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

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Speaker 2: And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Noriy with you, Julia.

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Speaker 2: Gordon Bramer back with us professional Tarot card reader. We

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Speaker 2: will do readings in the last hour of the program

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Speaker 2: if you would like. Sylvia Plath scholar, award winning writer

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Speaker 2: and poet, and former professor for the Graduate Writing program

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Speaker 2: at Lindenwood University in Saint Louis. Julia is the author

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Speaker 2: of Fixed Star's Governor, Life, Decoding Sylvia Plath, Tarot Life Lessons,

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Speaker 2: and the Occult Sylvia Plath.

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Speaker 3: Julia, welcome back, Thank you so much, George.

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Speaker 2: What happened to Sylvia Plath?

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Speaker 3: Well, that's that's a big question.

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Speaker 1: You know.

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Speaker 3: Plath is probably best known as the author of The

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Speaker 3: Bell Jar, and she's also known, unfortunately as the poet

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Speaker 3: who put her head in the oven, and so, you know,

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Speaker 3: my work is trying to change that a little bit.

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Speaker 3: It seems like the suicide overrides everything with class, and

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Speaker 3: you know, I think that people and people scholars and

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Speaker 3: people who have been in the archives, and even just

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Speaker 3: fans who have read her journals and letters, they see

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Speaker 3: that occult practice is mentioned, you know, in kind of

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Speaker 3: peripheral and casual ways across biographies and journals and letters,

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Speaker 3: but it's never really been taken to seriously or collectively,

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Speaker 3: and when you look at it with a little bit

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Speaker 3: of knowledge, it really shows she was somewhat obsessed with mysticism.

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Speaker 3: And I just think that, you know, my work attempts

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Speaker 3: to show that this has had a huge influence on

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Speaker 3: especially her poetry, and she's really been misread and misunderstood,

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Speaker 3: just being kept in that narrow autobiography.

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Speaker 2: You wrote a book in two thousands fifteen called Fixed

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Speaker 2: Star's Governor Life Coding Sylvia Plath, and then of course

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Speaker 2: the new book on the Occult. Did you dabble it

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Speaker 2: all in the Occult back in the twenty fifteen.

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Speaker 3: Okay, it actually came out in twenty fourteen, and I

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Speaker 3: you know, I'm a professional tarot card reader, so my

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Speaker 3: career is in the occult. The occult, of course, is

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Speaker 3: a word that just means hidden, so you know, it

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Speaker 3: isn't necessarily all wied aboards and summoning spirits and that

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Speaker 3: sort of thing, although places did plenty of that.

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Speaker 2: What kind of demons did she have to commit? Suicide

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Speaker 2: at the age of thirty.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, well, you know, she was probably bipolar, and I

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Speaker 3: think that's important to know. She was somebody who she

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Speaker 3: was definitely troubled. I have some of my own theories.

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Speaker 3: I have a lot of evidence that she and her husband,

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Speaker 3: Ted Hughes were actively into Kabbala. And if you were

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Speaker 3: to read about kind of the rules of Kabbala, going

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Speaker 3: back to the old Rabbis, we see that. You know,

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Speaker 3: I think Kabbala, first of all, is ancient Jewish mysticism,

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Speaker 3: and the old rabbis had rules on it. And one

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Speaker 3: of these rules, or I should say two of these

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Speaker 3: rules important ones, or that you had to be a

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Speaker 3: male and you had to be over forty years of age.

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Speaker 3: So Glass broke both of those rules. Her husband, Ted

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Speaker 3: Hughes broke the one about the age. I think they

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Speaker 3: probably knew that they were geniuses and they maybe thought

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Speaker 3: that they could handle this somehow. The punishment of breaking

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Speaker 3: these rules, according to the old rabbis is madness, and

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Speaker 3: I think that's pretty interesting given the fact that, I mean,

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Speaker 3: she had mental health problems going back into her youth.

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Speaker 3: She has definitely one documented unsuccessful suicide tempt when she

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Speaker 3: was twenty, but she has written that she had tried

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Speaker 3: before that in her teens, and that's also a pivotal

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Speaker 3: scene in the Belgar novel that she wrote, which is

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Speaker 3: very autobiographical. So you know, the unstability, you know, instability

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Speaker 3: was always there, and a lot of people think that,

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Speaker 3: you know, especially friends. She had an editor friend A Alvarez,

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Speaker 3: who wrote an article called did black Magic Kill Sylvia Plath?

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Speaker 3: He blamed it for that, just that it kind of

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Speaker 3: set her over the edge.

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Speaker 2: How did you begin to focus in on her and

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Speaker 2: the occult angle?

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Speaker 3: So I was in graduate school getting my MSA in

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Speaker 3: creative writing for poetry and fiction, both both the genres

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Speaker 3: of class and I have always loved class and read

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Speaker 3: a lot of her, But as a professional tarot card reader,

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Speaker 3: I started to see all of this tarot symbolism, you know.

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Speaker 3: I would point it out to my professor. I mean,

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Speaker 3: in her poem Daddy, which is one of her most

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Speaker 3: famous poems. She even named it, she says, and my

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Speaker 3: Tarok pack and my Tarok pack and Tarok being another

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Speaker 3: name for taro. And I pointed it out to my

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Speaker 3: professor at the University of Missouri Saint Willis, and I said,

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Speaker 3: what's going on here? I can't find any information about

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Speaker 3: the taro, but I'm seeing it all over her work.

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Speaker 3: And he said to me, why don't you make that

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Speaker 3: your semester end project. This was back in two thousand

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Speaker 3: and seven and it became my life's work.

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Speaker 2: You did a great job in this book, and you

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Speaker 2: uncovered some of the things, said, I don't think anybody

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Speaker 2: knows about, certainly not the masses.

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Speaker 3: Now. It's it's kind of been been kept hidden and

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Speaker 3: maybe just sort of looked at as you know, kind

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Speaker 3: of weird. You know, you think of scholars and fans,

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Speaker 3: they have an idea on who Plas is that they

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Speaker 3: want to keep, and you know they're not necessarily comfortable

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Speaker 3: with the weirdnesses.

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Speaker 2: Ironically, didn't her son commit suicide as well?

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Speaker 3: Unfortunately, Yes, her son, Nicholas, he he had kind of

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Speaker 3: hidden from the limelight. He had become a biologist and

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Speaker 3: moved up to Alaska and really you know, kept out

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Speaker 3: of the drama between his parents. His father was Ted Hughes.

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Speaker 3: Platt's husband was very famous in his own right. He

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Speaker 3: was Poet Laureate of England and there was there was

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Speaker 3: just so much scandal around his parents and yeah, he

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Speaker 3: was close to his father, but they sort of he

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Speaker 3: didn't want to be known for any of that. After

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Speaker 3: his father died of cancer, and I believe it was

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Speaker 3: nineteen ninety eight, Nicholas several years later killed himself.

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Speaker 2: Well that's said, and they say the father was very

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Speaker 2: abusive to everybody. Is that true?

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Speaker 3: Oh see, that's yes and no, certainly emotionally abusive, and

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Speaker 3: there is some documented evidence that there were some physical

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Speaker 3: brawls between him and Sylvia, although she seems to have

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Speaker 3: held her own and hit him back. So you know,

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Speaker 3: I don't know. I think there is evidence of some

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Speaker 3: physical and emotional abuse. I would not say very abusive,

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Speaker 3: and there's no evidence that Ted Hughes hit the kids either,

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Speaker 3: So I just want to you know, I think that's

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Speaker 3: important to kind of get the context on that.

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Speaker 2: Did Sylvia and Ted publicly do much with the occult

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Speaker 2: or did they keep it quiet?

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Speaker 3: I kept it very quiet. You know, witchcraft was a

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Speaker 3: crime in England until nineteen fifty one, and they got together,

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Speaker 3: they got they got well together and married in nineteen

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Speaker 3: fifty six. But you know, Plas had a reputation to

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Speaker 3: preserve in very conservative academia. She would have been labeled

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Speaker 3: as crazy with her history of mental illness. Already she

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Speaker 3: had been through shock treatments and institutionalized and you know,

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Speaker 3: on her first her first documented suicide attempt. And so

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Speaker 3: you know, there was a stigma about the occult and

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Speaker 3: how it reflect how it would reflect on their children.

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Speaker 3: They wanted to protect them from gossip and harm. And

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Speaker 3: you know Plas wrote The bell Jar under a pseudonym

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Speaker 3: Victoria Lucas, because she was afraid of that mental illness side.

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Speaker 3: You know, the Beljar addresses her struggle with mental illness.

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Speaker 3: So you know she hid things that that were uh,

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Speaker 3: not so acceptable in society and especially in academia.

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Speaker 2: How deep were they into the occult, Julia.

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Speaker 3: Very Uh. You know, there are so many mentions of

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Speaker 3: of their different practices. As I said, I have I

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Speaker 3: have a lot of direct evidence of kabbala that that

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Speaker 3: is not named outwardly in in journals and letters. But

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Speaker 3: what is named outwardly is astrology, Weijahboard's, hypnotic trances, Kundolini, meditation,

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Speaker 3: folk magic, witchcraft, bibliomancy, crystal ball, scrying and h and

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Speaker 3: even visiting witches in Devon.

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Speaker 2: Yes, they were into a lot of stuff Yeah, they

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Speaker 2: sure were.

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Speaker 3: She had a lot of rituals and practices. You know.

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Speaker 3: Plath wrote her her best poems in the collection Aeriel.

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Speaker 3: She wrote them on pink paper. And that was actually

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Speaker 3: a practice by Madame Blavatsky, who is one of the

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Speaker 3: founders of theosophy. Yeah.

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Speaker 2: Now, in terms of dabbling with the wuigi board, how

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Speaker 2: often did she do that?

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Speaker 3: Oh, that was a regular practice for them. Ted Hughes

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Speaker 3: made a wija board for them. And she has a

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Speaker 3: long poem which is it was not published until the

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Speaker 3: Collected Works of Sylvia Plath came out, or collected Poems,

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Speaker 3: i should say. And Ted Hughes put this poem dialogue

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Speaker 3: over a Wiga board in the introduction. It is anyone

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Speaker 3: who's read the journals and letters can see that this poem,

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Speaker 3: which has two characters, these characters are actually Sylvia and Ted.

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Speaker 3: And there's just all this conversation over the wija board

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Speaker 3: as they're trying to summon her father and Pan the

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Speaker 3: god and and uh and and they're going over, you know,

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Speaker 3: back and forth over their their uh faith and lack

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Speaker 3: of faith and and just the creepiness of the room

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Speaker 3: and and and it's all it's all there. I actually

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Speaker 3: used that poem to set uh, to open my different

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Speaker 3: parts in the in the occult Sylvia Plath, So I

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Speaker 3: I dip back and forth. I've turned that poem into

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Speaker 3: a into a scene and uh, and I've used you know,

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Speaker 3: all the details, uh to to kind of fill out

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Speaker 3: the what the room looked like, and what the smells

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Speaker 3: were and everything that Plath had ever documented. So so

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Speaker 3: so the dialogue over a witch Aboard poem is all

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Speaker 3: of her experiences with WIJA over some time.

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Speaker 2: It's truly remarkable. She was born in Boston, died in London.

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Speaker 2: How did she get to England?

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Speaker 3: Well, she had a Fulbright scholarship and so she went

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Speaker 3: to Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts for her undergraduate and

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Speaker 3: then she got a Fulbright scholarship to go over to

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Speaker 3: Cambridge in England and do some graduate work there. And that,

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Speaker 3: of course is where she met Ted Hughes and had

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Speaker 3: her wild, you know, passionate love affair that in four

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Speaker 3: months turned into marriage.

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Speaker 2: Was she a devil worshiper Julia?

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Speaker 3: She was not. I was a little afraid of that. Honestly,

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Speaker 3: I had an experience in my work where as I

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Speaker 3: was going through her collection Aerial and matching it with

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Speaker 3: the Tarot cards. And I got to a point as

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Speaker 3: I was getting kind of deep into the work where

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Speaker 3: I was on you know the way the tarot cards

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Speaker 3: work and the major arcana. They started zero and go

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Speaker 3: through number twenty twenty one, but there are twenty two

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Speaker 3: cards because of that one starting at zero. So when

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Speaker 3: I was doing my work and I got to this

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Speaker 3: point on her poem, the title poem Aerial, which is

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Speaker 3: matched with the fourteenth Starot card, it's the fifteenth poem,

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Speaker 3: and I saw that there was a lot of Satanic

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Speaker 3: kind of stuff that was very much in alignment, kind

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Speaker 3: of a paraphrasing to Alistair Crowley's poem to the Great

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Speaker 3: Beast six sixty six. That unnerved me quite a bit,

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Speaker 3: and I almost gave up on my work when I

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Speaker 3: found this, because I thought, oh my gosh, if they

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Speaker 3: weren't Satanists, I don't want any part of this. I

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Speaker 3: grew up going in the Episcopal church, you know, this

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Speaker 3: Christian kind of background. But I went to bed that

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Speaker 3: night night this is actually in the introduction of my

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Speaker 3: first book, Six Stars Government Life. I went to bed

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Speaker 3: and I heard her voice in my ear, which I

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Speaker 3: know very well from all the recordings, and she commanded me,

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Speaker 3: she said move through. And it woke me up, and

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Speaker 3: I was, you know, just startled by the whole thing.

