ARCHIVE #08 — Radiant Matter and Occult Vision: W. B. Yeats, Alchemy, and the Poetic Soul

What happens when a poet becomes a mystic—and the page becomes a field of ritual? In this episode, I’m joined by Danny Rhodes, Yeatsian scholar and poet-thinker, whose PhD, Radiant Matter: Alchemy, Radium and Field Poetics in W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound, offers a portal into the esoteric dimensions of modernist literature. Together, we traverse the mystic currents beneath the life and work of William Butler Yeats—the Irish poet, occultist, and metaphysical visionary who conjured a literary cosmos at once symbolic, magical, and vibrationally charged.

Danny and I explore Yeats’ deep entanglement with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the radiant influence of William Blake, and the shimmering intersections between alchemy, anti-materialist theories of matter, ectoplasm, radium, and poetic transmission. We delve into Yeats’ layered cosmology of consciousness—individual, collective, and cosmic—and its striking resonance with Carl Jung’s psycho-spiritual framework.

We also journey into the erotic-metaphysical terrain of “Leda and the Swan”, examining how the poem encodes a mythic shift in consciousness and mirrors the turbulence of Yeats’ own love life. Throughout, Danny offers rare insights into how the mystic imagination and poetic form become laboratories for transmuting matter, myth, and mind.

For lovers of poetry, occult history, metaphysics, and the entangled dance between science and soul—this episode is pure radiant gold.

This episode was originally released under the podcast title Sacred Wisdom, the precursor to The Cosmic Codex. It now resides within The Sacred Wisdom Archives.