Yeats, magic and mysticism

I find it a great pity that so much experimentation and discovery by men and women who become famous in other fields is disregarded and ignored as though [you did see those words “as though,” right?] by a conspiracy to silence testimony of the existence and interaction of the non-physical world. You see it in people’s non-quotation of Lindbergh’s out-of-body experiences over the north Atlantic in 1927 (though he himself described it fully in The Spirit of St. Louis) and, especially, in people writing of W.B. Yeats as if he were a poet and nationalist who had only an incidental and fanciful relationship to the other side.

As testimony I could offer many, many pages of Yeats’ Autobiographies, not to mention the entire book A Vision and many associated poems, but let this stand as an introduction to the magical world inhabited by one great man. From “Hodos Chameliontos,” part of Yeats’ Autobiographies, pages 258 to 262, speaking of his experiments as a young man with his uncle George Pollexfen:

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