The Occult Sylvia Plath - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 5/13/24

George Noory and scholar Julia Gordon-Bramer discuss the career of troubled poet Sylvia Plath, how her interest in the occult and tarot cards impacted her poetry, and if using a Ouija board let her to commit suicide.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Noriy with you, Julia.
Gordon Bramer back with us professional Tarot card reader. We
will do readings in the last hour of the program
if you would like. Sylvia Plath scholar, award winning writer
and poet, and former professor for the Graduate Writing program
at Lindenwood University in Saint Louis. Julia is the author

(00:27):
of Fixed Star's Governor, Life, Decoding Sylvia Plath, Tarot Life Lessons,
and the Occult Sylvia Plath.

Speaker 3 (00:34):
Julia, welcome back, Thank you so much, George.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
What happened to Sylvia Plath?

Speaker 3 (00:43):
Well, that's that's a big question.

Speaker 1 (00:46):
You know.

Speaker 3 (00:46):
Plath is probably best known as the author of The
Bell Jar, and she's also known, unfortunately as the poet
who put her head in the oven, and so, you know,
my work is trying to change that a little bit.
It seems like the suicide overrides everything with class, and

(01:09):
you know, I think that people and people scholars and
people who have been in the archives, and even just
fans who have read her journals and letters, they see
that occult practice is mentioned, you know, in kind of
peripheral and casual ways across biographies and journals and letters,
but it's never really been taken to seriously or collectively,

(01:33):
and when you look at it with a little bit
of knowledge, it really shows she was somewhat obsessed with mysticism.
And I just think that, you know, my work attempts
to show that this has had a huge influence on
especially her poetry, and she's really been misread and misunderstood,

(01:55):
just being kept in that narrow autobiography.

Speaker 2 (01:58):
You wrote a book in two thousands fifteen called Fixed
Star's Governor Life Coding Sylvia Plath, and then of course
the new book on the Occult. Did you dabble it
all in the Occult back in the twenty fifteen.

Speaker 3 (02:11):
Okay, it actually came out in twenty fourteen, and I
you know, I'm a professional tarot card reader, so my
career is in the occult. The occult, of course, is
a word that just means hidden, so you know, it
isn't necessarily all wied aboards and summoning spirits and that

(02:34):
sort of thing, although places did plenty of that.

Speaker 2 (02:38):
What kind of demons did she have to commit? Suicide
at the age of thirty.

Speaker 3 (02:43):
Yeah, well, you know, she was probably bipolar, and I
think that's important to know. She was somebody who she
was definitely troubled. I have some of my own theories.
I have a lot of evidence that she and her husband,
Ted Hughes were actively into Kabbala. And if you were

(03:05):
to read about kind of the rules of Kabbala, going
back to the old Rabbis, we see that. You know,
I think Kabbala, first of all, is ancient Jewish mysticism,
and the old rabbis had rules on it. And one
of these rules, or I should say two of these
rules important ones, or that you had to be a
male and you had to be over forty years of age.

(03:28):
So Glass broke both of those rules. Her husband, Ted
Hughes broke the one about the age. I think they
probably knew that they were geniuses and they maybe thought
that they could handle this somehow. The punishment of breaking
these rules, according to the old rabbis is madness, and
I think that's pretty interesting given the fact that, I mean,

(03:50):
she had mental health problems going back into her youth.
She has definitely one documented unsuccessful suicide tempt when she
was twenty, but she has written that she had tried
before that in her teens, and that's also a pivotal
scene in the Belgar novel that she wrote, which is

(04:12):
very autobiographical. So you know, the unstability, you know, instability
was always there, and a lot of people think that,
you know, especially friends. She had an editor friend A Alvarez,
who wrote an article called did black Magic Kill Sylvia Plath?

(04:36):
He blamed it for that, just that it kind of
set her over the edge.

Speaker 2 (04:41):
How did you begin to focus in on her and
the occult angle?

Speaker 3 (04:46):
So I was in graduate school getting my MSA in
creative writing for poetry and fiction, both both the genres
of class and I have always loved class and read
a lot of her, But as a professional tarot card reader,
I started to see all of this tarot symbolism, you know.

(05:09):
I would point it out to my professor. I mean,
in her poem Daddy, which is one of her most
famous poems. She even named it, she says, and my
Tarok pack and my Tarok pack and Tarok being another
name for taro. And I pointed it out to my
professor at the University of Missouri Saint Willis, and I said,

(05:30):
what's going on here? I can't find any information about
the taro, but I'm seeing it all over her work.
And he said to me, why don't you make that
your semester end project. This was back in two thousand
and seven and it became my life's work.

Speaker 2 (05:47):
You did a great job in this book, and you
uncovered some of the things, said, I don't think anybody
knows about, certainly not the masses.

