Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Noriy with you, Julia.
Speaker 2: Gordon Bramer back with us professional Tarot card reader. We
Speaker 2: will do readings in the last hour of the program
Speaker 2: if you would like. Sylvia Plath scholar, award winning writer
Speaker 2: and poet, and former professor for the Graduate Writing program
Speaker 2: at Lindenwood University in Saint Louis. Julia is the author
Speaker 2: of Fixed Star's Governor, Life, Decoding Sylvia Plath, Tarot Life Lessons,
Speaker 2: and the Occult Sylvia Plath.
Speaker 3: Julia, welcome back, Thank you so much, George.
Speaker 2: What happened to Sylvia Plath?
Speaker 3: Well, that's that's a big question.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: Plath is probably best known as the author of The
Speaker 3: Bell Jar, and she's also known, unfortunately as the poet
Speaker 3: who put her head in the oven, and so, you know,
Speaker 3: my work is trying to change that a little bit.
Speaker 3: It seems like the suicide overrides everything with class, and
Speaker 3: you know, I think that people and people scholars and
Speaker 3: people who have been in the archives, and even just
Speaker 3: fans who have read her journals and letters, they see
Speaker 3: that occult practice is mentioned, you know, in kind of
Speaker 3: peripheral and casual ways across biographies and journals and letters,
Speaker 3: but it's never really been taken to seriously or collectively,
Speaker 3: and when you look at it with a little bit
Speaker 3: of knowledge, it really shows she was somewhat obsessed with mysticism.
Speaker 3: And I just think that, you know, my work attempts
Speaker 3: to show that this has had a huge influence on
Speaker 3: especially her poetry, and she's really been misread and misunderstood,
Speaker 3: just being kept in that narrow autobiography.
Speaker 2: You wrote a book in two thousands fifteen called Fixed
Speaker 2: Star's Governor Life Coding Sylvia Plath, and then of course
Speaker 2: the new book on the Occult. Did you dabble it
Speaker 2: all in the Occult back in the twenty fifteen.
Speaker 3: Okay, it actually came out in twenty fourteen, and I
Speaker 3: you know, I'm a professional tarot card reader, so my
Speaker 3: career is in the occult. The occult, of course, is
Speaker 3: a word that just means hidden, so you know, it
Speaker 3: isn't necessarily all wied aboards and summoning spirits and that
Speaker 3: sort of thing, although places did plenty of that.
Speaker 2: What kind of demons did she have to commit? Suicide
Speaker 2: at the age of thirty.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, you know, she was probably bipolar, and I
Speaker 3: think that's important to know. She was somebody who she
Speaker 3: was definitely troubled. I have some of my own theories.
Speaker 3: I have a lot of evidence that she and her husband,
Speaker 3: Ted Hughes were actively into Kabbala. And if you were
Speaker 3: to read about kind of the rules of Kabbala, going
Speaker 3: back to the old Rabbis, we see that. You know,
Speaker 3: I think Kabbala, first of all, is ancient Jewish mysticism,
Speaker 3: and the old rabbis had rules on it. And one
Speaker 3: of these rules, or I should say two of these
Speaker 3: rules important ones, or that you had to be a
Speaker 3: male and you had to be over forty years of age.
Speaker 3: So Glass broke both of those rules. Her husband, Ted
Speaker 3: Hughes broke the one about the age. I think they
Speaker 3: probably knew that they were geniuses and they maybe thought
Speaker 3: that they could handle this somehow. The punishment of breaking
Speaker 3: these rules, according to the old rabbis is madness, and
Speaker 3: I think that's pretty interesting given the fact that, I mean,
Speaker 3: she had mental health problems going back into her youth.
Speaker 3: She has definitely one documented unsuccessful suicide tempt when she
Speaker 3: was twenty, but she has written that she had tried
Speaker 3: before that in her teens, and that's also a pivotal
Speaker 3: scene in the Belgar novel that she wrote, which is
Speaker 3: very autobiographical. So you know, the unstability, you know, instability
Speaker 3: was always there, and a lot of people think that,
Speaker 3: you know, especially friends. She had an editor friend A Alvarez,
Speaker 3: who wrote an article called did black Magic Kill Sylvia Plath?
Speaker 3: He blamed it for that, just that it kind of
Speaker 3: set her over the edge.
