Yeats’s Faustian Meditations: Jung, Yoga, and The Secret of the Golden Flower

Abstract

W. B. Yeats's long-term interest in meditation practices gained new impetus in 1931 when he obtained a copy of The Secret of the Golden Flower, a Daoist manual translated from Chinese. Alongside detailed instructions on meditation, this book includes a commentary by C. G. Jung. Taking Faust as a model for the Western psyche, Jung cautions that Asian meditation techniques are unsuitable for Europeans. Yeats responds to Jung in his introduction to another translation, Patanjali's Aphorisms of Yoga (1938). Here Yeats adopts Faust as a paradigm for the meditating subject and equates Goethe's Faust with Buddhist and Hindu processes of enlightenment. Late poems such as ‘Mohini Chatterjee’, ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’, and ‘The Statues’ contain evidence that Yeats came to see an earlier project, Unity of Culture, as a quest for collective, national enlightenment. Thus, Yeats's regret at acquiring authoritative guidance on meditation so late in life indicates not only his wish to experiment with the discipline, but also that he understood meditation as a practice that would have advanced his plans for Ireland's self-realization.