Yeats, the Great Year, and Pierre Duhem

Abstract

This essay deals with the intricacies of Yeats’s development of the concept of the Great Year—one of the earliest cyclical theories of history—in the system of A Vision. After considering the workings of the gyres and Faculties, it examines how the Yeatses’ developed a “World Diagram” of a 26,000-year “cycle” in the Automatic Script, divided into twelve parts, which provides a basis for a “Great Year” with alternately primary and antithetical religious epochs. It discusses Yeats’s use of sources in Hastings’s Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics and works on early calendars and astronomy in framing the great year in A Vision (1925), as well as the mistakes he made therein. The piece then considers the role played by Sepharial’s Hebrew Astrology and Hindu sources in Yeats’s search for new analogues when preparing for the new edition. Finally, the essay examines the crucial role played by Pierre Duhem and Yeats’s specific reasons for using mainly his book on Le Système du monde (“The System of the World”) in the final articulation of the idea.