Overview

The Principles are shadowy presences during waking life and therefore less easily characterized and handled than the Faculties; they come to the fore after death, when we have no real points of reference. Readers tend to come to them with some fatigue, having absorbed a barrage of new terms and the movements of the gyres with respect to the Faculties; the processes assigned to the Principles appear more abstract, the movements are involved and even more barren, and there is little of the vivid writing that makes “The Twenty- Eight Incarnations” rewarding. Yet in most respects the Principles are probably more easily grasped than the Faculties.

The spiritual being is an iceberg, in that most of it is submerged during incarnate life. The reflected forms, the Faculties, dominate (see Ch. 6), but these are like the shadows on the walls of Plato's cave, just the images of the spiritual aspects and with no real substance. The Principles remain the unconscious foundation for the Faculties, which produce the conscious waking state of the human being, the visible part of the iceberg. The Principles are more active in dream where we inhabit the same dimension as the dead, who exist only in the Principles.

The Spirit is the link between the immortal and the transient aspects of humanity. The Celestial Body, divine selfhood, is effectively isolated and the Spirit seeks connection beyond itself but needs the Passionate Body as vehicle, so that the Passionate Body saves the Celestial Body from solitude, a phrase from the automatic script that Yeats repeats. In an unpublished poem, Yeats portrays Spirit as the bridegroom of two sisters: Beauty or Passionate Body and Truth or Celestial Body. With the Beauty his name is Imagination, and with Truth Reason: