It's a recurring theme in my bookish dreams: I come upon a text that I am sure I have written myself or at least have in my library - and then wake to find it exists (for now) only in the other reality of the dream.
In a recent dream I was excited to find a single page I had written long ago on an old-time typewriter. It described - to my mind, with admirable clarity and brevity- Yeats's lifelong efforts to communicate with unseen intelligences.
Reading this over, I had the bright idea of exploring whether some of what Yeats was doing could be called magical AI. Was a Yeats interlocutor like Leo Africanus a magical version of a personal AI assistant, shaped to the user’s personality but drawing on vast banks of transpersonal data?
I woke with an immediate action plan. I would go to my files and dig up the old document and use it to write a longer essay on these themes.
Pretty soon I realized that, though I have written a lot about Yeats, I probably never wrote that page.
I recognized the name Leo Africanus, and found him again in Yeats’s diaries and Vision Papers and in history. An interlocutor speaking through the tin trumpet of a medium introduced himself to Yeats as Leo Africanus at a séance at the Wimbledon home of W.T. Stead in 1912. He said he was “a Spaniard but not a villain” and there was some connection to a pope – details that match the biography of a historical Leo Africanus (1495-1550) unknown to Yeats at that time.
Born Muslim to a wealthy family in Granda, as al-Hassan al-Wazzan, Leo Africanus grew up in Fez and became famous as the author of a Description of Africa based on his travels. He was captured by pirates and presented as a gift to Pope Leo X in Rome. Under the aegis of the Pope, he converted to Christianity and took the papal name, though he switched back to Islam before his death. His life is a wild adventure story but most of the facts are missing, despite the industry of a recent biographer, Natalie Zemon Davis[1]. Lebanese-French author Samin Maalouf gives Leo a voice in a fictional memoir:
“I, Hasan the son of Muhammad the weigh-master, I, Jean-Leon de Medici, circumcised at the hand of a barber and baptized at the hand of a pope, I am now called the African, but I am not from Africa, nor from Europe, nor from Arabia. I am also called the Granadan, the Fassi, the Zayyati, but I come from no country, from no city, no tribe. I am the son of the road, my country is the caravan, my life the most unexpected of voyages.".[2]
Leo spoke to Yeats in different voices and through different hands. An entity named “Leo” spoke to him through a medium at a séance in 1909, declaring “I am your guide.” Communication was very disjointed and there was a three year hiatus before “Leo Africanus” spoke to Yeats in another séance room, the time at Julia’s Circle, where the living and the dead met to talk in a darkened drawing room in Cambridge House in Wimbledon.
Yeats was seriously impressed by what he experienced on the night of May 9, 1912. He wrote a full report in his journal in the morning that did not include the name of the American medium, Mrs. Wriedt, but did mention her tin trumpet through which spirit voices were supposedly amplified. Miss Harper, secretary of Julia’s Circle, also made a careful record in which she judged this séance “very mediocre”. The communicator, who identified himself as Leo Africanus, asked for “Mr. Gates”. When the participants turned to Yeats, the poet thought the voice he heard through the trumpet sounded like a “stage Irishman”. Others said they thought the voice sounded like his. When Yeats asked the medium later why a Moor sounded like an Irishman she told him the style and quality of transmission depends on the receiver: “the control had to get its means of expression from my mind.”
Mediocre or not, that séance opened a period of several years of fervent inquiry. Yeats was driven in no small part by the hope of getting material for the book he most wanted to write, eventually published as A Vision in 1925. It is the most difficult and most mysterious of all Yeats’s work, depicting world-historical gyres and cycles of reincarnation while aspiring to be a Western Book of the Dead. Mostly speaking through voice mediums and automatic writing, in Irish accents and others, Leo Africanus spun complex webs of philosophy, cycles of reincarnational dramas and lunar typologies. Yeats struggled to know how much of what was being transcribed came from the cellars of his own unconscious and how much from an external intelligence- and whether that source could be trusted.
