The Thirteenth Cone

Although A Vision addresses a whole range of human attitudes towards God, there is little or no sense of the deity existing within or behind the system. God overshadows a significant part of the system, in particular as the specific interest of those in the last quarter of incarnations, and Yeats pays constant attention to humanity's relationships with God, through the wheel's spectrum of temperaments and over the spans of historical time, including belief and skepticism, love and hatred, struggle against and unity with God. Human ideas of God are present throughout, as is an emphasis on the supernatural and spiritual worlds that lie beyond the mundane, but the only figure that shows divine attributes is “the phaseless sphere” ( AVB 193), in particular in its secondary guise as the “Thirteenth Cycle or Thirteenth Cone ” ( AVB 210). This strange geometric abstraction hovers indistinctly at the margins of the system and, from the ways it is referred to in A Vision B , takes on a variety of qualities. It has some characteristics of place for “I shall have much to say of the sphere as the final place of rest” ( AVB 69) and “Within it live all souls that have been set free and every Daimon and Ghostly Self ” ( AVB 210); of a state or attribute, since “the Thirteenth Cone or cycle… is in every man and called by every man his freedom” ( AVB 302); of an abstraction and a being, as “The Thirteenth Cone is a sphere because sufficient to itself; but as seen by man it is a cone. It becomes even conscious of itself as so seen” ( AVB 240) or as “the reflection or messenger of the final deliverance” ( AVB 210); of deity, for “it can do all things and knows all things” ( AVB 302); even, possibly, of “Shelley's Demogorgon—eternity” ( AVB 211). These attributes are not impossible to reconcile but Yeats deliberately makes no eff ort to do so and leaves his readers questioning. As a consequence few elements of A Vision have given readers and commentators as many problems.