Yeats was not known as a great prose writer. His prose is admired for the way it reflects his mind's way of thinking. His ability to reflect upon a single theme or concept and integrate it into the various paradigms that he drew from was fascinating. In his short story "The Crucifixion of the Outcast", a part of the collection entitled The Secret Rose, Yeats portrays the Irsih spiritual dilemma through the character of the gleeman. The protagonist is lamenting the souls that are lost to the Christians and their purgatorial act of crucifixion, when he stumbles across a monastary and requests to spend the night. . . . The symbol Yeats uses is the gleeman, to represent the old and dying soul of the Celts, and places this amid the activity and growing dominance of a Christian setting. In many ways this shows that the Celtic heritage of magic contrasts the extant Christian dominance; and as the story shows, the Celtic ideals are sacrificed to the precidence of Christianity, and the mysteries of the cross.

The Celtic Mysteries are a means of integrating the pagan and ethnic heritage of the Celts into the modern understanding of religion.