Speaker 3 (05:56):
Now. It's it's kind of been been kept hidden and
maybe just sort of looked at as you know, kind
of weird. You know, you think of scholars and fans,
they have an idea on who Plas is that they
want to keep, and you know they're not necessarily comfortable
with the weirdnesses.

Speaker 2 (06:20):
Ironically, didn't her son commit suicide as well?

Speaker 3 (06:24):
Unfortunately, Yes, her son, Nicholas, he he had kind of
hidden from the limelight. He had become a biologist and
moved up to Alaska and really you know, kept out
of the drama between his parents. His father was Ted Hughes.
Platt's husband was very famous in his own right. He

(06:44):
was Poet Laureate of England and there was there was
just so much scandal around his parents and yeah, he
was close to his father, but they sort of he
didn't want to be known for any of that. After
his father died of cancer, and I believe it was
nineteen ninety eight, Nicholas several years later killed himself.

Speaker 2 (07:07):
Well that's said, and they say the father was very
abusive to everybody. Is that true?

Speaker 3 (07:12):
Oh see, that's yes and no, certainly emotionally abusive, and
there is some documented evidence that there were some physical
brawls between him and Sylvia, although she seems to have
held her own and hit him back. So you know,
I don't know. I think there is evidence of some

(07:37):
physical and emotional abuse. I would not say very abusive,
and there's no evidence that Ted Hughes hit the kids either,
So I just want to you know, I think that's
important to kind of get the context on that.

Speaker 2 (07:53):
Did Sylvia and Ted publicly do much with the occult
or did they keep it quiet?

Speaker 3 (08:00):
I kept it very quiet. You know, witchcraft was a
crime in England until nineteen fifty one, and they got together,
they got they got well together and married in nineteen
fifty six. But you know, Plas had a reputation to
preserve in very conservative academia. She would have been labeled

(08:20):
as crazy with her history of mental illness. Already she
had been through shock treatments and institutionalized and you know,
on her first her first documented suicide attempt. And so
you know, there was a stigma about the occult and
how it reflect how it would reflect on their children.

(08:43):
They wanted to protect them from gossip and harm. And
you know Plas wrote The bell Jar under a pseudonym
Victoria Lucas, because she was afraid of that mental illness side.
You know, the Beljar addresses her struggle with mental illness.
So you know she hid things that that were uh,

(09:05):
not so acceptable in society and especially in academia.

Speaker 2 (09:10):
How deep were they into the occult, Julia.

Speaker 3 (09:15):
Very Uh. You know, there are so many mentions of
of their different practices. As I said, I have I
have a lot of direct evidence of kabbala that that
is not named outwardly in in journals and letters. But
what is named outwardly is astrology, Weijahboard's, hypnotic trances, Kundolini, meditation,

(09:39):
folk magic, witchcraft, bibliomancy, crystal ball, scrying and h and
even visiting witches in Devon.

Speaker 2 (09:48):
Yes, they were into a lot of stuff Yeah, they
sure were.

Speaker 3 (09:53):
She had a lot of rituals and practices. You know.
Plath wrote her her best poems in the collection Aeriel.
She wrote them on pink paper. And that was actually
a practice by Madame Blavatsky, who is one of the
founders of theosophy. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:11):
Now, in terms of dabbling with the wuigi board, how
often did she do that?

Speaker 3 (10:16):
Oh, that was a regular practice for them. Ted Hughes
made a wija board for them. And she has a
long poem which is it was not published until the
Collected Works of Sylvia Plath came out, or collected Poems,
i should say. And Ted Hughes put this poem dialogue
over a Wiga board in the introduction. It is anyone

(10:39):
who's read the journals and letters can see that this poem,
which has two characters, these characters are actually Sylvia and Ted.
And there's just all this conversation over the wija board
as they're trying to summon her father and Pan the

(11:01):
god and and uh and and they're going over, you know,
back and forth over their their uh faith and lack
of faith and and just the creepiness of the room
and and and it's all it's all there. I actually
used that poem to set uh, to open my different
parts in the in the occult Sylvia Plath, So I

(11:22):
I dip back and forth. I've turned that poem into
a into a scene and uh, and I've used you know,
all the details, uh to to kind of fill out
the what the room looked like, and what the smells
were and everything that Plath had ever documented. So so
so the dialogue over a witch Aboard poem is all

(11:43):
of her experiences with WIJA over some time.

Speaker 2 (11:50):
It's truly remarkable. She was born in Boston, died in London.
How did she get to England?

Speaker 3 (11:56):
Well, she had a Fulbright scholarship and so she went
to Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts for her undergraduate and
then she got a Fulbright scholarship to go over to
Cambridge in England and do some graduate work there. And that,
of course is where she met Ted Hughes and had

(12:19):
her wild, you know, passionate love affair that in four
months turned into marriage.

