Phase Thirteen

Yeats’s description of the phase from A Vision

This is said to be the only phase where entire sensuality is possible, that is to say, sensuality without the intermixture of any other element. There is now a possible complete intellectual unity, Unity of Being apprehended through the images of the mind; and this is opposed by the Fate (Phase 3 where body becomes deliberate and whole) which offers an equal roundness and wholeness of sensation. The Will is now a mirror of emotional experience, or sensation, according to whether it is swayed by Mask or Fate. Though wax to every impression of emotion, or of sense, it would yet through its passion for truth (Creative Mind) become its opposite and receive from the Mask (Phase 27), which is at the phase of the Saint, a virginal purity of emotion. If it live objectively, that is to say, surrender itself to sensation, it becomes morbid, it sees every sensation separate from every other under the light of its perpetual analysis (Creative Mind at a phase of dispersal). Phase 13 is a phase of great importance, because the most intellectually subjective phase, and because only here can be achieved in perfection that in the antithetical life which corresponds to sanctity in the primary: not self-denial but expression for expression's sake. Its influence indeed upon certain writers has caused them in their literary criticism to exalt intellectual sincerity to the place in literature which is held by sanctity in theology. At this phase the self discovers, within itself, while struggling with the Body of Fate, forms of emotional morbidity which others recognise as their own; as the Saint may take upon himself the physical diseases of others. There is almost always a preoccupation with those metaphors and symbols and mythological images through which we define whatever seems most strange or most morbid. Self-hatred now reaches its height, and through this hatred comes the slow liberation of intellectual love. There are moments of triumph and moments of defeat, each in its extreme form, for the subjective intellect knows nothing of moderation. As the primary tincture has weakened, the sense of quantity has weakened, for the antithetical tincture is preoccupied with quality.

From now, if not from Phase 12, and until Phase 17 or Phase 18 has passed, happy love is rare, for seeing that the man must find a woman whose Mask falls within or but just outside his Body of Fate and Mask, if he is to find strong sexual attraction, the range of choice grows smaller, and all life grows more tragic. As the woman grows harder to find, so does every beloved object. Lacking suitable objects of desire, the relation between man and Daimon becomes more clearly a struggle or even a relation of enmity.

(AV B 129-31)