Speaker 2: How did you begin to focus in on her and
Speaker 2: the occult angle?
Speaker 3: So I was in graduate school getting my MSA in
Speaker 3: creative writing for poetry and fiction, both both the genres
Speaker 3: of class and I have always loved class and read
Speaker 3: a lot of her, But as a professional tarot card reader,
Speaker 3: I started to see all of this tarot symbolism, you know.
Speaker 3: I would point it out to my professor. I mean,
Speaker 3: in her poem Daddy, which is one of her most
Speaker 3: famous poems. She even named it, she says, and my
Speaker 3: Tarok pack and my Tarok pack and Tarok being another
Speaker 3: name for taro. And I pointed it out to my
Speaker 3: professor at the University of Missouri Saint Willis, and I said,
Speaker 3: what's going on here? I can't find any information about
Speaker 3: the taro, but I'm seeing it all over her work.
Speaker 3: And he said to me, why don't you make that
Speaker 3: your semester end project. This was back in two thousand
Speaker 3: and seven and it became my life's work.
Speaker 2: You did a great job in this book, and you
Speaker 2: uncovered some of the things, said, I don't think anybody
Speaker 2: knows about, certainly not the masses.
Speaker 3: Now. It's it's kind of been been kept hidden and
Speaker 3: maybe just sort of looked at as you know, kind
Speaker 3: of weird. You know, you think of scholars and fans,
Speaker 3: they have an idea on who Plas is that they
Speaker 3: want to keep, and you know they're not necessarily comfortable
Speaker 3: with the weirdnesses.
Speaker 2: Ironically, didn't her son commit suicide as well?
Speaker 3: Unfortunately, Yes, her son, Nicholas, he he had kind of
Speaker 3: hidden from the limelight. He had become a biologist and
Speaker 3: moved up to Alaska and really you know, kept out
Speaker 3: of the drama between his parents. His father was Ted Hughes.
Speaker 3: Platt's husband was very famous in his own right. He
Speaker 3: was Poet Laureate of England and there was there was
Speaker 3: just so much scandal around his parents and yeah, he
Speaker 3: was close to his father, but they sort of he
Speaker 3: didn't want to be known for any of that. After
Speaker 3: his father died of cancer, and I believe it was
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety eight, Nicholas several years later killed himself.
Speaker 2: Well that's said, and they say the father was very
Speaker 2: abusive to everybody. Is that true?
Speaker 3: Oh see, that's yes and no, certainly emotionally abusive, and
Speaker 3: there is some documented evidence that there were some physical
Speaker 3: brawls between him and Sylvia, although she seems to have
Speaker 3: held her own and hit him back. So you know,
Speaker 3: I don't know. I think there is evidence of some
Speaker 3: physical and emotional abuse. I would not say very abusive,
Speaker 3: and there's no evidence that Ted Hughes hit the kids either,
Speaker 3: So I just want to you know, I think that's
Speaker 3: important to kind of get the context on that.
Speaker 2: Did Sylvia and Ted publicly do much with the occult
Speaker 2: or did they keep it quiet?
Speaker 3: I kept it very quiet. You know, witchcraft was a
Speaker 3: crime in England until nineteen fifty one, and they got together,
Speaker 3: they got they got well together and married in nineteen
Speaker 3: fifty six. But you know, Plas had a reputation to
Speaker 3: preserve in very conservative academia. She would have been labeled
Speaker 3: as crazy with her history of mental illness. Already she
Speaker 3: had been through shock treatments and institutionalized and you know,
Speaker 3: on her first her first documented suicide attempt. And so
Speaker 3: you know, there was a stigma about the occult and
Speaker 3: how it reflect how it would reflect on their children.
Speaker 3: They wanted to protect them from gossip and harm. And
Speaker 3: you know Plas wrote The bell Jar under a pseudonym
Speaker 3: Victoria Lucas, because she was afraid of that mental illness side.
Speaker 3: You know, the Beljar addresses her struggle with mental illness.
Speaker 3: So you know she hid things that that were uh,
Speaker 3: not so acceptable in society and especially in academia.
Speaker 2: How deep were they into the occult, Julia.
