Defending the Magic of Power

Abstract

At the time, surely, Yeats must have felt there was nothing more to say or do; but he was a determined man, and the issue had, for whatever complex of reasons, assumed tremendous proportions. As a proud man of strong principles, he was infuriated by Thomas’s attack upon his personal integrity. Far more important, however, was the ruin he foresaw for an Order which embodied in its teachings and rituals his profoundest religious and philosophical convictions about man’s place in the universe. So, as usual, he sought an artistic means for the ordering of his thought and for the reunification of a religious organisation he thought could not exist in fragments. He must have begun almost at once to write the striking and thoughtful essay entitled ‘Is the Order of R.R. & A.C. to remain a Magical Order?’ The title page of the privately printed pamphlet records that it was ‘Written in March, 1901, and given to the Adepti of the Order of R.R. & A.C. in April, 1901’.¹

If we preserve the unity of the Order, if we make that unity efficient among us, the Order will become a single very powerful talisman, creating in us, and in the world about us, such moods and circumstances as may best serve the magical life, and best awaken the magical wisdom. Its personality will be powerful, active, visible afar, in that all powerful world that casts downward for its shadows, dreams, and visions.

Yeats, ‘Is the Order of R.R. & A.C. to remain a Magical Order?’