugenics came late to Yeats's philosophical repertoire, around 1930.

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On the Boiler, published at the end of his life in 1939, is Yeats's unabashed statement about his belief in the continuing racial degeneration of Europeans. Its ideas are built on his earlier preoccupation with sexual magic as a means of creating the most highly evolved humans. Yeats writes, "well-known specialists are convinced that the principal European nations are degenerating in body and in mind . . . ."¹ In 1937 Yeats joined the Eugenics Society, and by 1939, his convictions had been bolstered by Eugenic Society publications and the work of Eugene Catell, an early pioneer of intelligence testing.² While Yeats wrote to Ethel Mannin that he was afraid that some of his friends might be angry with him for the opinions he was publishing in On the Boiler, his letters sound almost playful on this point.

He also wrote, ironically, to Maud Gonne MacBride that some of On the Boiler might "amuse" her.³ It is hard to see what Yeats would consider amusing in his thoughts presented in On the Boiler, and it is doubtful that Madame MacBride was amused. However, in "A Bronze Head," first published in 1939 and then included in Last Poems, the poem's speaker imagines that "a sterner eye looked. . ." out of the plaster cast of Maude Gonne MacBride's head that was painted bronze and installed to the right of the entrance to the Municipal Gallery of Art in Dublin. The "sterner eye" that looked out of Madame MacBride's head saw the degeneration of the Irish exactly as Yeats saw it. It looked out

On this foul world in its decline and fall;
On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave.
And wondered what was left for massacre to save.⁴

According to Yeats, both poor breeding and overpopulation by inferior members of society were to blame for Europe's racial degeneration:

For now by our too much facility in this kind, in giving way for all to marry that will, too much liberty and indulgence in tolerating all sorts, there is a vast confusion of hereditary diseases, no family secure, no man almost free from some grievous infirmity or other. . . . ; it comes to pass that our generation is corrupt, we have many weak persons, both in body and mind, many feral diseases raging amongst us, crazed families, parentes peremtores; our fathers bad and we are the like to be worse.

(E 579)

Yeats went so far as to admit his opinion that "Sooner or later we must limit the families of the unintelligent classes . . . (E 426)," hinting at possible eugenic solutions (such as involuntary sterilization, which became practice in the United States at...