"The Tattooed Psychic"

Maud Gonne and William Yeats...my Favortie Love Story..
The Spiritual Marriage of Maud Gonne and W. B. YeatsMaud Gonne returned to Dublin in December 1898 and was with Willie [Yeats] constantly. Her renowned beauty was then in its full flowering, a beauty that her friend, Ella Young, described as "like the sun when it leaps above the horizon." "She is tall," Young said, "and like a queen out of a saga. Her hair is burnished gold and her eyes are gold, really gold." When she was with Yeats in public all eyes would fall on them, creating a stir in the surrounding crowds as people stopped and turned to stare: "It is Maud Gonne and the Poet. She has a radiance as of sunlight. Yeats, that leopard of the moon, holds back in a leash a huge lion-colored Great Dane--Maud Gonne's dog, Dagda."One day Willie arrived as usual to see Maud. But on this day she asked him, "Had you a strange dream last night?""I dreamed this morning for the first time in my life that you kissed me," he replied. Maud then described her own dream: "When I fell asleep last night I saw standing at my bedside a great spirit. He took me to a great throng of spirits, and you were among them. My hand was put into yours and I was told we were married. After that I remember nothing." For the first time with "bodily mouth," Maud then kissed him.The next day Willie found her sitting gloomily over the fire. "I should not have spoken to you in that way," she said, " for I can never be your wife in reality.""Do you love anyone else?" Willie asked."No." But she admitted that there was someone else, a child, and that she had to be a "moral nature for two."Then bit by bit, she began to tell him the story of her life. Some of these things Willie had heard as rumors, twisted by scandal, and had chosen not to believe. Now he was learning the truth. As Willie remembered it:She had met in the South of France the French Boulangist deputy, [Lucien] Millevoye, while staying with a relative in her nineteenth year, and had at once and without any urging on his part fallen in love with him. She then returned to Dublin where her father had a military command. She had sat one night over the fire thinking over her future life, and chance discovery of some book on magic among her father's books had made her believe that the devil, if she prayed to him, might help her. She asked the Devil to give her control of her own life and offered in return her soul. At that moment the clock struck twelve, and she felt of a sudden that the prayer had been heard and answered. Within a fortnight her father died suddenly, and she was stricken with remorse. (Yeats, Memoirs)Maud told Willie of her troubles with Millevoye and of the birth and death of her son. "The idea came to her that the lost child might be reborn," wrote Yeats later, "and she had gone back to Millevoye, in the vault under [her son's] memorial chapel. A girl child was born."A few days later they undertook a silent trance, and both experienced a vision about which they agreed not to speak until it was over. Maud "thought herself a great stone statue through which passed flame." She was unmoving, enduring, perpetual, like the stone and earth of the country she love, fired by the life force and passion of those who lived on the land.Willie felt himself "becoming flame and mounting up through and looking out of the eyes of a great stone Minerva." With his creative spark of artistic genius, he needed a form through which to flow. This form was Maud, embodying for him the spirit of the land itself -- of Ireland.This experience confirmed that theirs was a "spiritual marriage," coming from "the beings which stand behind human life." They were to receive initiations for founding an Irish Mystery School. Theirs was not a marriage of the body but a sacred rite for linking the Bard and the Earth Mother. Maud learned in a trance, induced by staring at a talisman devised by Willie, that "the initiation of the cauldron or cup is a purification, that of the stone power, that of the sword knowledge and subtlety, and that of the wands a supernatural inspiration." For Maud and Willie these were the four suits of the Tarot, as well as the four treasures of the Tuatha de Danaan

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