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Julia Gordon-Bramer – The Occult Sylvia Plath · Vox Novus with Victor Fuhrman

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Vox Novus, the New Voice, Vox Novus, the New Dimension. Vox
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Novus thought and movement leaders who will share from their experience and offer tools to
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help us navigate our rapidly changing world. My name is Victor Furman. Welcome
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to Vox Novus, the New Voice. Sylvia Plath was an American poet,
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novelist, and short story writer, best known for The Colossus and other poems,
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Arielle and the Bell Jar, a semi autobiographical novel published shortly before her
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suicide in nineteen sixty three. What many are not aware of was her study
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of occult practices. This week on Box Novus, Julia Gordon Bramer spent fifteen
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years researching Sylvia Plath's enduring interest and active practice in mysticism and the occult from
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childhood until her tragic death in nineteen sixty three. Julia Gordon Bramer is a
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Sylvia Plath scholar, professional Tarot card reader, award winning writer and poet,
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and former professor for the Graduate Writing program at Lyndenwood University. She's the author
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of several books, including Fixed Starr's Governor Life, Decoding Sylvia Plath, and
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Tarot Life Lessons. Her website is Julia Gordonbramer dot com and she joins me
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this week to share her path and new book, The Occult Sylvia Plath,
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The Hidden spiritual life of the visionary Poet. Please join me in welcoming Julia
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Gordon Bramer. Welcome, Julia, Hi, Thanks for having me. Julia,
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Please share with our listeners your path and how it led to your becoming
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a professional Tarot card reader, an award winning writer, poet, and scholar
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of Sylvia Plath. Yeah. It's a lot, with several different paths,
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I guess, but they are interconnected. When I was sixteen, I got
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my first deck of Tarot cards, and I tell the whole story of that
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in the beginning of Tarot Life Lessons, my book that came out last year
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with Destiny Books. And it's an interesting intersection because that was around the same
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time that I first found a copy of The Bell Jar, which was in
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a big box of books and my parents' garage, and for some reason I
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thought it looked interesting and I plucked it out and I read it, and
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you know, I can't say that the story itself, and this has always
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been for me. I'm more of a poet. I love fiction and I
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read fiction, but poetry is what gets me. But in the back of
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this copy of The Bell Jar was a copy of her poem Matt Girl's Love
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Song, which is not a famous Plass poem. She wrote it when she
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was nineteen. In fact, it's a villain l but it mesmerized me to
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the point that I kept it with me. I used to have a copy
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of it in my wallet, you know, back when we carried photographs and
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all kinds of things in our wallets, and they were they did half the
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things our phones do today. And I would just read it and I memorized
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it, and it was sort of yeah, it just bewitched me. And
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so I knew there was something to Platt's words, and I respected that,
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but I hadn't really, you know, put anything together too seriously as a
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teenager. And Taro as a teenager was just a fun thing to goof around
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with, although I was always a pretty mystical kid, and I had a
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background, you know, I went to my Episcopal church. But I found
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out in later years that my Episcopal church was not like others because they taught
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us meditation and automatic writing, and people spoke in tongues and so it was.
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It was charismatic is the term that I was told, but you know
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almost you know, veering toward like Pentecostal in some ways. And so I
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had that very spiritual sort of background as I as I grew older. I
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didn't go to college until I was in my thirties, and when I was
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there from my undergraduate degree, I discovered Plath again and fell deep into her
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poetry this time. And even then, you know, all this time I
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had been reading tarot cards, getting better and better and pursuing my spirituality and
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developing that. And I had been reading the Dow and studying Buddhism, and
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I found a course in miracles, and I now teach and lead a workshop
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and a course in miracles. It's a very important practice for me. And
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you know, I began to read about mythology and all of these different things,
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which I think has made me infinitely a better tarot card reader. It
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wasn't until my graduate school work when I went back in my late forties to
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get my MFA and creative writing and poetry and fiction. Like Plath, I'm
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multi genre. And I had a semester and project that I was supposed to
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do, and I wasn't really coming up with any good ideas for what that
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was. But I had pointed out to my professor that I saw a lot
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of Tarot imagery in Platt's work, and when I pointed it out to him,
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I was like, Oh, this is so clear. Look this is
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this card, this is that card, you know, And he looked at
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me just bewildered, and he said, I don't know what you're talking about.
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And so he suggested that I make that my semester in project. And
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really it became my life's work because as soon as I discovered that Sylvia Plath's
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great collection Aerial, which was posthumously published, was in alignment with the Taro,
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then all of a sudden I realized that most people had been essentially reading
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her wrong for over fifty years. They had been reading Plath strictly in her
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autobiography, the depression, the suicide, the cheating husband and the anger and
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all of that. And that's there. There's no doubt that is there,
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and I would never deny that. But what Plath did was she took one
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set of words, and she gave it a minimum of six different meanings.
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And so my first book, Fixed Star's Governor Life Decoding Sylvia Platt. That
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came out in twenty fourteen with Stephen F. Austin State University Press, and
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that revealed the first twenty two in alignment with the Tarot's major Arcana poems,
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and how they're completely in alignment with the Taro. I have yet to publish
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the remaining poems in Aeriel and how she did it in alignment with the minor
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Arcana. I had some difficulties with that press, honestly, and I didn't
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want to return to them. And I've published some individual studies of poems with
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class profiles and some literary journals, and I'll probably get around to doing a
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volume two at some time to finish out Ariel. But yeah, it all
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sort of crossed back and forth over each Plath was in my life and out
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of my life. Taro has always been in my life, and I just
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knew that I resonated with Plath, although I didn't know why at the time,
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and now I'm fully conscious of why. And I believe that Plath's work,
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with all of these meanings that she's sort of woven in, it's doing
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a real number on our subconscious and it is a spell of sorts in itself.
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I've got to ask you something because when I was a kid growing up,
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I was fascinated. I was obsessed with the work of Edgar Allan Poe
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uh huh, and some of the poetry that came through me in the nineteen
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sixties when I was around thirteen or fourteen was reminiscent of something that Poe might
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have written himself. Do you feel a connection that way with Sylvia Plath?
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So, I'm sixty years old and I have been writing for a long time.
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I think I knew I wanted to be a writer when I was six
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years old, and I was you know, I'm somebody who has been developing
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my own voice for a long long time. And perhaps I may have imitated
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some of the writers I love and certainly in learning them and Plats would be
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top of the list. But my life experiences her life experience is very different,
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and so our voices are different. I have tried to embed these multiple
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meanings into my work, you know, learning from her and from Ted Hughes.
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He did the same thing. And I can talk more about their technique
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if you like, But I you know, I'm limited. I am not
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the genius they were and I can get a good poem. A strong poem
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might have two or three different meanings, but nothing like what they pulled off
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of, especially Plas. My working title for The Occult Sylvia Plath was the
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Magician's Girl. I called it that for many years. The book has been
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fifteen years in the making, and I called it the Magician's Girl from a
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line that she has in her poem The b Meeting, which says, I
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am the Magician's Girl, I do not flinch. But it's also kind of
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reminiscent of the Sorcerer's Apprentice. And I really do believe that Ted Hughes apprenticed
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Sylvia Plath, and that, like in that story, she became more powerful
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than the master. And so that's all in my book, The Occult Sylvia
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Plath, that line, I am the Magician's Girl, I do not flinch.
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Is that a reference to being cut in half? Or so? A
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yeah, I think so, I think so. Just that perfect calm.
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Absolutely. Before we discuss your latest book, The Occult, Sylvia Plath,
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please share with us your last book, Taro Life Lessons Living Wisdom from the
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Major Arkana. What inspired this book and what do you share with readers Yeah,
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this was an unusual book for me because I had published three books before
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and they were all scholarship on Sylvia Plath on her mysticism, and then I
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switched gears and in twenty twenty. You know, really, I have to
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credit my husband Tom Bramer for saying, you had to publish these stories about
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your tarot clients, because I've been a professional tarot card reader for a lot
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of years, and I am quite good at it, if I do say
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so myself, and I have had these stories that floored me that I just
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couldn't quite believe for one reason or another. And I had journaled them,
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and because I'm a creative writer, I had journaled them in a way that
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you know, I would want to read it. So I had dialog and
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I had what cards I pulled, and I wrote about my experiences and how
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I felt, and you know, maybe I was intimidated, or maybe I
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was shocked, or maybe I was in tears with somebody, and so I
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put all of this into the writing, and I did it for myself.
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It was just my journals, and I had shared some on a blog at
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one time, and I had shared some with some interested people and with my
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husband and he was, like, in twenty twenty, when we were all
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bored and quarantined and looking for things to do, he said, why don't
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you put that in a book? And I did it very quickly, and
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I did it in alignment with the Tarot cards major arcana, which is where
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the subtitle comes from. But it's really not just about the major orcana.
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And this is not a how to read Tarot card book. I want to
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emphasize that I really wrote a book that I had never seen anything like.
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It is the real practical stories of my clients, starting with my story.
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So I aligned my own story on how I kind of found my psychic abilities
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and became a Tarot card reader. That's in alignment with the fool card,
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you know, the beginning and the naive person just sort of falling into it.
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And then I have stories about gold diggers, and I have stories about
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addicts, and I have stories about people who who have never been loved,
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and I have stories about there's murder in there. I mean, some of
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this stuff really tripped me up. There's somebody who was sort of stalking me
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and impersonating me. Most of these are not my stories, however, most
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of these are my client stories. And because of that, I changed identities.
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I not just names, but in some cases races, in some cases
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sexes, definitely, Lee careers got changed, any identifying sort of characteristics.
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But I wanted I wanted to share the real stories of real people and and
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how Taro you know, you might say, exposed them in some ways,
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but also how it helped them to find healing. And I do think ultimately
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this is a book about healing, and it's a book about our humanity and
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our collective experiences. And you know, we all know someone who has,
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you know, lost a child to some horrible circumstance, and and how do
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they cope with that? Well, well, Taro gave me some tools to
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help some people through. We all know people who have have addictions, have
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addiction issues. There's a tragic story of a gambling addict, and then there
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are alcohol and drug addicts in this book as well. They're a mercy killing
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in this book. There is manslaughter that's covered up in this book. There's
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a lot of intense stuff and I just didn't want to forget it, so
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I had recorded it all. So essentially it was all there for me to
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just sort of polish up and put into place. And when I and I
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had the blessing, you know, just to get a little tangential for a
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second, I got a fan letter about my Plath work from somebody on Instagram,
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Tamra Lucid, and she's a wonderful writer and scholar and mystic in her
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own right, and she wrote this incredible letter to me, and you know,
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talk about things being in alignment. She said, I'd like to introduce
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you to an author friend of mine for your She was asking what I had
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next, and I told her about these two projects, Haroh Life Lessons and
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The Occult Sylvia Plath, and she connected me with Inner Traditions and they snatched
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both right up and they've been wonderful and the imprint is Destiny Books, but
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Inner Traditions as the parent company, and boy, I've not had a better
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publishing experience than working with them. They've been just great. And I just
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think it was the exact right time, and you know, serendipity. The
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Occult Sylvia Plath was intended to be the introduction to your first book, Fixed
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Stars, Governal Life, Decoding Sylvia Plath. When why did you decide it
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was its own biography? Who? Yeah, well, it just became too
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wieldy, you know. I just kept finding things and Fixed Star's Government Life
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came out. It was published in twenty fourteen, and I realized I had
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probably started, well, I had definitely started my deep, deep dive into
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Plath and working in the archives and that sort of thing in two thousand and
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seven then, and I thought that seven years of work would have been enough,
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you know. But I just kept finding things to support this mysticism,
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this background, and I knew I had to tell a bigger story than to
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just say, oh, she had some tarot cards, she had a crystal
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ball, she had you know, me to board, you know, like
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there are all these sort of touch points that yeah, it supports it,
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but there this was a bigger story to tell, and the historical context it
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blew me away again. You know, people just read Plaths for her autobiography
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and they weren't looking at what was happening around her at the time. And
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she was a real news junkie by the way, and so you know,
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all of this stuff had to be incorporated. And it was just too big
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of a book, you know, on its own to be an introduction.
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I mean, as it is the occult Sylvia plas you know, with its
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with its index is a four hundred pages, so it would have been a
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you know, a heck of an introduction. And in Fixed Stars Government Life
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is about four hundred pages by itself, So yeah, I wasn't writing a
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Russian novel and nobody would publish that and few would read it, so I
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had to break it apart. For listeners not familiar with Sylvia Plath, please
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give us a thumbnail bio. Yeah. So she's probably most famous for her
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very autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, which is based on her true events of
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basically having a nervous breakdown and depression and being institutionalized, getting shock treatment,
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and ultimately having a suicide attempt that she came out of. I had that
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a little bit backwards there, but that's what That's what people know of Plath.
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If they know a little more, they know that she was depressive,
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that she was angry, betrayed by her husband, you know, who was
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a bit of a philanderer, and that she was the poet who put her
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head in the oven and committed suicide by gas in nineteen sixty three. So
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that's what people know about her. By and large. There's been Hollywood movies
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made about her and Ted Hughes, Gwennys Paltrow and Daniel Craig, starting one
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in the early two thousands called Sylvia. And you know, it's only about
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how beautiful they were and how you know, it had some writer's block.
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It had very little about her genius. It was all the drama of the
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marriage and you know, her depression and his philandering, and yes that happened,
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but that was not all of who she was. Plaid scholars will read
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and really anyone can read now now that her letters have been published and everything.
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She was wickedly funny. She was, you know, extremely clever in
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so many ways, and so talented. She was a painter and you know,
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just did all kinds of things. As I said, she was a
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multi genre writer. She was a gardener, she was a meticulous housekeeper.
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She was a good cook. She wanted to really be the perfect mother,
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you know, very nineteen fifties woman. In a lot of ways. Clath
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was much more multi dimensional than most people know. I'll just leave it at
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that, which leads to the question, how has the occult side of Sylvia
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Plath been missed? In the sixty years since her death. Right Well,
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she and Ted Hughes were not too open about it at the time they were
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together, and there are reasons for that. I think. Number one,
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she had been in an institution, so she didn't want that sort of crazy
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label on her. She was trying to make a career in academia for a
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time. She had gone back to Smith College to teach, and you know,
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she wanted to be taken very seriously as a poet, and so the
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occult just didn't really work with that. So that's the main thing. Number
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Two, Witchcraft had only just been taken off the books as a crime in
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England in nineteen fifty three. Plas and Hughes got together in nineteen fifty six,
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you know, so there was still a lot of stigma associated with it.
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At that time. They had young children and you know, they just
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were not going They didn't want that to sort of, you know, tarnish
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their kid's image or have their children teased or anything like that. So you
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know, there were a lot of reasons to keep it on the down low.
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She and Ted did this very private as far as I can tell.
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They were not a part of any groups as after Plath died though Ted Hughes
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did become more open about it. His work has been widely studied for the
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occult. Writers have found all kinds of alchemy and Kabbala and astrology. They
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found all of this embedded in his work, as have I. But for
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some curious reason, no one thought to look at Plaths. They have just
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held her to this really limited, narrow autobiography as if that's all she was.
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And it's just amazing to me. To the point. You know,
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Harold Bloom, which is a great literary critic, very famous, he wrote
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a wonderful book about Kabbala in literature. I forget the exact title. It
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may be just that, but it's an intensive study of these great poets and
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literature who have used cabbala. And it's exactly right. He's very correct.
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But here's the crazy thing. He wrote an introduction to a biography on Plath
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and he called her a mere hysteric and he completely missed all the Kabbala in
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her work. And Taro, of course, is in alignment with Kabbala.
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So as I interpret her work in my first book, you know, I
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have Taro and Kabbala is sort of the same interpretation of you know, one
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way to look at a poem, because you know, we have these stations
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on the Cabala's Tree of Life that have Tarot card equivalents, and she's you
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know, what she had done was just gone sort of station by station,
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card by card, and really wrote a poem that perfectly described the symbolism on
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the cards and the definition of the cards, and you know, even sometimes
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relating to the number of the cards and the colors of the cards if you're
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looking at the writer weight deck, and you know, very very interesting stuff
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that Harold Bloom missed completely. And I really think, you know, I
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don't like to get all trendy on this, but I think it's very a
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sexist statement that the women just are read for their drama. They're sort of
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confessional. You know. Plas was called a confessional poet, Ted Hughes said,
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And I opened my book The Occult Sylvia Plas with a quote that she
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was, in fact, not a confessional poet, but a mystical poet of
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the highest order. That's what he called her. But people just kind of
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roll their eyes and oh, crazy, Ted. You know, nobody takes
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it seriously. It's very weird. They just want to see her in that
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narrow view, and careers have been built on the narrow view, of course,
24:57
so why would they want to jet their careers right? My guest is
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Julia Gordon Bramer, her book The Occult Sylvia Plath, The Hidden Spiritual Life
25:07
of the Visionary Poet. Julia, please share with our listeners where they can
25:11
get all of your books and find out more about you and your work.
25:15
Yeah, thank you. Well, you can find me on all the major
25:18
booksellers, Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and I have an audio book.
25:23
Simon and Schuster distributes the audiobook. My first book, Fixed Stars, Governor
25:29
Life Decoding Sylvia Plath is out of print. There are some very expensive copies
25:34
out there, but if your listeners are interested in that book, have them
25:38
email me directly at through my website Julia Gordonbramer dot com and I can hook
25:45
you up with a PDF for five dollars. That's wonderful and we'll be back
25:51
with more of Julia after these words. On the Own Times Radio Network,
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two three five one oh back with Julia Gordon Bramer. We're talking about her
27:15
latest book, The Occult Sylvia Plath, The Hidden Spiritual Life of the Visionary
27:21
Poet. Okay, we got to give Ted Hughes his due. Why did
27:25
you devote so much time to Ted Hughes in this book? Because he was
27:30
her mentor, and you know, he's been widely criticized. He made a
27:37
statement in the Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath and the Introduction that Sylvia Plath hadn't
27:42
really come into her own fully as a poet until meeting Ted Hughes. And
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people are like, oh, yeah, you know, you're giving yourself all
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the credit. But that is absolutely true by my work. And I you
27:59
know, I mean, I don't even have to say. It's not a
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theory. I mean he mentored her. It's it's fact. Uh, it's
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all. The evidence is all through her writings, her her letters and her
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and her journals and everything. He he trained her, He trained her in
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hypnosis, he trained her in meditation. He uh, you know, he
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gave her creative exercises every day. They wrote on similar themes and sort of
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went back and forth with each other what what one writer has called a call
28:27
and response between the two of them, and and he was absolutely critical to
28:33
her development. I do not think Plas would have become the poet that she
28:37
did without Ted Hughes. I think that would have been impossible. I uh,
28:44
I speak so much about him, you know. I have that whole
28:47
part four of the occult Sylvia Platt. So it's in four parts. There's
28:52
there's the first part is Sylvia and her family as she was growing up as
28:56
a young girl, uh and and off and then off to college. And
29:00
then the second part is Ted Hughes and as he was growing up in a
29:03
young man and then off to college. The third part is Plath and Hugh's
29:07
together, and then the fourth part is what I call after Plaths. And
29:11
it was essential to follow Ted Hughes because well, first of all, he
29:17
claimed to have been basically haunted by Sylvia Is in a manner of speaking or
29:22
maybe even literally. And there was so much a cult and so much mysticism
29:29
after Plath too that just advanced or developed. And many many girlfriends have written
29:34
biographies about their times with Ted Hughes and his references to Plath after she had
29:41
died, And so I had to include all of that because it was still
29:45
still about Sylvia, but he couldn't quite give her up. And of course
29:51
his final and maybe greatest poetic achievement was Birthday Letters, which was a collection
29:57
of poems devote to Plath about his life with her, and it won many,
30:04
many major awards, So it all had to be in there as well.
30:08
So, you know, love him or hate him, Ted was definitely
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more than influential. He was essential in her development. And I believe he
30:21
showed her really how to do the cabalistic system, and he showed her these
30:27
propitious dates for mailing out entries to win awards and publications and you know,
30:33
all of the stuff. That he was a magician, I mean, he
30:37
worked it, and he worked it very successfully. And Sylvia could not deny
30:41
that. She had some doubts sometimes about her own spirituality, but she could
30:45
not deny his powers. And as others have said, he was you know,
30:52
whether you want to call him a black magician, some people do,
30:56
but he was powerful. You had mentioned her allusion to him as herself being
31:02
the magician's girl. Was he her Svengali? Yes, absolutely, he was,
31:07
absolutely no doubt about it. You open each of the four parts of
31:12
the Occult Sylvia Plath with a scene of Plath and Hughes over there wijaboard.
31:18
Tell us about why you did this and how the scene came to be.
31:22
Yeah, So there's a long poem that was never published until it's in the
31:27
introduction of the Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, and it's called Dialogue over a
31:33
Wigiboard, And this is it has two characters, Sybil and Leroy. But
31:38
anyone who's read any of Platt's letters or journals can clearly see that it's Sylvia
31:47
and Ted. And what I did was I took the language, I took
31:52
the dialogue from that poem, and I took all of the descriptions that Plat
32:00
had written supporting those scenes, and I basically put them together. And so
32:04
I had this long wage aboard scene that I split up into four parts,
32:07
and I everything in those in those scenes. Nothing I made up, the
32:15
smells in the room, the colors of furniture and walls, and paintings that
32:21
were that were named, the closing of the curtains, everything Plath had written
32:28
about at other times, and I incorporated this. So none of this was
32:31
my creative imagination here, it's actual scholarship. My creativity was just setting it
32:39
instead of just telling, you know, in a narrative voice, telling about
32:44
it. I gave the reader more of that, you know in media res,
32:47
kind of feeling that that that they're there. And I wanted I wanted
32:52
the reader to I wanted it to be good reading, you know. I
32:55
didn't want this to be a dry academic book like my others. In some
33:00
cases, you know, when you get into literary analysis, you can't get
33:04
too creative. But in a biography, I can stretch my wings a little
33:07
more and have a little more fun with it. So maybe the poet came
33:12
out in me a little bit more, and certainly the creative writer did.
33:17
Why did Sylvia and Ted hide their occult pursuits, or really did they?
33:24
They definitely did to the masses, and I think it was because of their
33:30
reputations. I think it was because of the as I said, the stigma
33:34
of you know, having it just been a crime. A few years before
33:37
they got together, you know, there was an occasion that Ted wanted to
33:43
make a bit of money writing astrology charts for people, and I think he
33:50
wanted to put an ad in the paper, if I'm remembering correctly, and
33:52
they wouldn't print it because they considered that to be witchcraft, so you know,
33:57
to do horoscopes. So it just was frowned upon. Was it was
34:02
not so far from Victorian England and a lot of means, you know,
34:07
in a lot of ways of describing it. And they were quite close minded
34:12
and quite Christian, and you know, they being society, and so it
34:19
just wasn't really looked upon. Well, so yeah, they kept it to
34:23
themselves. Now all the while, especially getting into the nineteen sixties, it
34:30
was becoming more and more trendy, so more people were getting tarot cards and
34:36
water boards and crystal balls and these sort of things, so that we were
34:39
seeing kind of a resurgence and spirituality, which they were a part of in
34:45
the early nineteen sixties, but they had started in fifty six together and they
34:50
both had backgrounds that were very spiritual before that time. And as a scholarly
34:57
work, what sources did you use for the information in the book? Oh?
35:00
Yeah, well, so many different sources. I mean, I read
35:05
every biography and memoir. I've spent a lot of time in the up Plath
35:09
archives, especially in Lily Library in Bloomington, Indiana, but in some other
35:15
archives as well. There's a nice archives in Smith College, and there's even
35:21
some in my hometown here of Saint Louis at the Washington University. I read
35:25
the books, the actual books Plath read, and I copied down her underlinings
35:31
and her marginalia and little things that she had starred. I went through her
35:37
calendars and her scrap books that people don't normally see that have never been published.
35:43
I went through her school papers, and I read her school papers to
35:45
see what she had actually learned and pondered and discussed. So, I mean,
35:52
there was countless hours of, you know, really backbreaking work in the
35:57
archives. I say backbreaking because when you're just sitting hunt over for so long
36:01
over these you know, pristine texts that you have to be very very careful
36:06
with and and you can't eat or drink around them, and you know,
36:10
and in some cases you must use gloves or turn pages with you know,
36:15
very careful things that you know, it's like it's work. It's it's it's
36:20
physical work to do this sort of scholarship. But I feel like the luckiest
36:25
person in the world who have had this opportunity. And yeah, I had
36:30
sources from all over So so when I wasn't in the archives. I was
36:36
reading every memoir, every biography, just picking up the little bits, and
36:43
it's you know, Victor, it's all been out there, or most of
36:46
it in any case, has been out there, but no one has viewed
36:51
it collectively, and they've all kind of just chuckled and figured it was entertainment
36:55
for Plats and Hues and not seeing how very serious they were about their mysticism
37:00
and how it was really the core of their work. You had mentioned kabbala
37:07
and taro and uija. What were some of the other occult activities pursued by
37:10
Plath and Hughes. Yeah. So you know, Plath has been She's written
37:15
about her use of bibliomancy. That was how she how she came to settle
37:21
on her last apartment where she did kill herself in London. She has you
37:28
know, been written of having these witchy bonfires where she gathered the fingernail clippings
37:35
and dan driff of Ted news and put it in the fire and chants and
37:40
and all kinds of things like that. She and Ted practiced hypnosis. Uh,
37:46
they practiced Kundalini meditation. They they were you know, just very into
37:53
mythology. And reading of all sorts of mysticism. Uh. She has been
38:00
photographed with a crystal ball which the cover of the Occult Sylvia Plath. That
38:05
is actually her on the cover holding the crystal ball on my book. Most
38:10
people think it's just an artistic rendering. No, this was a photo that
38:15
her mother had done. They had a series of professional photos with the crystal
38:19
ball before she ever met Ted in the early nineteen fifties, so it's always
38:23
been a part of her Ted has written a lot about the alchemy. He
38:29
was definitely very interested in alchemy. I suspect rosa Crucianism, also definitely her
38:37
meticism. They've had a lot of books on her medicism, and they worshiped
38:43
the poems W. B. Yates, and Plath has written that she and
38:47
Ted Hughes they wanted to be just like William and Georgie Yates and do the
38:52
automatic writing together and the astrology together. And Ted was a very accomplished astrologer.
38:59
By the way, Sylvia reprimanded herself that her astrology was not that good
39:04
and that she had to study that and the taro, but she got pretty
39:08
good at it. I think the fact that the mother took the picture of
39:13
her holding the crystal ball before she met Ted indicates that family members actually raised
39:19
them in a cult pursuits prior to their getting together. Can you tell us
39:22
a little bit of more about that. Police. Plath attended the Universalist Unitarian
39:25
Church as she was growing up. I have read in her papers that some
39:31
of her school work was on things her Sunday school work, this is,
39:37
was on things like the zodiac. So even in my very unusual spiritual Episcopal
39:44
church, we never did any such work like the zodiac in Sunday school,
39:47
you know, So it was definitely free thinking. Sylvia's father was a freemason,
39:53
Autoplath Aurelia Plath. Her mother got her master's deg and Paracelsus, the
40:00
famous alchemist, and Plath read every book of her mother's every school book.
40:07
Her mother has said this. So they her mother said that they really shared
40:12
everything, and it was a very you know a lot of osmosis with understanding,
40:17
and so Plath had this, you know, just beginning, just steeped
40:22
in it. An interesting aside when when she was in summer camp and her
40:29
teens, she carved a hermetic Cadusius out of wood. So this is a
40:34
tip off to her meticism number one and it has alchemical symbols on it.
40:39
It's basically like a magic wand, and she carved this out of wood.
40:43
It was given by Aurelia Plath to doctor Richard Larshan, who had it for
40:50
a long time. Who it is now, I'm delighted to say in my
40:54
possession. Doctor Larshan wanted somebody who respected in new places mysticism to have this
41:01
object, as he's a very old man now, and so this single object
41:08
is probably more valuable than my house. My Pleath had her tarot cards auctioned
41:15
off in twenty twenty and they sold at the auction for over two hundred thousand
41:22
US dollars in twenty twenty, so you can imagine she didn't make those tarot
41:27
cards. And there's even some question as to whether that was even the deck
41:30
that she used. I especially question it because it was a tero de masie
41:35
deck, and while she may have had it, my work supports that she
41:38
had the rider Weight deck, and the tarot expert Mary Greer backed me up
41:45
that rider Weight was the most likely deck that she would have had in nineteen
41:50
fifty six England. So you know, it's kind of amazing that I would
41:57
own this thing that she made by hand, and of course is kept in
42:00
a safe but it is my most treasured possession. I have to ask,
42:07
because I'm sensitive to subtle energy. When you hold it in your hands,
42:10
do you feel anything? Oh? You know, yeah, I don't know
42:15
how much I'm projecting on it. You know, I would say wonder and
42:19
delight and just the blessing that I really think she chose me. I think
42:27
I have had. I had a real battle with my publications on my Plat
42:32
stuff for the first really the first decade, but then it just started to
42:38
unfold and it just clearly my path was being opened up, and I had
42:44
all of these major points of you know, just being told, yes,
42:50
this is right, this is right, starting with Camra Lucid writing me on
42:53
Instagram and hooking me up with the publisher. But when I became owner of
43:00
that hermetic Cadusius, oh yeah, like Plath could not have given me a
43:07
more lovely gift. You know, it's just so wonderful, beyond beyond the
43:14
understanding of her work, you know, which is the ultimate gift. I
43:16
think that she chose me, of all people, just this random poet in
43:22
Saint Louis, you know, tarot card reading poet. I think I think
43:27
the choice was more than random. Her book is called The Occult Sylvia Plath,
43:30
The Hidden Spiritual Life of a Visionary Poet. Will be back with more
43:35
of Julia Gordon Braemer after these words on the Own Times Radio network. Humanity
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one at AARP dot org slash caregiving. That's AARP dot org slash caregiving,
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brought to you by AARP and the AD Council. Back on box Novus,
45:40
my guest this week is Julia Gordon Bramer her book The Occult Sylvia Plath,
45:46
The Hidden Spiritual Life of the Visionary Poet. Julia, why do you suppose
45:53
you've had so much pushback from academia accepting Plath's mysticism when you say this information
46:00
is all in the Plath archives for anyone to see. Yeah, Well,
46:07
first off, Plath herself did write on a number of occasion of occasions that
46:13
she was an atheist. Now almost anybody will say, and it has been
46:17
written of her that she was the most spiritual atheist ever. I do believe
46:23
that atheism does not have to deny something beyond. It's it's just denying a
46:31
god in the sky, you know, as a person. But Plath definitely
46:37
believed in something beyond and pursued something beyond in so many ways, as as
46:44
really every creative person does. I mean creativity, whether you're painting or writing,
46:50
or sculpting or dancing. You know, you go into that other consciousness,
46:55
you go into that zone. And what I've learned learned, you know,
47:00
when I started my Plath work and I started to find this stuff,
47:04
and I got so excited, and I immediately went to the Plath community and
47:07
I was like, Oh my gosh, and I look at this, and
47:09
I thought that they would be so excited with me, and in fact it
47:15
was kind of the opposite. And what I learned. Number one, they're
47:21
atheists, but they're really a little bit beyond that. They're they're kind of
47:25
nihilists, believing in nothing. They're also by and large not creative people.
47:31
They don't understand They teach poetry, but they don't understand what poetry can do.
47:37
They don't understand these multi levels and the magic of it. They're not
47:42
necessarily writing it, you know. And then, as I said earlier,
47:47
their careers are dependent on the old story of Plaths, that she was just
47:53
this depressive, suicidal, confessional poet, and that's how they want to see
48:00
her, and they're not willing to look at anything else. You know.
48:05
There was a time I walked out of the archives in Bloomington, Indiana with
48:08
my stack of my plast books and everything, and a man looked at me
48:14
as he was going in and I was going out, and he kind of
48:16
nodded his head and he said, hasn't everything been said about her that there
48:22
is to say? And I think that's the popular view and one of the
48:28
main scholars. Peter Steinberg, he said to me once that he just felt
48:32
that there were no new findings. It was just saying it in a different
48:37
way. That was how he put it. And I thought, oh my
48:39
gosh, like really, you know, and here I'm finding all this new
48:45
stuff, but they don't want to read it. You know, instantly.
48:51
I have an MFA in creative writing poetry and fiction, but you know,
48:55
it's not a PhD. And so they're not going to give me that cred.
49:00
And you know, and and the fact that I'm a professional tarot card
49:05
reader, well of course, you know, to to anybody who understands or
49:08
has any interest in mysticism, that gives me the ability to see this stuff.
49:15
But they don't have that, and they just think I'm crazy. You
49:19
know. They do not understand the imagery that's in tarot cards and the number
49:24
sequences and the meanings and and so they can't possibly see it. And and
49:30
so it's it's been very frustrating and for many years, I mean I literally
49:36
cried over you know, I was iced out at conferences, and I was
49:40
treated very badly and you know, even somewhat humiliated, and and it really
49:46
hurt me because I was trying so hard for their approval, for the Plath
49:52
community's approval, and then one day I just said enough. And that,
49:57
interestingly, was when it all of up for me, and I realized that
50:01
the world's a lot bigger than just the Plath community. And a lot of
50:05
people love Sylvia who are not, you know, reading Peter Steinberg's Sylvia Plath
50:12
information blog, which I laugh about because it's very censored information, you know,
50:17
and uh, you know, and and these these sort of narrow little
50:22
channels of uh of well, you know, Steinberg has called himself in his
50:27
blogs the king of Plasdom. You know this, this white male, non
50:32
poet, non mystic. It claims to know everything and and he and he
50:37
knows a lot, and he's very good at what he does. But uh,
50:40
but to to think that it's all there already, Uh, what a
50:45
shame. Uh, you know, their loss. You know, maybe some
50:49
of them will get it, maybe some of them will read it, uh
50:52
and and see it. I suspect most won't. That's okay. Uh,
50:57
They're not my audience anymore. Your concluding part four after Plath shows how her
51:04
husband Ted Hughes lived haunted by her memory and how is a cult practice maybe
51:08
even accelerated. Please share a little more about that. Yeah, so he
51:15
definitely, I mean, he's all of these girlfriends he had after her,
51:20
and he and he was married by the way he got he got married to
51:22
a woman named Carol Orchard. But well, I should back up a little
51:27
bit. So the woman he left Plath for, Asha Wevell, she was
51:31
another tragedy. And she killed herself in the same way that Sylvia did and
51:36
took their their daughter. That the daughter that that she and Ted Hughes had
51:40
had together killed her as well is very tragic. But she had She had
51:46
written about a lot about Ted and some about some about their practices and their
51:52
mysticism and Asha Wevell. You know, it's interesting, Asha is even a
51:57
word in Kabbalah, kind of that that's spiritual zone, you know, the
52:01
place to aim toward. And so she has written about the mysticism and about
52:10
Sylvia haunting them, and Sylvia lying between them and their bed. You know,
52:15
I'm sure she was speaking figuratively, but just the feeling of Sylvia around
52:19
all the time. She became quite obsessed with Sylvia herself. She wore Sylvia's
52:23
clothes and used her things after Platt's death, very very weird. All of
52:30
Ped's girlfriends were obsessed with Sylvia and they all have written about it in these
52:36
biographies. Is very interesting, and they all talk about what Ted said to
52:42
them about Plath and didn't and so I've included all of that stuff. He
52:46
just it seemed as time went on, Sylvia became more and more important to
52:52
him in a way that had not happened during their life together, when he
52:59
you know, kind of just regarded her. But but his mysticism accelerated as
53:05
well. So people talk about him putting spells on people. Uh. He
53:09
they talk about he dated a couple of witches and spells going back and forth
53:16
in that case. Uh, even even some curses because it almost always ended
53:22
bad with tied because he'd almost always leave for leave one woman for another and
53:25
break their hearts. He was quite the casanova. But yeah, they there's
53:34
just many, many circumstances of him practicing magic in various ways, in addition
53:43
to the the astrology and kabbala and stuff that that was documented with Plas.
53:52
Uh. There's a writer friend of Plath in Hugheses Alvarez. He was editor
53:57
at the London Times and he published an art an article called did Black Magic
54:01
Kill Sylvia Plath? And he believed that they got in it too deep.
54:07
There's some evidence to support that. Honestly, I do think, you know,
54:13
her very fragile psyche might have been pushed over the edge by all of
54:17
this stuff. And I've talked in the book. You know, there are
54:21
some rules about kabbala. Kabbala by the ancient Jewish mystics is supposed to be
54:27
practiced by people who are forty and over and male. Plath Browth broke both
54:34
of those rules, being in her twenties and female and Ted broke the rule
54:38
of being too young. I think they both probably considered that they knew they
54:45
were geniuses. They knew they were smart enough to kind of handle it.
54:49
The punishment to breaking that rule of studying Kabbala, interestingly, is madness.
54:54
And you know, some could say that they both went mad, and they're
55:00
different ways. My guest is Julia Gordon Bramer, her book The Occult Sylvia
55:05
Plath, The Hidden Spiritual Life of the Visionary Poet. Julia. One more
55:09
time, please share with our listeners where they can find out more about your
55:13
work and where they can get your books. Sure. Sure. My website
55:16
is Julia Gordonbramer dot com. And I'll spell that j U l I A
55:22
g O R d O N b R A m E R and uh and
55:29
they can you know, you can write me through there. My books are
55:32
available on Amazon, except for the first. As I said, Fixed Star's
55:37
Government Life is now out of print. But I'd be glad to send you
55:39
a PDA for five dollars if you want to write me through the website.
55:44
And uh and if you search me Julia Gordon Bramer, you can find all
55:47
kinds of stuff on me, on my tarot, on my poetry. You
55:52
know, it's I'm pretty uh out there on the web. Julia, thank
55:58
you so much for joining us and share sharing this tragic but fascinating story.
56:02
Thank you. It's great to be here, Victor, and thank you for
56:06
joining us on Vox Novus. I'm Victor the Voice Furman. Have a wonderful week.