Per Amica Silentia Lunae

Per Amica Silentia Lunae and the opening movement of Anima Mundi form a luminous meditation on art, identity, and the hidden powers that shape human life. Speaking through intimate prologue, dialogue, and reflective prose, Yeats asks how vision is born: from solitude, longing, suffering, dreams, and the divided self rather than from ease or social certainty. In Ego Dominus Tuus and Anima Hominis, he contrasts the ordinary self with an "anti-self," showing how artistic creation can transform fear, desire, bodily temperament, and emotional imbalance into lasting beauty. Dante, Keats, Synge, Morris, Landor, and other figures become touchstones for a poetics of struggle, where exile, fault, and disappointment are transmuted into tragic or ecstatic art. The later reflections widen into a mystical search for a universal mind, a Daemon-like destiny, and a deeper reality beneath institutions, criticism, and conscious thought. Through trance, symbolic dreaming, and visionary images, Yeats explores memory, inheritance, and the elemental forces of earth, water, air, fire, and a fifth presence, suggesting that imagination can uncover an ancient, shared wisdom. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.