#theosopy

Annie Besant - Plate W. (Seeing" of music: overture to Meistersingers by Wagner)

Like most ghosts of this era, Wilde resented two things above all else: the living and the modernists. When he wasn’t frequenting high-society-séances, he would often amuse himself by smearing his ghostly-leavings on the door-handles of the Faber and Faber offices on Russell Square, much to the irritation of T.S. Eliot. Several critics have suggested that these cruel ghost-pranks may have been perpetrated by Wilde at the behest of the notorious ‘poet-prankster’ W.B. Yeats. Although this has never been confirmed, it is very likely the case. Yeats was a gifted theosophist who commanded the loyalty of many dead things, including Oscar Wilde, trilobites, poetry-readers, Winslow (eventually) and an ambitious young fleet of nine-and-fifty swans.