Speaker 3: Very Uh. You know, there are so many mentions of
Speaker 3: of their different practices. As I said, I have I
Speaker 3: have a lot of direct evidence of kabbala that that
Speaker 3: is not named outwardly in in journals and letters. But
Speaker 3: what is named outwardly is astrology, Weijahboard's, hypnotic trances, Kundolini, meditation,
Speaker 3: folk magic, witchcraft, bibliomancy, crystal ball, scrying and h and
Speaker 3: even visiting witches in Devon.
Speaker 2: Yes, they were into a lot of stuff Yeah, they
Speaker 2: sure were.
Speaker 3: She had a lot of rituals and practices. You know.
Speaker 3: Plath wrote her her best poems in the collection Aeriel.
Speaker 3: She wrote them on pink paper. And that was actually
Speaker 3: a practice by Madame Blavatsky, who is one of the
Speaker 3: founders of theosophy. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, in terms of dabbling with the wuigi board, how
Speaker 2: often did she do that?
Speaker 3: Oh, that was a regular practice for them. Ted Hughes
Speaker 3: made a wija board for them. And she has a
Speaker 3: long poem which is it was not published until the
Speaker 3: Collected Works of Sylvia Plath came out, or collected Poems,
Speaker 3: i should say. And Ted Hughes put this poem dialogue
Speaker 3: over a Wiga board in the introduction. It is anyone
Speaker 3: who's read the journals and letters can see that this poem,
Speaker 3: which has two characters, these characters are actually Sylvia and Ted.
Speaker 3: And there's just all this conversation over the wija board
Speaker 3: as they're trying to summon her father and Pan the
Speaker 3: god and and uh and and they're going over, you know,
Speaker 3: back and forth over their their uh faith and lack
Speaker 3: of faith and and just the creepiness of the room
Speaker 3: and and and it's all it's all there. I actually
Speaker 3: used that poem to set uh, to open my different
Speaker 3: parts in the in the occult Sylvia Plath, So I
Speaker 3: I dip back and forth. I've turned that poem into
Speaker 3: a into a scene and uh, and I've used you know,
Speaker 3: all the details, uh to to kind of fill out
Speaker 3: the what the room looked like, and what the smells
Speaker 3: were and everything that Plath had ever documented. So so
Speaker 3: so the dialogue over a witch Aboard poem is all
Speaker 3: of her experiences with WIJA over some time.
Speaker 2: It's truly remarkable. She was born in Boston, died in London.
Speaker 2: How did she get to England?
Speaker 3: Well, she had a Fulbright scholarship and so she went
Speaker 3: to Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts for her undergraduate and
Speaker 3: then she got a Fulbright scholarship to go over to
Speaker 3: Cambridge in England and do some graduate work there. And that,
Speaker 3: of course is where she met Ted Hughes and had
Speaker 3: her wild, you know, passionate love affair that in four
Speaker 3: months turned into marriage.
Speaker 2: Was she a devil worshiper Julia?
Speaker 3: She was not. I was a little afraid of that. Honestly,
Speaker 3: I had an experience in my work where as I
Speaker 3: was going through her collection Aerial and matching it with
Speaker 3: the Tarot cards. And I got to a point as
Speaker 3: I was getting kind of deep into the work where
Speaker 3: I was on you know the way the tarot cards
Speaker 3: work and the major arcana. They started zero and go
Speaker 3: through number twenty twenty one, but there are twenty two
Speaker 3: cards because of that one starting at zero. So when
Speaker 3: I was doing my work and I got to this
Speaker 3: point on her poem, the title poem Aerial, which is
Speaker 3: matched with the fourteenth Starot card, it's the fifteenth poem,
Speaker 3: and I saw that there was a lot of Satanic
Speaker 3: kind of stuff that was very much in alignment, kind
Speaker 3: of a paraphrasing to Alistair Crowley's poem to the Great
Speaker 3: Beast six sixty six. That unnerved me quite a bit,
Speaker 3: and I almost gave up on my work when I
Speaker 3: found this, because I thought, oh my gosh, if they
Speaker 3: weren't Satanists, I don't want any part of this. I
Speaker 3: grew up going in the Episcopal church, you know, this
Speaker 3: Christian kind of background. But I went to bed that
Speaker 3: night night this is actually in the introduction of my
Speaker 3: first book, Six Stars Government Life. I went to bed
Speaker 3: and I heard her voice in my ear, which I
Speaker 3: know very well from all the recordings, and she commanded me,
Speaker 3: she said move through. And it woke me up, and
Speaker 3: I was, you know, just startled by the whole thing.
