The Speckled Bird is an autobiographical novel, by the Irish poet, writer, mystic and Nobel laureate in literature in 1923, W. B. Yeats. The novel has been written in four versions, between 1896 - 1903, and Yeats has given this name to the last version, taken from the Old Testament, Book of Jeremiah, chapter 12, verse 9: "Mine heritage is unto me as a speckled bird, the birds round about are against her; come ye, assemble all the beasts of the field, come to devour." The novel was never published during Yeats's lifetime. As referred to by Yeats himself when he wrote in his Autobiographies, in its chapter, The Trembling of the Veil: a novel that I could neither write nor cease to write, which had Hodos Chameliontos for its theme .[1] The novel was published for the first time in 1976, including the three previous variants which Yeats wrote for his novel. The second edition, with new annotations being added, was published in 2003. Both of the editions were edited, expounded and elucidated, by the author and literary critic William H. O'donnell.
Yeats started to work on The Speckled Bird in 1896 and wrote four recognizably different versions of it before ceasing to work on his venture in 1903. The novel is "finished" in the sense that its plot reaches an ending, but Yeats did not complete the extensive refining and revising which would have been obligatory to bring the speckled bird up to his literary merits.[2]
Given that perspective and Yeats's point of view that elaborated surface realism was essential in writing novels, it was almost unavoidable that The Speckled Bird's 744 manuscript pages would include a very large portion of biographical matter. The major characters are corresponding to Yeats, his father, Maud Gonne, MacGregor Mathers, and Olivia Shakespear. The location is based on the country houses of Edward Martyn, Count Florimond de Basterot, and Lady Gregory in County Galway and County Clare. But The Speckled Bird is not a roman à clef. Instead, real-life aspects were selected from a variety of sources according to the direct artistic objective and gathered together into fictional synthesis.
The Speckled Bird, as an autobiographical novel, is related in its context to Yeats's attempt to found a mystical order of Celtic Mysteries. During the period when he was working on the novel, his written articles and papers on some publications, were full of statements in which he expressed his wish that the predominating age of science and materialism, would soon be replaced by a new age of imagination, artistic beauty, and vivid symbols. It is not surprising that those general views are repeated in the novel, but the correspondences between Yeats's Celtic Mystical Order and the novel's mystical society are particularly close. In the novel, the autobiographical hero adamantly requires that the rituals for his mystical order be formed from knowledge that comes in dreams and visions. As Yeats said of the Celtic Mysteries Order rituals: "My rituals were not to be made deliberately, like a poem, but all got by that method Mathers had explained to me" of visions induced by symbols. The Celtic Mystical Order was to "find its manuals of devotion in all imaginative literature." This religion of beauty and of the power of the visionary imagination holds a central place in all versions of the novel, even though the hero's attempt to organize a mystical society does not appear until the 1900 and 1902 versions.
The main theme for the novel was described by Yeats as the Hodos Chameliontos[3] (the path of the Chameleon). Broadly speaking, Yeats refers to his occult involvement among the ranks of the mystical order of the Golden Dawn, during this period (the end of the 1890s), as the background for writing the novel. This term is taken from a hand-written text, a Cabbalistic one, shown to Yeats, by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, which includes a coloured diagram of the ten Cabalistic sephiroth and their interconnecting lines (or "paths"). The term itself refers to the right path, which the students of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn must pursue, in order to proceed themselves through that Hodos Chameliontos and in order to attain for themselves that very knowledge of the adept. Also, the students must progress through this path without deviation, "turning neither aside unto the right hand, nor unto the left wherein are the wicked and frightening" paths that would lead to incertitude and debacle. Only "the path of the Chameleon, that Path namely, which is alone moving upwards" to supernatural wisdom will lead them so.