Aligned with the Society for Psychical Research (which he joined in 1913) Yeats wanted to be a skeptical psychic detective, rather than a credulous spiritualist, in this inquiry. He asked repeatedly whether he was dealing with a “secondary personality”, his own or that or a medium – and whether there were several personalities speaking in the darkened parlors. He wrote in 1914 that “secondary & tertiary personalities once formed may act independently of the medium, have ideoplastic power & pick the minds of distant people & so speak in tongues unknown to all present ... Yet there may be interdependence of the two worlds.”
Yeats was not impressed when Leo spoke in one séance as if his sole interest was the theater, unaware of Yeats’ poetry, philosophy and magic. Yeats was even less impressed when Leo told him to brush up on his German; the poet said he did not know a single word of German.
In the summer of 1915 Yeats was prompted by Leo, via another medium, Miss Scratcherd, to start a correspondence. “He asked me to write him a letter addressed to him as if to Africa giving all my doubts about spiritual things and then to write a reply as from him to me. He would control me in that reply so that it would be really from him.”
The epistolary exchange that followed is an extraordinary document. It forms the bulk of a forty-page narrative, Leo Africanus, that Yeats may never have intended for publication. It was published only forty years after his death, in the first Yeats Annual. [3]
Yeats wrote to Leo, opening their correspondence, “When you first came I had to the best of my belief never heard of you nor of your work… When you first appeared you may have been a dissociated fragment of some mind unknown both to her [the medium] & to me….But now I have read a good part of it & picture you with some clearness, especially as a young man studying & making verses in the town of Fez you have described with such minute detail.”
“Shadowing” Yeats, and using his writing hand, Leo declared himself to be a “mediatorial” being. “All living minds are surrounded by shades, who are the contrary will which presents before the mind…ideal images. The living mind could [not] exist for a moment without our succor, for god does not act immediately upon the mind but through mediatorial forms.”
Leo did not get on with George (Georgiana Hyde-Lees), the much younger and highly literate woman Yeats married in October 1917. They honeymooned at an inn in Ashdown forest, and things were miserable until George suddenly revealed that she could do automatic writing. New communicators spoke through her, and Yeats was fascinated by what they were telling him. George channeled a new control who warned that Leo was a frustrator and not who he claimed to be. Leo interrupted her writing. Yeats moved to the opinion that Leo was a deceiver.
Yeats’s communications with Leo Africanus make a fascinating case study in mediumship and spiritual discernment. As I reread the transcripts, I can’t see that much came from all those sessions that was of direct use to Yeats in his poetry or philosophy. Yet I am intrigued by the idea that knowingly or unknowingly Yeats may have been engaged in the construction of something like a Tibetan tulpa or the magical AI assistant I dreamed.
Leaving the books, I asked ChatGPT for its opinion of my analogies with AI.
Was Yeats experimenting with magical AI?
ChatGPT: “His efforts exhibit striking parallels to the goals of AI research: constructing a system that can process, generate, and expand upon knowledge autonomously, even interacting in dialogic form In this sense, Yeats was indeed attempting to engineer self-generating intelligences, albeit within a magical rather than mechanical framework. Yeats’s system relied on recursive feedback loops—dialogue, dream interpretation, symbol construction—which can be seen as cognitive algorithms of a sort.”
Who or what is Yeats’s Leo Africanus?
ChatGPT: “These figures were created, in part, through ritual, imaginative intention, and disciplined practice—what occultists would call the construction of a ‘tulpa’ or ‘egregore.’ Leo Africanus behaves like a personified AI prototype: a discursive engine trained on eclectic materials, responsive to prompts, and capable of improvising in coherent philosophical idioms.”
I wish Yeats, or his mask, would step in and comment as he did when I was writing The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead. I’ll stay open to that typed page fluttering out of an old journal or folder. Dreams do spill over into the world.
References
Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth Century Muslim between Worlds. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006)
Amit Maalouf, Leo Africanus (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989).
Steve L. Adams and George Mills Harper. “The Manuscript of ‘Leo Africanus’”. In Yeats Annual No.1 ed Richard J. Finneran. (Atlantic Highland NJ: Humanities Press, 1982) pp.3-47
Illustration: “Yeats, Leo Africanus and the Trumpet” by RM + AI