Overview

In classical myth, the goddess Persephone spent six months of the year with her mother, Demeter, in the world, and six months of the year with her husband, Pluto, in the underworld.1 In the system of A Vision, the human soul spends six symbolic months in the world and six in the period between lives. In terms of symbolic time periods, Persephone's time in Hades is earthly incarnation and our human lives are night or the darker months of the year, while the passage from death to birth is daytime or the seasons of spring and summer. Viewed from the perspective of the lunar month, death to birth is the period where the sun—the Principles—predominates, which is the darker part of the moon's cycles—so the interlife period is represented in the lunar cycle by the phases from Phase 22 (death) to Phase 8 (birth).

When dealing with the familiar stages of human life, the symbolic months are largely ignored, but their counterparts after death provide useful markers for Yeats in a series of states where there are no common points of reference (see Ch. 11). The stages are very unequal and some fall into further subdivisions, so that it may seem slightly arbitrary to insist upon six distinct states or stages. Nevertheless, however varied or extended a state is, it is unified by a single purpose.

The six “months” or states fall into three groups:

• The first comprises three states and is the actual “afterlife,” where the aim is to process the experience of the foregoing incarnation. The completion of the third state marks the end of a given phase of incarnation, so once it is finished the soul will, for instance, move from a Phase 17 incarnation to a Phase 18 incarnation.

• The second division consists of a single “month” or state and is the beginning of the new phase of incarnation. It is a relatively brief “resolution” that is out of time and may be unconscious too, in which there is a union of the elements of the soul's solar essence.

• The third division consists of two states of “pre-life” that prepare for the coming incarnation, during which the soul continues purification and acquires the renewed lunar Principles.