Plot
First version
The first version, written in early 1897, is basically a tale of idealized love, informed by Plato's thought and a highly valuable work of art. It is set in the Aran Islands, where the young hero's peculiar father has built a house and keeps the customary prayer hours until, after the Virgin Mary appears in a vision, he dedicates himself solely to visions. A visit by the beautiful young heroine fills the hero with romantic love that accompanies the mystical reverence he has bequeathed from his father, although the hero himself does not see any Marian apparition, in contrast to his father's ones.[2]
Second version
The second version, whose name is The Lilies of the Lord, was written probably in the first half of 1897 and the summer and fall of 1898. It has eighty-five extant pages and is now missing only one page. Its location is a remote estate in the west of Ireland, but on the mainland rather than the Aran Islands. The father has a private chapel and, as in the earlier version, sees the Virgin Mary in visions. The visit of the young heroine is given expanded treatment. The son does not have any visions in either of the two earliest versions and there is no mention of ritual magic or occultism. Yeats probably did not do much work on the novel in 1899.[2]
Third version
The untitled third version, to which Yeats referred in his letters as "Michael," the hero's name in all versions of the novel, has 285 extant holograph pages, treble the length of its predecessors. The setting for the 1900 version is still on a remote estate in the west of Ireland, but the father is now only a minor character who, after spending his youth in art schools and womanizing on the Continent, is an irreligious recluse. The son, instead of the father, sees a vision of the Virgin Mary. The opening one-third of this 1900 version is an expansion of the two earlier versions, with considerable new attention given to the young hero's vision. The remainder of the 1900 version takes the hero to London where he and an occultist, who is closely modeled on MacGregor Mathers, begin to plan a mystical order. News that the heroine has married someone else overwhelms the hero, and, at the suggestion of the occultist, he goes to Paris to copy occult manuscripts, hoping that the change of scene will comfort him. Soon afterwards he receives alarming reports that the occultist has usurped control of their mystical order and has altered the rituals so that they no longer reflect the hero's artistic ideals. The 1900 version breaks off after the hero visits a bizarre old occultist who sunbathes nude in a coffin and rants about a supposed plot by Jesuits to subvert the mystical order.[2]
Final version
In the final version, The Speckled Bird is concerned with the artist’s quest for spiritual truth. The novel begins in the west of Ireland with Michael Hearne’s gradual discovery of the existence of a spiritual world through meditation, dream, trance, and vision, and his awakening to the spiritual significance of myth, art, folklore, nature, and woman. Later in London he attempts to found a mystical order which would unite religious, artistic, and natural emotions, or, to use the Platonic terms, truth, beauty, and love. He gathers a group of artists and mystics around him to help devise rituals which would evoke the supernatural, and the objects and instruments of which would embody artistic beauty. The novel concludes with the hero at a railway station in Paris, setting out for the East, now to Arabia, now to Persia, still driven by his dominant aim, and convinced that in the East he would surely find a doctrine that would “reconcile religion with the natural emotions and explain these emotions”.[2][4]
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, more commonly the Golden Dawn, was a secret society devoted to the study and practice of occult Hermeticism and metaphysics during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Known as a magical order, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was active in Great Britain and focused its practices on theurgy and spiritual development. Many present-day concepts of ritual and magic that are at the centre of contemporary traditions, such as Wicca and Thelema, were inspired by the Golden Dawn, which became one of the largest single influences on 20th-century Western occultism.
The occult is a category of esoteric or supernatural beliefs and practices which generally fall outside the scope of organized religion and science, encompassing phenomena involving a 'hidden' or 'secret' agency, such as magic and mysticism. It can also refer to supernatural ideas like extra-sensory perception and parapsychology.
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist and writer, and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. He was awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature, and later served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State.
Dion Fortune was a British occultist, ceremonial magician, novelist and author. She was a co-founder of the Fraternity of the Inner Light, an occult organisation that promoted philosophies which she claimed had been taught to her by spiritual entities known as the Ascended Masters. A prolific writer, she produced a large number of articles and books on her occult ideas and also authored seven novels, several of which expound occult themes.
Ceremonial magic encompasses a wide variety of rituals of magic. The works included are characterized by ceremony and numerous requisite accessories to aid the practitioner. It can be seen as an extension of ritual magic, and in most cases synonymous with it. Popularized by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, it draws on such schools of philosophical and occult thought as Hermetic Qabalah, Enochian magic, Thelema, and the magic of various grimoires. Ceremonial magic is part of Hermeticism and Western esotericism.
Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, born Samuel Liddell Mathers, was a British occultist and member of the S.R.I.A.. He is primarily known as one of the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a ceremonial magic order of which offshoots still exist. He became so synonymous with the order that Golden Dawn scholar Israel Regardie observed in retrospect that "the Golden Dawn was MacGregor Mathers."
The Book of Abramelin tells the story of an Egyptian mage named Abraham, or Abra-Melin, who taught a system of magic to Abraham of Worms, a Jew in Worms, Germany, presumed to have lived from c. 1362 to c. 1458. The system of magic from this book regained popularity in the 19th and 20th centuries partly due to Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers' translation, The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage.
