Yeats’s Daimonic Birds and Beasts of Apocalypse

Abstract

Much from George and W.B. Yeats’s channelling sessions left little or no trace in A Vision yet provided important material for the poet. The Daimon, an antagonist spiritual counterpart, though unclear in A Vision, was a vital concept to Yeats, and could be symbolised in bird or animal form; similarly, the dove and swan that appear in the annunciations to Mary and Leda embody the daimonic on a macrocosmic scale. Another daimonic beast at both individual and world level is the unicorn; one related to the new religious age is the sphinx, which embodies a complex conjunction of ideas, including the reawakening of ancient ways of thought. The Daimon brings crisis to human life, and the daimonic beasts are associated with crisis in world history, the irruption of the irrational divine.