| Status | 已發表Published |
| Yeats, the Great Year and Pierre Duhem | |
| Gibson, M.I. | |
| 2016-12-01 | |
| Source Publication | Yeats, Philosophy and the Occult |
| Publication Place | Clemson, SC |
| Publisher | Clemson University Press (an imprint of Liverpool University Press) |
| Pages | 171-223 |
| Abstract | When writing both versions of A Vision and when adapting the solar months (represented as signs of the zodiac) of his own cycle to the “Great Year,” Yeats read deeply in order to fit his most macroscopic version of the Instructors’ symbolism to ancient calendrian theory. Originally indebted to thinkers like Jeremiah Hastings, Franz Cumont and the Egyptologist Flinders Petrie for information on the difference between measuring the Great Year through the lining up of the planets, the procession of the equinoxes and the Etruscan Great Year, Yeats eventually settled on Pierre Duhem’s Systeme du Monde as his major source for the concept, and embedded translations from the French – probably by his wife, George – into the body of his 1937 text. That he should do so is particularly intriguing given that his Rapallo notebooks show that he had been reading Sepharial’s Hebrew Astrology for alternative articulations of the Great Year just before rewriting A Vision, making copious notes which would seem to play no part in the final text, although in fact do so surreptitiously. The chapter will begin by covering familiar ground on the workings of the gyres, the Faculties, and then the Yeatses’ development of a “World Diagram” of twelve 2150 year “cycles” in the Automatic script, which provides a basis for his belief in the wheel representing a “Great Year” with alternately primary and antithetical religious epochs. There will then be a discussion of the uses to which Yeats put sources like Flinders Petrie and Jeremiah Hastings in framing the great year in A Vision (1925), as well as a frank discussion of the mistakes made therein. The piece will then move to a consideration of the role played by Sepaharial’s Hebrew Astrology and Leo Frobenius’s The Voice of Africa in Yeats’s search for new analogues when preparing for the new edition. Finally, the chapter will examine the role played by Pierre Duhem and Yeats’s specific reasons for using his great book mainly in the final articulation of the idea. |
| Keyword | Yeats Duhem cosmology Ptolemy |
| Language | 英語English |
| ISBN | 9781942954262 |
| The Source to Article | PB_Publication |
| PUB ID | 27099 |
| Document Type | Book chapter |
| Collection | DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH |
| Recommended Citation GB/T 7714 | Gibson, M.I. . Yeats, the Great Year and Pierre Duhem[M]. Yeats, Philosophy and the Occult, Clemson, SC:Clemson University Press (an imprint of Liverpool University Press), 2016, 171-223. |
| APA | Gibson, M.I. .(2016). Yeats, the Great Year and Pierre Duhem. Yeats, Philosophy and the Occult, 171-223. |
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