Horoscope for Lady Gregory

Claude Dumas

Horoscope for Lady Gregory

ca. 1909

A student of theosophy and Rosicrucianism as a young man, a long-standing member of the occult society the Golden Dawn, and a devotee of astrology, Yeats was throughout his life eager for supernatural revelation. He regularly attended séances and drew horary charts to make decisions about aspects of his life. Many horoscopes he commissioned for himself survive. In 1909 he paid astrologer Claude Dumas to draw up this horoscope for Gregory, partly in response to her critical ill-health on February 3 that year. She generally disdained Yeats’s investment in the occult, however, noting somewhat facetiously of another horoscope drawn up for her in 1908, that it had predicted she was “not to attain real prosperity until 1911 when I am to blossom like the rose.”