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Death is much too serious to be approached with solemnity.

This came home to me when I was at home on a winter’s night, working feverishly on the book I titled The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead, and a cosmic trickster in the shape of a humble animal came to play in my backyard. As the Greeks say, the gods love to travel in disguise.

I was up at 4 a.m. because I was determined that on this particular night I was somehow going to crack the Yeats Code. The great Irish poet William Butler Yeats made it one of the great quests of his life to deliver a grand modern myth – a Myth of Everything – whose key element would be a Book of the Dead that would reveal all the cycles of the soul’s journey through life and death and rebirth. A myth that would match the power and grandeur of Dante’s Divine Comedy without being haunted and cramped by the dogmas and obsessions of the church. A Book of the Dead that would match the famous ones from Egypt and Tibet but speak in images and forms better suited to the contemporary world. With his immense power of poetic speech, Yeats had the voice to carry through his design. His lifelong dedication to experiential research into the realms of spirit and the spirits, his experiments in “mutual visioning” and his craft as a working magician of a great esoteric order gave him the raw materials for a Book of the Dead that would be founded on first-hand knowledge of the things that really matter.

But he exhausted himself, and his readers, with his efforts to pull it all together in prose. He wrote two versions of the book he called A Vision – so different as to be really two different books. They drew heavily on the teachings of spirit “communicators” who responded to his questions through the mediumship of Yeats’s young wife, but also upon his own vast learning and his own dreams and intimations of immortality. He strived and wrestled to bind the prolix multidimensional insights that had come into a stable form, as the hero in the Odyssey must struggle to bind Proteus – the king of shapeshifters – into a single form before he can get that Old Man of the Sea to show him the way to go home. How deeply Yeats resonated with the tale of the hero’s struggle with Proteus as he shifts from fire to storm, from sea monster to lion, trying to escape being pinned to one form!

Yeats did not succeed in binding Proteus, at least not in the book he hoped would be a crowning work. Perhaps the great poet could never have succeeded in the vehicle of prose. But – for reasons I will explain later in this book – I was determined, that night, to follow him as far as he was able to go. And come four in the morning, I had a headache and was utterly exhausted by the complex machinery of the last version of A Vision that he had published. And after banging my head against the interior walls of Yeats’s house of the spirits, I was starting to wonder whether there was actually any door in it that opens into the deeper world for which Yeats yearned to translate – or whether beyond the impenetrable outer walls there was only a void. While Yeats’ poetry had thrilled and winged my imagination since boyhood, his attempt at a Book of the Dead (the part of A Vision that he titled “The Soul in Judgment”) was actually cramping my mind, and narrowing the gates of perception.

So, enough of that for one night. I was living, as well as working, in the basement of my family home in the Northeast, in the space I call The Cave. It is a magical space. My desk is a door – a “hollow-core” door picked up at a hardware store for $25 – laid across low bookcases overstuffed, inside and out, with a small part of my library. On the desk that is a door is a statue of Thoth, the lunar god of writing, an antler, a spiral glyph in high relief, a see-stone that is a large rock crystal from Mohawk Indian country, a medieval French knight. And in honor of this project: a Mexicon calaca, a skeleton got up as a disk jockey wearing headphones as he chooses the music; and a brace of blood-red cigar boxes labeled El Paraiso that hold the diskettes for my Book of the Dead. Red is the color of death in Ireland, as Yeats knew well. A name for the lord of Death is Da Derga, the Red God, as Yeats once reminded me. At Samhain – on the night much of the world now calls Halloween – the riders come out of the hollow hills and fly through the air on red horses.

But it is time now to close the door that is a desk, and catch some sleep. I stagger to the downstairs bedroom, dropping my clothes in a heap on the floor, and throw myself naked under the covers.

I am on my way to dreamland when I hear a series of noises just behind my head. There is a scratching and a scraping. And some rustling and scampering. Some definite gnawing.

Squirrels. I have been vaguely aware of their nesting activities, especially since the thermometer fell below freezing and they have been working to make themselves warm and cozy, gathering old papers and leaves and garden trash into snugs and shanties under the back stairs. I have not felt any desire to interfere with their comforts – until now.

I am so very tired. Maybe if I pull the covers up over my ears I can ignore the squirrels.

Scratch, rustle, BANG!

The last sound is exactly that of someone knocking.

My effort to ignore the squirrels is not working. I get out of bed and move the easy chair that sits in front of the downstairs door to the garden, which has been sealed for years. I struggle with the locks to get the door open. The squirrels fall deathly silent as I growl and slam the door shut again.

Back to bed. I have to get some rest, and find the solutions to what I have been trying to grasp all night in dreamland – where (as Yeats knew) they are most easily and honestly found.

Now one of the damn squirrels is running up and down the exterior wall of the house, inches from my head. I can picture him, fat and big and cocky, showing off to his harem and to lesser males in the pack, or whatever a collective of squirrels is called.

Knock, knock, BANG!

This is too much. Still naked, I wrench open the door and snarl homicidal threats into the dark under the back porch.

Silence. Maybe the squirrels believed me that time. Back to bed.

Patter, patter, knock, BAM!

Louder than ever. That does it! I pull on my clothes and fling myself out the back door, into the snowy night. I make snowballs and iceballs and throw them at what I suppose to be the squirrel’s nest. I find a hoe, forgotten under a light coating of snow, and poke and jab with that, at the litter under the porch where the squirrel’s nest must be.

When I relock the door, I listen for a few minutes, ready to take firmer measures if required. We now have deep silence, but I am deep awake. 

I might as well walk the dog. He has heard me stirring and is dancing on the landing above the Cave, ever ready to go. As I walk the dog down towards the neighborhood park, I have to chuckle, because if there is a message from the squirrels it is plainly a message to lighten up. I had been taking my theme – and Yeats’s theme – so very seriously al night long. I think of how a squirrel kept running up and down the wall of my house and remember that there is a squirrel in Nordic mythology who keeps running up and down the world tree, Ygdrassil.

After a couple of – quiet – hours in bed, I start writing my notes, on my Yeats researches and the squirrel incident, which seems funnier now that my body is partially rested. I find I can’t quite remember the name of the squirrel who lives on the World Tree. I dig up an old book called The Children of Odin, a book by an Irishman and one that Yeats probably knew. The squirrel’s name is Ratatosk, and you can hear that pattering and chattering in the word. And Ratatosk – says Padraic Colum – is the Squirrel of Mischief, who keeps running up and down the tree to keep things on the go, forever trying to stir up trouble between the Eagle who lives at the top of Yggdrasil and the fierce dark Dragon who slumbers at the roots (except when Ratatosk is telling him tales about the Eagle to enrage him and stir him to fire-breathing). The wells of wisdom are by this tree, stags graze in its upper branches, the hawk flies from the eagle’s beak to see things the eagle cannot see from his perch – and the roots of Yggdrasil go down and down (of course) into realms of the dead.

I am revved and excited to discover that my backyard Ratatosk has put me right at the center of a mythic and multidimensional universe. And I decide that in approaching themes that Dante announced as those of a Divine Comedy, I will be sure to include the comedy in the Commedia.

Yeats in the Magic Cottage" by Robert Moss