Note: this piece originally appeared on my Patreon as part of my free public offerings. It’s one of my most popular free posts, so I’m including it here as well.
Since her death in 1964, American poet Sylvia Plath has become a hero of feminism, an icon of what feminists see as the struggle of women to reconcile their family responsibilities and personal relationships with their creative and professional ambitions. Her husband, Ted Hughes was a famous poet in his own right. He is universally blamed by feminists for her gruesome suicide. His notorious affairs and alleged emotional and perhaps even physical abuse of Plath is often cited as the final nail in the coffin of a brilliant woman who suffered from depression for all her adult life. Following Plath’s suicide, radical feminists openly accused Ted Hughes of driving his fragile wife to suicide, some even going as far as to threaten to murder him on her behalf. Others wrote poems condemning both Hughes and Sylvia’s father, now famously known as the subject of her bitter poem Daddy, as symbols of patriarchal oppression. But in my studies of Plath and Hughes, I have discovered information that I believe indicates there were forces at work much more nefarious than the ghost of the patriarchy throughout Sylvia’s life, which ultimately led to her destruction.
Born to Otto and Aurelia Plath in 1932 in Boston, Sylvia Plath was a child prodigy with a reported IQ of 160. She showed incredible promise as a writer and artist, winning awards for her paintings and having her first poem published in the Boston Herald at age eight. That same year, Plath’s father died from complications of an amputation due to untreated diabetes. As I mentioned, one of her most famous poems is about her troubled relationship with her father, who was a German immigrant to the United States. Otto Plath sailed to the United States in the year 1900 at age 15. He went to stay with his grandparents in Wisconsin who later disowned him for dropping out of Lutheran seminary and renouncing his Christian faith in order to pursue a degree in biology, studying Darwinian evolution. Plath called her father a “bitter atheist.” Otto was also briefly investigated by the FBI during the first World War for being a possible German sympathizer, but no evidence of this was found, and the investigation was dropped. Sylvia’s mother was a second-generation Austrian American who was raised Catholic, but later rejected her Christian faith as well, calling it “oppressive and controlling.” Sylvia grew up attending a Unitarian church. If you are not familiar with Unitarianism, it is a belief system that rejects the deity of Christ, the trinity, and most Christian creeds altogether. It is not Christian, but rather a universalist system of wide-ranging ideas and beliefs that are more closely tied to the esoteric than to any traditional religion. Sylvia attended the Star Island Youth Conference in 1949. It’s hard to determine exactly what the conference may have looked like 70 years ago, but today Star Island still hosts these conferences every summer. The website says the island has a rich history of esoteric spiritual gatherings, and today includes a roster of almost exclusively female new age religious gurus and teachers who lead visitors in transcendental meditation and mind-opening spiritual exercises. While attending Smith college, Sylvia wrote a paper on Unitarianism in which she identified herself as an “agnostic humanist.” She had her first writing published nationally in The Christian Science Monitor, a publication started by Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the new age cult-like Christian Science movement. The roots of esoteric spiritualism permeate the developmental years of Sylvia Plath’s life, which may have helped make her more open to the occult world she was introduced to later.
Sylvia struggled with religion all her life, as well as depression. While she was a student at Smith college, an early bastion of American feminism, her depression became so severe that she began undergoing electroconvulsive shock therapy treatments but did not improve. She first attempted suicide at age 20 by taking a large amount of sleeping pills and hiding under her house in a crawl space. After this attempt, she spent six months in a psychiatric hospital where she met Dr. Ruth Barnhouse Beuscher. Beuscher, a fellow female child prodigy said to have an IQ north of 200, quickly gained the trust of a desperate, vulnerable Sylvia. They bonded right away, and despite Sylvia’s intense fear of undergoing more shock therapy, she trusted Dr. Beuscher and submitted to more rounds of electric shock and even insulin shock therapy treatments. The treatments seemed to work, almost miraculously this time, and she returned to college.
In 1955, Sylvia obtained a Fullbright scholarship to study at Newham college, one of only two schools for women at Cambridge University in England. There, she met budding poet Ted Hughes. The two married in 1956 after only four months of courtship, and during this time they both became interested in astrology and esoteric practices like shamanism, alchemy, and Buddhism. Since both were writers in an era before the internet, we know a lot about their occult related activities throughout their relationship since the two wrote letters to each other as well as to friends and family, and both also kept journals. Ted and Sylvia studied The Tibetan Book of the Dead and began experimenting with Ouija boards and other occult rituals. Ted believed poetry was the language of the occult and ancient mystery religions. During the first five years of their marriage, while exploring the occult, Sylvia began writing her first book of poems as well as her semi-autobiographical novel. Her depression worsened, and her writing became darker. The couple had their first child in 1960. A second pregnancy ended in miscarriage the following year. Her poetry began to include disturbing imagery of hospitals and fetuses, something understandable for a woman who had experienced miscarriage and psychiatric hospital stays. However, something that is often missed in the analysis of her work from this period is the blatant occult imagery and influence. I have found that this is often dismissed by scholars as being a result of clinical depression rather than demonic influence from participation in occult rituals, but it’s pretty hard to miss. Take her poem Ouija, for example. Here she writes,
“It is a chilly god, a god of shades,
Rises to the glass from his black fathoms.
At the window, those unborn, those undone
Assemble with the frail paleness of moths,
...
The glass mouth sucks blood-heat from my forefinger.
The old god dribbles, in return, his words.”