Speaker 3: And I said, okay, I'll go to the next poem. Well,
Speaker 3: the next poem in alignment with the cards is in
Speaker 3: alignment with the Devil card. So I realized she had
Speaker 3: been setting up the next card. Basically it was it
Speaker 3: was the fifteenth poem Aeriel in alignment with the Temperance card,
Speaker 3: but card number fifteen is the devil in the tarot's
Speaker 3: major arcana, so she was setting it up. She was
Speaker 3: brilliant in every way. She was brilliant.
Speaker 2: Are you sure you're right that she wasn't involved?
Speaker 3: You know, I have no evidence that she was a Satanist,
Speaker 3: none at all. I think she was fascinated. She has always,
Speaker 3: since since her early years, been interested in mysticism, in mythology,
Speaker 3: in her medicism. Uh. She she loved magic, she loved
Speaker 3: you know, the mystery of the occult. But there's no
Speaker 3: evidence at all that she was a Satanist, had demons,
Speaker 3: she had personal demons. Yeah, And you know, and it's
Speaker 3: my feeling as a Tarot card reader that it's kind
Speaker 3: of all within heaven and hell. And you know, I
Speaker 3: don't want to get into a philosophical thing here, but
Speaker 3: but certainly when you're open to some of the darker energies,
Speaker 3: when when you allow things like like anger, which really
Speaker 3: consumed her later as her marriage fell apart, and uh,
Speaker 3: you know, and as I said, she she was unstable.
Speaker 3: She was probably bipolar at a time when there was
Speaker 3: no medication for that that that was really effective in
Speaker 3: any case. And she had just a lot of things
Speaker 3: going really wrong at the end. She was she had
Speaker 3: the flu. She was in the middle of the coldest
Speaker 3: winter and a hundred years and in London. Her husband
Speaker 3: had just left her for another woman who at one
Speaker 3: time had been her friend. You know, it was she
Speaker 3: had two small children to raise. You know, it was
Speaker 3: just a mass that everything went wrong.
Speaker 2: How did she life?
Speaker 3: Uh? She was she was known, you know, as I said,
Speaker 3: it's been the best known for putting her head in
Speaker 3: the oven, which was as much I thought you were.
Speaker 2: Just pulling my leg. She actually put her head in
Speaker 2: the oven.
Speaker 3: Yeah, now that was the most popular way to commit
Speaker 3: suicide back in England. She cooked herself based No, no,
Speaker 3: it's the gas, the gas oven.
Speaker 2: With the oven on exactly.
Speaker 3: Exactly, so she she uh died by gas and this
Speaker 3: kind of town gas was was the popular way. That
Speaker 3: was how most it was sort of like the Vogue
Speaker 3: way to commit suicide for a number of years into
Speaker 3: the sixties, and they changed the gas because it was
Speaker 3: happening too much. So, yeah, there are there are, believe
Speaker 3: it or not, popular ways to commit suicide. And the
Speaker 3: author Malcolm Gladwell was written about that.
Speaker 2: What a horrible way to go.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, certainly, I mean it's all horrible, right.
Speaker 2: How many people are aware of Sylvia Plath, even regardless
Speaker 2: of the mysticism.
Speaker 3: Oh, I mean, she is one of the leading authors
Speaker 3: of our you know, of contemporary literature. She's right up
Speaker 3: there with Emily Dickinson as one of the greats. She
Speaker 3: was one of the first feminist voices, and even before
Speaker 3: feminism had really taken root, you know. And as I said,
Speaker 3: she died in nineteen sixty three, February eleventh, nineteen sixty three,
Speaker 3: which is coincidentally, I was born nine months after that,
Speaker 3: also in nineteen sixty three. I don't believe on her,
Speaker 3: but just to say that, but but I do believe
Speaker 3: that that we have a connection and and yeah, so
Speaker 3: she's very you know, one of the leading contemporary American
Speaker 3: female authors. Certainly, you know, you might even want to
Speaker 3: take female out of the out of that mix and
Speaker 3: say American authors.
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