2. Hermeticism, Theosophy, Gnosticism

Yeats’s anti-materialist attraction to various forms of spiritualism—Hermetic, Theosophical, Gnostic, Platonic, Neoplatonic, Christian and Celtic—and ranging from West to East. Despite that primary attraction, emphasis is placed on his even stronger antithetical, often Nietzschean, refusal to submit to the demands of any ‘religion,’ orthodox or occult, that he deemed ultimately hostile to imaginative creativity and to human life itself.