The Manuscript of “Leo Africanus”

Abstract

Although several critics have commented on the first appearance of the spirit of Leo Africanus to Yeats and a few have examined the unpublished manuscript of Yeats’s dialogue with him,¹ no one has pointed out either the extent of Yeats’s preoccupation or the significance of his changing conception of Leo. Yeats first referred to Leo, so far as we can determine, in some “Notes of a very poor sitting with Mr Feilding, on May 3rd 1909,” which contain a “plainly fanciful account of my ‘guides’.” Everard Feilding, an Honorary Secretary of the Society for Psychical Research, remained a friend for many years and was probably responsible for Yeats’s membership in the Society (from 1913 to 1928). Alluding first to a young girl who was “not a guide,” Yeats then records that “a Julia comes — a guide.” This is probably a reference to Julia A. Ames, the dead American woman whose Letters from Julia to William T. Stead were widely known throughout Europe.² Since Julia’s Circle had been established at Cambridge House, Stead’s home in Wimbledon, on 24 April 1909, Yeats may be recording the first of many seances he attended there. After Julia came Agrippa, “a key” who “wants to do something through me.” But “all this while,” Yeats noted parenthetically, “I am trying to call Leo I want Leo to control medium.”