Speaker 2 (12:26):
Was she a devil worshiper Julia?

Speaker 3 (12:29):
She was not. I was a little afraid of that. Honestly,
I had an experience in my work where as I
was going through her collection Aerial and matching it with
the Tarot cards. And I got to a point as
I was getting kind of deep into the work where
I was on you know the way the tarot cards

(12:51):
work and the major arcana. They started zero and go
through number twenty twenty one, but there are twenty two
cards because of that one starting at zero. So when
I was doing my work and I got to this
point on her poem, the title poem Aerial, which is

(13:12):
matched with the fourteenth Starot card, it's the fifteenth poem,
and I saw that there was a lot of Satanic
kind of stuff that was very much in alignment, kind
of a paraphrasing to Alistair Crowley's poem to the Great
Beast six sixty six. That unnerved me quite a bit,

(13:33):
and I almost gave up on my work when I
found this, because I thought, oh my gosh, if they
weren't Satanists, I don't want any part of this. I
grew up going in the Episcopal church, you know, this
Christian kind of background. But I went to bed that
night night this is actually in the introduction of my
first book, Six Stars Government Life. I went to bed
and I heard her voice in my ear, which I

(13:55):
know very well from all the recordings, and she commanded me,
she said move through. And it woke me up, and
I was, you know, just startled by the whole thing.
And I said, okay, I'll go to the next poem. Well,
the next poem in alignment with the cards is in
alignment with the Devil card. So I realized she had

(14:18):
been setting up the next card. Basically it was it
was the fifteenth poem Aeriel in alignment with the Temperance card,
but card number fifteen is the devil in the tarot's
major arcana, so she was setting it up. She was
brilliant in every way. She was brilliant.

Speaker 2 (14:38):
Are you sure you're right that she wasn't involved?

Speaker 3 (14:42):
You know, I have no evidence that she was a Satanist,
none at all. I think she was fascinated. She has always,
since since her early years, been interested in mysticism, in mythology,
in her medicism. Uh. She she loved magic, she loved

(15:05):
you know, the mystery of the occult. But there's no
evidence at all that she was a Satanist, had demons,
she had personal demons. Yeah, And you know, and it's
my feeling as a Tarot card reader that it's kind
of all within heaven and hell. And you know, I
don't want to get into a philosophical thing here, but

(15:27):
but certainly when you're open to some of the darker energies,
when when you allow things like like anger, which really
consumed her later as her marriage fell apart, and uh,
you know, and as I said, she she was unstable.
She was probably bipolar at a time when there was
no medication for that that that was really effective in

(15:50):
any case. And she had just a lot of things
going really wrong at the end. She was she had
the flu. She was in the middle of the coldest
winter and a hundred years and in London. Her husband
had just left her for another woman who at one
time had been her friend. You know, it was she
had two small children to raise. You know, it was

(16:11):
just a mass that everything went wrong.

Speaker 2 (16:13):
How did she life?

Speaker 3 (16:15):
Uh? She was she was known, you know, as I said,
it's been the best known for putting her head in
the oven, which was as much I thought you were.

Speaker 2 (16:25):
Just pulling my leg. She actually put her head in
the oven.

Speaker 3 (16:29):
Yeah, now that was the most popular way to commit
suicide back in England. She cooked herself based No, no,
it's the gas, the gas oven.

Speaker 2 (16:40):
With the oven on exactly.

Speaker 3 (16:43):
Exactly, so she she uh died by gas and this
kind of town gas was was the popular way. That
was how most it was sort of like the Vogue
way to commit suicide for a number of years into
the sixties, and they changed the gas because it was
happening too much. So, yeah, there are there are, believe

(17:05):
it or not, popular ways to commit suicide. And the
author Malcolm Gladwell was written about that.

Speaker 2 (17:11):
What a horrible way to go.

Speaker 3 (17:13):
Yeah, yeah, certainly, I mean it's all horrible, right.

Speaker 2 (17:18):
How many people are aware of Sylvia Plath, even regardless
of the mysticism.

Speaker 3 (17:25):
Oh, I mean, she is one of the leading authors
of our you know, of contemporary literature. She's right up
there with Emily Dickinson as one of the greats. She
was one of the first feminist voices, and even before
feminism had really taken root, you know. And as I said,

(17:46):
she died in nineteen sixty three, February eleventh, nineteen sixty three,
which is coincidentally, I was born nine months after that,
also in nineteen sixty three. I don't believe on her,
but just to say that, but but I do believe
that that we have a connection and and yeah, so

(18:07):
she's very you know, one of the leading contemporary American
female authors. Certainly, you know, you might even want to
take female out of the out of that mix and
say American authors.

Speaker 1 (18:21):
Listen to more Coast to Coast a m every weeknight
at one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to
coastam dot com for more