William Butler Yeats

“ I made it night after night just before I went to bed and after many nights—eight or nine perhaps—I saw between sleeping and waking as in a kinematograph, a galloping centaur and a moment later a naked woman of incredible beauty, standing upon a pedestal and shooting an arrow at a star. I still remember the tint of that marvellous flesh which makes all human flesh seem unhealthy, and remember that others who have seen such forms have remembered the same characteristic. ”

“ To influence events or one's own mind, one had to draw the attention of that dark portion, to turn it, as it were, into a new direction. Macgregor described how as a boy he had drawn over and over some event that he longed for; and called those drawings an instinctive magic. But for the most part one repeated certain names and drew or imagined certain symbolic forms which had acquired a precise meaning and not only to the dark portion of one's own mind, but to the mind of the race. I decided to repeat the names associated with the moon in the cabbalistic tree of life. ”

“ Someone in the story had a vision of a woman shooting an arrow into the sky and later of an arrow shot at a faun that pierced the faun's body and remained, the faun's heart torn out and clinging to it, embedded in a tree. Some weeks later I too was in London and found among Macgregor's pupils a woman whose little child had come running in from the garden, perhaps at the time of my vision, perhaps a little later, calling out "Oh, mother, I have seen a woman shooting an arrow into the sky and I am afraid that she has killed God." ”