Observations placeholder
Yeats, W B - Collected poems - An abstract Greek absurdity has crazed the man
Identifier
007328
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Notes: The Emerald Tablet, also known as Smaragdine Table, Tabula Smaragdina, or The Secret of Hermes, is the work of Hermes Trismegistus. This short and cryptic text was highly regarded by European alchemists as the foundation of their art, in particular of its Hermetic tradition
A description of the experience
W B Yeats – Collected Poems
An abstract Greek absurdity has crazed the man –
Recall that masculine Trinity. Man, Woman, Child (a daughter or a son)
That’s how all natural or supernatural stories run.
Natural and supernatural with the self same ring are wed
As man, as beast, as an ephemeral fly begets, Godhead begets Godhead
For things below are copies, the Great Smaragdine Tablet said.
Yet all must copy copies, all increase their kind;
When the conflagration of their passion sinks, damped by the body or the mind,
That juggling nature mounts, her coil in their embraces twined.
The mirror scaled serpent is multiplicity
But all that run in couples, on earth, in flood or air, share God that is but three
And could beget or bear themselves could they but love as He