The Prophets and the Goddess

As the title indicates, the scholarly book examines the contributions of four poets - WB Yeats, Aleister Crowley, Robert Graves and Ezra Pound - to the spirituality of the goddess in the light of the chthonic esoteric tradition. Their is a very good introduction on the Golden Dawn, in which Yeats and Crowley were involved, introducing the theme of the Great Work, the purification and exaltation of the human psyche in the process of attaining theosis or identity and unity with the divine nature as well as a merging of conscious with subconscious. All four poets stand for an antithetical tradition upholding the primacy of the soul and imagination rather than the rational mind so that the poet becomes a priest-magician and an expression of the feminine. There is also a process of the reconciliation of opposites, including Apollonian and Dionysian elements after the philosophical insights of Nietzsche and the emergence of anthropology at the end of the 19th century. This is an erudite and very well informed discussion that sheds new light not only on esotericism and the goddess generally, but also the different ways in which the authors featured approach it as part of the re-emergence of a gnostic impulse in our time.