Ted Hughes would later disclose that she wrote this in reference to the pagan god Pan, whom the two said they had contacted using a homemade Ouija board. Ted writes that Sylvia thought their dabbling in occult ritual to be “magnificent fun, more fun than a movie.” They considered Pan to be their creative muse, and Hughes noted that Sylvia’s gifts in regard to occult practice were “strong enough to make her frequently wish to be rid of them.” Sylvia wrote in her own diaries that she wanted to become a better tarot card reader and practiced contacting spirits and fortune telling with use of a crystal ball. Sylvia also attempted to contact her dead father using the Ouija board as Hughes recounts in a letter included in Sylvia Plath and Her Journals: … “spirits” would regularly arrive with instructions for her from one Prince Otto, who was said to be a great power in the underworld. When she pressed for a more personal communication, she would be told Prince Otto could not speak to her directly because he was under orders from the Colossus. Plath herself refers to this often in The Colossus, her only published book of poetry prior to her death in 1963.
Ted and Sylvia had a tumultuous relationship, and in the fall of 1962, Sylvia discovered that Ted had been having an affair with a woman named Assia Wevill. The two separated, and Sylvia took their two children and moved into 23 Fitzroy Rd. in London. Sylvia said she had always wanted to live there because of the blue plaque hanging over the door saying it was the childhood home of William Butler Yeats. Yeats was a major inspiration to both Sylvia and Ted because he was a Nobel Prize winning English poet and high-ranking occultist. To give you an idea just how important a figure Yeats was in the occult, he was directly involved in the struggles between Aleister Crowley, Florence Farr, and Macgregor Mathers for control of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, one of the most powerful and influential ritual occult magic organizations in modern history. It is clear that practicing occult ritual magic was a very big part of the last several years of Sylvia Plath’s life, and several of her poems carry this theme.
Just a few months after her separation from Ted Hughes, in the early morning hours of February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath sealed off the doors between her sleeping children’s bedroom and the kitchen with tape, towels, and cloths. She turned on the kitchen’s gas oven and put her head inside it, where she was found dead by a visiting nurse some hours later.
According to everyone around him, Ted was devastated by her death, but continued his affair with Assia, who was also married to her third husband, and already pregnant with Hughes’ child at the time of Sylvia’s death. Assia had the baby aborted soon after Sylvia’s suicide and moved in with Ted to help care for he and Sylvia’s two young children. In 1965 Assia gave birth to a daughter with Ted, while still married to her third husband. By this time, Ted had begun two other affairs- one with yet another married woman and the other with a nurse 20 years younger than he was. Ted never claimed their daughter, Alexandra, and refused to marry Assia. On March 23, 1969, Assia killed herself and her four-year-old daughter by taping off the doors and windows to the kitchen, placing a mattress on the kitchen floor and turning on the gas stove. The two were found hours later lying together on the mattress by a babysitter.
As if this were not an eerie and horrific enough addendum to Sylvia’s suicide, she and Ted’s son, Nicholas, also hanged himself at the age of 47. It’s hard to imagine that a man can be followed by such congruent tragedy after practicing occult magic without it being the result of a curse.
The stunning similarities in the demise of both Sylvia and Assia are made even more disturbing by Ted Hughes’ writings about it in his work Capriccio, an artistic and subjective interpretation of his relationship with Assia where he likens her to the Rabbinic Hebrew spirits of Shekinah and Lilith. In Jewish mysticism Shekinah is the female manifestation of god, and Lilith the queen of demons and a succubus who kills children and rapes men in their sleep, in order to impregnate herself. This is significant given Assia’s Jewish background and that a large part of her early life was spent in Israel. This cannot be separated from Ted Hughes’ intense personal study of Kabbalah, occult Jewish mysticism. Capriccio was published by a company called The Gehenna Press, which was owned by longtime friend of Ted and Sylvia, Leonard Baskin, a Jewish artist known for his sculptures of grotesque human-animal hybrids. The word “Gehenna” is the Hebrew word for hell but it is also an actual place. Gehenna was a valley in Israel filled with burning refuse that was used for child sacrifice in Old Testament times. In an article written by Steve Ely for the Hughes Society, Ely suggests that Hughes is saying the similar fates of Sylvia and Assia were sealed when they met him, making mention of the fact that he slept with both women for the first time on ‘Friday the thirteenth.’
Ted Hughes cites The Tibetan Book of the Dead as one of his greatest influences, and in case you are not yet thoroughly convinced that practicing occult ritual magic played a role in Sylvia’s destruction as well as Assia’s, consider that their mutual friend and longtime poetry editor and critic for The Observer, Al Alvarez, authored an article in 1999 titled “How Black Magic Killed Sylvia Plath.” In the article, he says that when Ted left Sylvia for his new mistress, she took his papers from his desk along with fingernail clippings and other personal debris and made a ritual fire to burn them in. Alvarez describes his last meeting with Sylvia and how he believes their experiments with occult ritual helped her create her best work, but at the terrible cost of her life, and possibly her immortal soul.
Look, I don't know what book of the death they refer to. But the only one serious is about helping the dead person to go towards a good rebirth.
The conditio sine qua non of Buddhism is love and compassion. Without love and compassion, and selfishness, morality and so on you are not a Buddhist. Those people were crazy if they have put together occultism and Tibetan Buddhism. They are opposite.
An interesting read, full of fascinating details I (surprisingly) didn't know.
I see your name + comments pop up in Orthodox chats so happy to now be reading these too.