Armanism and Ariosophy are esoteric ideological systems that were largely developed by Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, respectively, in Austria between 1890 and 1930. The term 'Ariosophy', which translates to wisdom of the Aryans, was invented by Lanz von Liebenfels in 1915, and during the 1920s, it became the name of his doctrine. For research on the topic, such as Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's book The Occult Roots of Nazism, the term 'Ariosophy' is generically used to describe the Aryan/esoteric theories which constituted a subset of the 'Völkische Bewegung'. This broader use of the word is retrospective and it was not generally current among the esotericists themselves. List actually called his doctrine 'Armanism', while Lanz used the terms 'Theozoology' and 'Ario-Christianity' before the First World War.
Paul Foster Case was an American occultist, Freemason, and writer of books on occult tarot and Qabalah. Perhaps his greatest contributions to the field of occultism were the lessons he wrote for associate members of Builders of the Adytum or B.O.T.A. The knowledge lectures given to initiated members of the chapters of the B.O.T.A. were equally profound, although the limited distribution has made them less well known.
Joséphin Péladan was a French novelist and Rosicrucian who later briefly joined the Martinist order led by Papus. His father was a journalist who had written on prophecies, and professed an esoteric-aesthetic form of Rosicrucianism and universalist Catholicism. He established the Salon de la Rose + Croix for painters, writers, and musicians sharing his artistic ideals, the Symbolists in particular.
Moonchild is a novel written by the British occultist Aleister Crowley in 1917. Its plot involves a magical war between a group of white magicians, led by Simon Iff, and a group of black magicians, over an unborn child. It was first published by Mandrake Press in 1929 and its recent edition is published by Weiser.
The Cipher Manuscripts are a collection of 60 folios containing the structural outline of a series of magical initiation rituals corresponding to the spiritual elements of Earth, Air, Water and Fire. The "occult" materials in the Manuscripts are a compendium of the classical magical theory and symbolism known in the Western world up until the middle of the 19th century, combined to create an encompassing model of the Western mystery tradition, and arranged into a syllabus of a graded course of instruction in magical symbolism. It was used as the structure for the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, after the manuscripts came into the possession of prominent SRIA members.
Babalon is a goddess found in the occult system of Thelema, which was established in 1904 with the writing of The Book of the Law by English author and occultist Aleister Crowley. The spelling of the name as "Babalon" was revealed to Crowley in The Vision and the Voice. Her name and imagery feature prominently in Crowley's "Liber Cheth vel Vallum Abiegni".
Florence Beatrice Emery was a British West End leading actress, composer and director. She was also a women's rights activist, journalist, educator, singer, novelist, and leader of the occult order, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. She was a friend and collaborator of Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats, poet Ezra Pound, playwright Oscar Wilde, artists Aubrey Beardsley and Pamela Colman Smith, Masonic scholar Arthur Edward Waite, theatrical producer Annie Horniman, and many other literati of London's fin de siècle era, and even by their standards she was "the bohemian's bohemian". Though not as well known as some of her contemporaries and successors, Farr was a "first-wave" feminist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; she publicly advocated for suffrage, workplace equality, and equal protection under the law for women, writing a book and many articles in intellectual journals on the rights of "the new woman".
The Isis-Urania Temple was the first temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The three founders, Dr. William Robert Woodman, William Wynn Westcott, and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, were Freemasons and members of Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (S.R.I.A.). It continued as one of four daughter organisations into which the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn fragmented, the others being the Alpha et Omega, the Stella Matutina and Aleister Crowley's A∴A∴.
Stanislas de Guaita was a French poet based in Paris, an expert on esotericism and European mysticism, and an active member of the Rosicrucian Order. He was very celebrated and successful in his time. He had many disputes with other people who were involved with occultism and magic. Occultism and magic were part of his novels.
Tarot card reading is a form of cartomancy whereby practitioners use tarot cards to purportedly gain insight into the past, present or future. They formulate a question, then draw cards to interpret them for this end. A traditional tarot deck consists of 78 cards, which can be split into two groups, the Major Arcana and Minor Arcana. French-suited playing cards can also be used; as can any card system with suits assigned to identifiable elements.
Edmund William Berridge (1843–1923) was a medical doctor in London, homoeopathist in the United States and occultist. He joined the Golden Dawn in May 1889, taking the magical name "Respiro" and the motto Resurgam. He was also a follower of Thomas Lake Harris.
According to some literary and religious studies scholars, modern Theosophy had a certain influence on contemporary literature, particularly in forms of genre fiction such as fantasy and science fiction. Researchers claim that Theosophy has significantly influenced the Irish literary renaissance of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, notably in such figures as W. B. Yeats and G. W. Russell.
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