The thesis deals with the influence of various movements, beliefs, and practices grouped by scholars under the term “Western Esotericism” upon the life and works of William Butler Yeats and Fernando Pessoa. The term “esoteric” herein refers to certain ideas that were formed throughout history in parallel to the dominant organized religion on the one hand and positivist science on the other, thus forming an often overlooked “third pillar” of Western culture. In the thesis I investigate how these phenomena, especially Hermeticism and Hermetic Qabalah, alchemy, magic, spiritualism, Theosophy and (Rosicrucian) initiatic orders, manifested themselves as motifs in Yeats’s and Pessoa’s writings. In addition, special attention is given to their poetic process, which can be interpreted from the viewpoint of Western Esotericism, and to the understanding of the role of the poet as a magician or a seer, a mediator between the material and the spiritual planes of existence.
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