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Sunday 30 October 2016

Blavatsky and Literature: W. B. Yeats & Rosa Praed

W.B. Yeats
Yeats "Yeats died just before the catastrophe of the Second World War but his poetry seems able to encompass and face up to the most destructive century in human memory. Its way of doing so is idiosyncratic in the extreme, relying more on Irish and Greek myth, mystical and antinomian texts by Plotinus, Blake, Swedenborg, Nietzsche and Madame Blavatsky than on the approved masters of 19th- and 20th-century scientific, political and economic thought. Yeats turned himself from a wistful romantic into a tough-minded prophet – a unique metamorphosis at least in poetic history that makes him the bridge between two centuries or between late romanticism and modernism."
http://europe.newsweek.com/w-b-yeats-was-tough-prophet-our-times-330045


Magic, myth and secrecy - WB Yeats and the occult
Michelle McDonagh May 9 2015 When the Yeats family moved back to London in 1887, the young poet paid a visit to Madame Helena Blavatsky, the famous occultist and founder of the Theosophical Society which he joined and was later expelled from.
http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/wb-150/magic-myth-and-secrecy-wb-yeats-and-the-occult-31207213.html
Australian novelist Rosa Praed had theosophical connections:
Stargazing with Rosa Praed - Jessica White
In the 1880s and 1890s, her success propelled her into artistic and theosophist circles and she counted Helena Blavatsky and Oscar Wilde among her acquaintances
http://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/stargazing-with-rosa-praed/

The ‘Weird Melancholy’ of Torquay author Rosa Praed - Kevin Dixon
During the 1880s Rosa’s work began to change. In 1878 the Theosophical Society had founded its London branch. She had, since childhood, been interested in spiritualism and she began to attend and host Theosophical Society meetings. She came to know and correspond with the theosophists H.S. Olcott, Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant. Occult themes then began to emerge in her work

The Academician Theosophical is blogging up a storm with plenty of interesting Blavatskian research, sample this Blavatsky letter showing the love to the great Egyptologist Gerald Massey (not to be confused with other Blavatsky associate C. C. Massey):
https://theacademiciantheosophical.wordpress.com/2016/10/24/a-letter-from-helena-blavatsky-to-gerald-massey-on-christianity-and-egyptology/
Gerald Massey




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