The Occult Sylvia Plath: The Hidden Spiritual Life of the Visionary Poet

(Paperback)

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Explores Sylvia Plaths enduring interest and active practice in mysticism and the occult from childhood until her tragic death in 1963

Decodes the alchemical, Qabalistic, hermetic, spiritual, and Tarot-related references in many of Plaths poems

Based on more than 15 years of research, including analysis of Plaths unpublished personal writings from the Plath archives at Indiana University

Examines the influences of Plaths parents, her early interests in Hermeticism, and her and husband Ted Hughess explorations in the supernatural and the occult

Sharing her more than 15 years of compelling researchincluding analysis of Sylvia Plaths unpublished calendars, notebooks, scrapbooks, book annotations, and underlinings, as well as published memoirs, biographies, letters, journals, and interviews with Plath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.

Author Bio

Julia Gordon-Bramer is a Sylvia Plath scholar, professional Tarot card reader, award-winning writer and poet, and former professor for the Graduate Writing Program at Lindenwood University. She is the author of several books, including Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath, and Tarot Life Lessons. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri.