The Occult Sylvia Plath

Explores Sylvia Plaths enduring interest and active practice in mysticism and the occult from childhood until her tragic death in 1963. Sharing her more than 15 years of compelling researchincluding analysis of Sylvia Plaths unpublished calendars, notebooks, scrapbooks, book annotations, and underlinings, as well as published memoirs, biographies, letters, journals, and interviews with Plath and her husband, friends, and familyPlath scholar Julia Gordon-Bramer reveals Sylvia Plaths enduring interest and active practice in mysticism and the occult from childhood until her tragic death in 1963. She examines Plaths early years growing up in a transcendentalist Unitarian church under a brilliant, if stern, Freemason father and a mother who wrote her masters dissertation on the famous alchemist Paracelsus. She reveals Plaths early knowledge of Hermeticism, how she devoured books on the occult throughout her life, and how, since adolescence, Plath regularly wrote of premonitory dreams. Examining Plaths tumultuous marriage with poet Ted Hughes, she looks at their explorations in the supernatural and Hughess mentoring of Plath in meditation, crystal-gazing, astrology, Qabalah, Tarot, automatic writing, magical workings, and use of the Ouija board. She also reveals how, at the end of her marriage, Plath used her husbands hair and fingernails in rituals. Looking at Plaths writing and her evolution as a person through mystical, political, personal, and historical lenses, Gordon-Bramer shows how her poems take on radically new, surprising, and universal meaningsexplaining why Hughes perpetually denied that Plath was a confessional poet. Contrasting the versions in Letters Home with those held in the Plath archives at Indiana University, the author also shows how all occult influences have been rigorously excised from the letters approved for publication by the Plath and Hughes Estate. Revealing significant, previously undiscovered meanings in Sylvia Plaths works, much broader than the narrow lens of her tragic autobiography, the author shows how Plaths writings are deeply rooted in her mystical and occult endeavors.