THE VISION

A Vision, a mystical text composed of information revealed to him through the medium of his wife’s sustained experiments in automatic writing.1 In A Vision and related textual fragments composed between 1919 and 1925, hyperstitional agents Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne recount the discovery of an arcane philosophical system encoded in a series of geometrical diagrams—‘squares and spheres, cones made up of revolving gyres intersecting each other at various angles, figures sometimes with great complexity’—found accidentally by Robartes in a book that had been propping up the lopsided furniture of his shady Cracow bedsit.2 Aherne is skeptical, but as Robartes delves further into the system’s origin, he discovers that the Cracow book (the Speculum Angelorum et Hominis by one ‘Giraldus’, published in 1594) recapitulates the belief system of an Arabian sect known as the Judwalis or ‘diagrammatists’,{ W.B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’, in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Churchtown, Dundrum, Ireland: The Cuala Press, 1920); A Vision [1925], in C.E. Paul and M. Mills Harper (eds), The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Vol. XIII, (New York: Scribner, 2008); A Vision [1937], in C.E. Paul and M. Mills Harper (eds), The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Vol. XIV (New York: Scribner, 2008). It should be noted here that George Yeats’s contribution to A Vision was that of a co-author, although she insisted, along with the mysterious Instructors, that her role in the process not be made public. } Via AMY IRELAND.