Ritual Art: Political, Social and Religious Subversion in the Dramatic Works of William Butler Yeats and Aleister Crowley

Abstract

The ritual plays of William Butler Yeats and Aleister Crowley question the dominant political, social, and religious values of their time, contravening traditional ideas of ritual as a conservative social force. This study analyses Yeats’s Celtic Mysteries rituals and Crowley’s Rites of Eleusis according to changing scholarly theories of ritual.