KEEPERS OF THE FLAME: HERMETICISM IN YEATS, H.D., AND BORGES (wILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, IRELAND, JORGE LUIS BORGES, ARGENTINA, HILDA DOOLITTLE)

Hermeticism has often been relegated to a minor and arcane role in established literatures and literary criticism. Hermetic literatures have operated primarily as hidden and oral traditions and therefore have not been as readily available as more conventional written literatures. Hermetic studies are beginning to enjoy a renaissance due to the study of myth and mythic language and the incorporation of psychoanalytic theory in literary criticism with the theories of Freud, Jung, and Lacan.;Robert Graves' studies of the ancient poetic colleges of the Druids and the tree alphabets of ancient and modern Irish contextualize Yeats' imagery. The Celtic Revival of the 1890's and Yeats use of the kabbalistic rose are considered in his early poetry; "The Two Trees" provides a model of the Sephirotic Tree of Life and Crazy Jane and the Bishop provide Yeats' contrast of pagan and Christian elements in Words for Music Perhaps. H.D.'s Trilogy, Sagesse, and Hermetic Definition invoke Isis and alchemical imagery to emphasize the materiality of language and effect its transformation. Borges' "Una vindicacion de la Cabala" and "Casas Como Angeles" parody gnosticism and Ruben Dario's modernismo. The tiger is a central alchemical image. "The Library of Babel" is an architectural version of the kabbalistic tree. Borges' inversion of lunar and solar imagery suggest "The Divine Marriage" of the alchemist's athanor.;Yeats, H.D., and Borges, roughly contemporaries, rely on hermetic allusions to increase symbolic potency in their writings. Hermetic imagery surpasses the richness of ordinary symbolic language by stimulating the deep structures of memory and activating what Yeats would call "The Great Mind," what Jung would term "The Collective Unconscious," and what I would suggest is an "archetypal language." An introductory analysis of the relationship between poetry and the sacred explores the historical genderizing of language and perception which leads to the repression of the feminine and the irrational in language and culture. These repressed elements surface in the literary privileging of lunar imagery, the biological privileging lunar time, and the appropriation of pagan, matriarchal elements by the failed patriarchy of Christianity.