William Butler Yeats’ Theory of Reincarnation – I
The Four Memories of the Daimon, or Ultimate Self of Man
The stage-manager, or Daimon, offers his actor an inherited scenario, the Body of Fate, and a Mask or role as unlike as possible to his natural ego or Will, and leaves him to improvise through his Creative Mind the dialogue and details of the plot. – A Vision, by William Butler Yeats
Irish poet and Nobel Laureate William Butler Yeats proposed a novel theory of reincarnation in his occult treatise A Vision. According to Yeats’ view reincarnation does not occur within a framework of linear time. Rather, all of a person’s past and future lives are happening at once, in an eternal Now moment; and the decisions made in any of these lifetimes influence all of the other lives (and are influenced by them).
According to Yeats there are four different levels of human memory (which he termed “Faculties”) which impinge upon the present moment. The scheme of the Four Faculties is an arbitrary way of describing four types of memories, four different aspects of the principle of memory:
Memories from this present lifetime (i.e. the thought forms of this present personal history) make up WILL. This is what we access in the technique of recapitulation of present-life memories.
Will together with the memories of all probable realities related to this lifetime make up BODY OF FATE. This is what we access in probable reality progressions.
Body of Fate together with memories of all of an individual’s past and future lives make up MASK. This is what we access in running past life regressions.
Mask together with memories of all human beings in all their incarnations make up CREATIVE MIND, or collective unconscious. This is what we access in listening to the Voices of our Ancestors.
The Four Faculties symbolize four levels of motivation in everyday life – four levels from which a person may act in making everyday decisions. Decisions made in one lifetime affect all lifetimes. Every decision impinges on the totality; and the totality impinges on every decision. Every decision ever made affects and is affected by an infinitude of lifetimes in an eternal Now moment.
When not affected by the other Faculties (Will) has neither emotion, morality, nor intellectual interest, but knows how things are done, how windows open and shut, how roads are crossed, everything that we call utility. It seeks its own continuance. Body of Fate, the series of events forced upon him from without, is shaped out of the Daimon’s memory of the events of his past incarnations; his Mask or object of desire or idea of the good, out of its memory of the moments of exaltation in his past lives; his Will or normal ego out of its memory of all the events of his present life, whether consciously remembered or not; his Creative Mind from its memory of ideas – or universals – displayed by actual men in past lives, or their spirits between lives. – A Vision
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