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Speaker 3: And I said, okay, I'll go to the next poem. Well,

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Speaker 3: the next poem in alignment with the cards is in

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Speaker 3: alignment with the Devil card. So I realized she had

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Speaker 3: been setting up the next card. Basically it was it

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Speaker 3: was the fifteenth poem Aeriel in alignment with the Temperance card,

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Speaker 3: but card number fifteen is the devil in the tarot's

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Speaker 3: major arcana, so she was setting it up. She was

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Speaker 3: brilliant in every way. She was brilliant.

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Speaker 2: Are you sure you're right that she wasn't involved?

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Speaker 3: You know, I have no evidence that she was a Satanist,

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Speaker 3: none at all. I think she was fascinated. She has always,

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Speaker 3: since since her early years, been interested in mysticism, in mythology,

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Speaker 3: in her medicism. Uh. She she loved magic, she loved

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Speaker 3: you know, the mystery of the occult. But there's no

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Speaker 3: evidence at all that she was a Satanist, had demons,

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Speaker 3: she had personal demons. Yeah, And you know, and it's

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Speaker 3: my feeling as a Tarot card reader that it's kind

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Speaker 3: of all within heaven and hell. And you know, I

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Speaker 3: don't want to get into a philosophical thing here, but

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Speaker 3: but certainly when you're open to some of the darker energies,

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Speaker 3: when when you allow things like like anger, which really

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Speaker 3: consumed her later as her marriage fell apart, and uh,

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Speaker 3: you know, and as I said, she she was unstable.

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Speaker 3: She was probably bipolar at a time when there was

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Speaker 3: no medication for that that that was really effective in

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Speaker 3: any case. And she had just a lot of things

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Speaker 3: going really wrong at the end. She was she had

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Speaker 3: the flu. She was in the middle of the coldest

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Speaker 3: winter and a hundred years and in London. Her husband

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Speaker 3: had just left her for another woman who at one

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Speaker 3: time had been her friend. You know, it was she

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Speaker 3: had two small children to raise. You know, it was

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Speaker 3: just a mass that everything went wrong.

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Speaker 2: How did she life?

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Speaker 3: Uh? She was she was known, you know, as I said,

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Speaker 3: it's been the best known for putting her head in

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Speaker 3: the oven, which was as much I thought you were.

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Speaker 2: Just pulling my leg. She actually put her head in

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Speaker 2: the oven.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, now that was the most popular way to commit

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Speaker 3: suicide back in England. She cooked herself based No, no,

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Speaker 3: it's the gas, the gas oven.

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Speaker 2: With the oven on exactly.

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Speaker 3: Exactly, so she she uh died by gas and this

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Speaker 3: kind of town gas was was the popular way. That

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Speaker 3: was how most it was sort of like the Vogue

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Speaker 3: way to commit suicide for a number of years into

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Speaker 3: the sixties, and they changed the gas because it was

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Speaker 3: happening too much. So, yeah, there are there are, believe

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Speaker 3: it or not, popular ways to commit suicide. And the

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Speaker 3: author Malcolm Gladwell was written about that.

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Speaker 2: What a horrible way to go.

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

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Speaker 2: How many people are aware of Sylvia Plath, even regardless

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Speaker 2: of the mysticism.

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Speaker 3: Oh, I mean, she is one of the leading authors

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Speaker 3: of our you know, of contemporary literature. She's right up

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Speaker 3: there with Emily Dickinson as one of the greats. She

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Speaker 3: was one of the first feminist voices, and even before

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Speaker 3: feminism had really taken root, you know. And as I said,

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Speaker 3: she died in nineteen sixty three, February eleventh, nineteen sixty three,

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Speaker 3: which is coincidentally, I was born nine months after that,

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Speaker 3: also in nineteen sixty three. I don't believe on her,

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Speaker 3: but just to say that, but but I do believe

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Speaker 3: that that we have a connection and and yeah, so

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Speaker 3: she's very you know, one of the leading contemporary American

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Speaker 3: female authors. Certainly, you know, you might even want to

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Speaker 3: take female out of the out of that mix and

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Speaker 3: say American authors.

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