Oil And Blood

ABOUT "OIL AND BLOOD" 2ND. PART

As imaginative inspired poet William Butler Yeats was a man fond of occultism and oriental culture the we have to interprete the exac meaning of "the two kind of people" he is showing to us.

If he has chosen pagan images directly like "tombs of gold and lapis lazuli", commonly called "sarcophagus", we have to point at the word "gold". In Egypt gold is the symbol of Horus and Rah (or Reh), the divine god of the sun. To say, that poet William Butler Yeats wanted to tell us that "there is a lineage of Sun. Men and women that descend of descended from the Sun. Holy blue-blooded people that "exhude miraculous odor". Today we could add: people who are very lovely, kind, brave, mannered, who are plenty of virtues. Catholic and other christians say that a saint man or woman has Jesus Christ´s odour. But William Butler Yeats doesn´t point to any christian symbol in this poem. However he is talking about a kind of saint people that causes joy, happyness, welfare,, etc. for everybody in this World. They are living beyond material death, because their corpse are not rotten (many catholic saints´ corpses never got rotten). They are the "chosen ones".
They will live forever and ever.

In the second stanza we can watch that on the contrary there are many vampires. Vampires are not described only as living corpses that rise from the grave in the night to suck blood from their victims. Vampire are also exploiters, thiefs, liers, tricksters, etc. In the Bible are called "sons of Cain´s lineage". But why poet William Butler Yeats have chosen this legendary figure?

May be bacuse even old Greeks believed in "vampires", long long time ago. It´s an ancient figure of evil men and women (vampire women were called "lamias"). And in this case, poet William Butler Yeats doesn´t point at any christian or biblical figure, too.

Ancient Egypcians believed that SETH was a devil God. So, he is the Devil for them.

Now we have the second human descendants from Mankind: The sons of Seth. To say, the sons of doom, all evil and perdition. People that cause damage, that cause death and pain. Drunken of blood that prevented them to think about their actions reasonably. They are living under the clay and are made of clay (they are simply dust material under the clay), and they are not living an own personal life, because they are living on others´blood, if not they would die immediately. Their lives could be cut off at any moment.

May be there´s no better image of evil people than this.

Briefly: we can see that poet William Butler Yeats although he was taught inside a christian culture he wanted to use oriental pagan images to talk about tough realities of Life, instead of christian images, as a "the other side of the coin" (a reversal). A clear product of his search of the Occult. Two kind of mem and women in constrast; men and women that live in opposition: Good vs. Evil; holy vs unholy; salvation vs doom; divine vs profane; Osiris vs Seth (or God vs Devil, if you like); virtues vs vices.

Carlos Garay del Moral
Teacher and Writer