emilehermans.com

In the article entitled ‘W. B. Yeats: Poet and Astrologer’ by Elizabeth
Heine, which was published in the journal ‘Culture and Cosmos’ (Vol. 2,
no. 1, 1998), Heine points out the importance of astrological principles
in both the work and the (personal) life of Yeats. From his entry into the
hermetic society of the Golden Dawn to the publication of the enigmatic
work ‘A Vision’ (a transcription of the ‘automatic writing’ of his wife
Georgie Hyde Lees), astrological principles remain guiding.

What is therefore particularly striking is that Heine misses Yeats’ birthday
by a month; Yeats was born on 13 June 1865, at 22:40, yet the article states
that Yeats was born on 13 July 1865, at 22:40. That this could be a typo is
hard to believe; June and July are off by two distinct letters. How the error
could have arisen, and how it was subsequently overlooked by the editors, is
beyond me. But this shift, as it were, of the birthday of a devout astrologer,
has become the guiding principle in this work.

I see this idea as a way to question the real (and much more general) value
of astrological models by posing an implicit what-if question: would the
July-Yeats have been different from the June-Yeats we know?