/lit/ - Literature

I know I come across as a complete nutter. It's because I'm a novice to this subject and so I haven't figured how to explain it to the unitiated without coming across as mentally defective.
I assure you that I'm a quite functional human being.

Seriously guys, listen to the song of this beautiful witch. It's mystical.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8Ymd-OCucs

>>4390255
No. Every cultural phenomenon has a spiritual explanation. It's a matter of interpretation.

>>4390257
I can't speak to a raging bull. You have more interest in insulting me than anything else.

>>4390251
Typical Irishman hahahahhaha

Hang up your boxing gloves m8.

Actually, these are the prettiest Yeats poems

I DREAMED that I stood in a valley, and amid sighs,
For happy lovers passed two by two where I stood;
And I dreamed my lost love came stealthily out of the wood
With her cloud-pale eyelids falling on dream-dimmed eyes:
I cried in my dream ‘O women bid the young men lay 5
‘Their heads on your knees, and drown their eyes with your hair,
‘Or remembering hers they will find no other face fair
‘Till all the valleys of the world have been withered away.’

----

HAD I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet: 5
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

---

Pure woman worship, "Eternal Feminine" cult that goes back at least as far as Dante and Chaucer. Pretty though, extremely pretty.
Here's an extremely pretty Chaucer poem.

Your two great eyes will slay me suddenly;
Their beauty shakes me who was once serene;
Straight through my heart the wound is quick and keen.

Only your word will heal the injury
To my hurt heart, while yet the wound is clean -
Your two great eyes will slay me suddenly;
Their beauty shakes me who was once serene.

Upon my word, I tell you faithfully
Through life and after death you are my queen;
For with my death the whole truth shall be seen.
Your two great eyes will slay me suddenly;
Their beauty shakes me who was once serene;
Straight through my heart the wound is quick and keen.

---

Same kind of woman worship. The Eternal Feminine cult is actually really popular today. People naively call it "Romance", but it's really about worshipping the woman as an idol, as an embodiment of the divine.

>>4390233
Those YouTube conspiracies aren't entirely vapid.
You should stop being a sneering snob and humble yourself. You'll learn more that way.

>>4390224
Read this book
>>4390202
He has a lot to do with the occult.
His poetry is littered with Celtic magic.

> STB has absolutely nothing to do with Satan or the occult

I like the poem in a way, it's pretty. I didn't post that particular poem because I thought it was particularly occult, I just wanted to post a poem o fhis.

Those two other works that I linked to are really occult.

>>4390217
>language is divine

See, that is gnosticism. You have to tread very carefully in these matters.
Language is not divine. God is divine. Language can be a pointer to the divine . . . it can also be a pointer to the abominable.

>>4390214
All works of art have a double meaning. Its a matter of interpretation.

>Written in 1926 (when Yeats was 60 or 61), "Sailing to Byzantium" is Yeats's definitive statement about the agony of old age and the imaginative and spiritual work required to remain a vital individual even when the heart is "fastened to a dying animal" (the body). Yeats's solution is to leave the country of the young and travel to Byzantium, where the sages in the city's famous gold mosaics could become the "singing-masters" of his soul. He hopes the sages will appear in fire and take him away from his body into an existence outside time, where, like a great work of art, he could exist in "the artifice of eternity." In the final stanza of the poem, he declares that once he is out of his body he will never again appear in the form of a natural thing; rather, he will become a golden bird, sitting on a golden tree, singing of the past ("what is past"), the present (that which is "passing"), and the future (that which is "to come").

>I am trying to write about the state of my soul, for it is right for an old man to make his soul, and some of my thoughts about that subject I have put into a poem called 'Sailing to Byzantium'. When Irishmen were illuminating the Book of Kells, and making the jeweled croziers in the National Museum, Byzantium was the centre of European civilization and the source of its spiritual philosophy, so I symbolize the search for the spiritual life by a journey to that city.[1]

From Wikipedia.

>>4390191
Your instincts are good.
Language is an important part of separation from God in the form of blasphemy.
Language itself, however, is not separation from God. Indeed, if you are gnostic language pretty much IS God. They take "God's Word" in quite a literal sense.

>And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light.

Language is an important part of God's being, or how we understand God in the very least.

>>4390205
also, in gnosticism and neoplatonism and the like the names themselves take on a kind of super-reality.
Like, the names themselves are the embodiment of a spirit.

>>4390197
I love how the secular types boast about skepticism but when it comes to spirits they are certain that they don't exist.

>>4390176
This isn't far off the mark at all. I wouldn't say that is is occult, just that language has a built-in spiritual power, not necessarily occult but very susceptible to it.

"Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name".

"thy name"

the names in and of themselves are of significance.
the old Hebrew has loads of different names for God.
names / words have always been an important part of rituals / spells / incantations.

Yeats actually made it very easy for us to tell that he was a sorcerer because he wrote this book.

http://www.yeatsvision.com/Yeats.html

"A Vision"

see for yourself

This prose work of his is highly occult also. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5794/5794-h/5794-h.htm

Here's a poem of his

Sailing To Byzantium

I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
---Those dying generations---at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.

II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

III
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

IV
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

>>4390185
>>>/mu/42662717

>>4390178
here's a /mu/ I made (it's just me talking to myself)
>>42662717

Get there before it 404s. It's more of my "wacko" theory that you seem to enjoy.

>>4390154
I'm exhaused m8. I literally spent all of yesterday doing it.

Here are some threads I've posted in >>4385250 >>4388119
and these posts >>4381631
>>4383974

>>4389992
>>4389775
You two are extremely naive. This kind of thing shouldn't be messed around with. It's dangerous.

Also, this is a literature board. Literature is steeped in the occult. If you embrace literature you aren't that far off embracing the occult.
Shakespeare is a blatant example of an occultist. William Blake is a blatant example of a gnostic. Two examples, but there are countless. Yeats was a little pagan sorcerer. There are far fewer good writers that aren't occult than there are. The vast majority of them are.

>>4389713
Academia is pretty much a kabbalistic cult these days, at least the Humanities side. The STEM side is just uptight nerds thinking that they're intellectually superior.

>>4390100
Alright,

the cultural superstructure heavily influenced by Hegel and Marx has made a culture where people are looking for the end of history.

>>4389565
> keep buying and being obsessed with the end of the world?

because "muh end of history" Hegel and Marx

>>4390057
this

it's all about showing how far down the shitter modern society has gone

No, dystopian films/books are realist fiction now.

Zombie apocalypse, for example, is just a metaphor for mindless consumers.

This one contains one of my favourite quotes, and I don't know how anybody can not believe in freewill after reading this comic.