A reader saw Dr. Ann Skea’s 2012 posts about my first book, Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath work and asked me some questions. I started to respond, and then decided to answer her here, to share with everyone, five years after the fact:
Earlier in that year, Dr. Skea emailed me, letting me know she was preparing to write her take on my work. I was pleased, as she writes on the spiritual side of Ted Hughes. I offered to send her the manuscript of my book to review in advance (it had not yet been released), but she declined. She said she preferred to do this on her own. It didn’t make a lot of sense that she’d consider a critical response without the information, or only partial bits. But… whatever. That’s how she did it.
Years have passed. Perhaps she’s read it now. Perhaps not.
In Skea’s essay, she made some good points and some bad assumptions, and I would have clarified it all long ago but Skea didn’t have a comments area. Skea suggested that Plath didn’t know enough mysticism to incorporate it into her work, as Plath wrote of still learning astrology and tarot in 1959. That’s a good observation. However, any practitioner will tell you that tarot is a lifelong learning. I have been learning tarot for 38 years, and I will continue to learn. It will never be finished. In my opinion, the first sign of a fake in mysticism is someone who proclaims to know all and be “enlightened.” The greatest gurus are still on the path, still becoming. We professors know how much we learn from our students, for instance. None of us are fully there until we’re dead and gone. But back to Plath: the fact is, a couple days of rudimentary tarot is all one needs to understand Plath’s system of ordering, as I spell it out in FSGL.
Skea wrote of Hughes’ first use of “Cabbala (but not Tarot)” and this statement right off demonstrates that Skea herself is not a practitioner. Tarot is a part of Cabbala (or Qabalah, as I use the more contemporary Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn’s spelling). This would be like me saying that Hughes used his body, but not his skin. Her next statement, “I have found no such structured use of Cabbala in Plath’s work, although there is plenty of evidence for her use of Tarot imagery in her late poetry,” is therefore absurd. Skea sees the skin, but not the body. I don’t mean to beat her up here. It’s clear that she just doesn’t know, and she doesn’t know that she doesn’t know.
At the Sylvia Plath Symposium this year, a fellow presenter, Peter Fydler, made the comment to me that the trouble with Ann Skea’s and my work is that no one knows enough about it to know if we are right or wrong. This is absolutely true, and has been my biggest struggle over the last several years. THAT is why I created the new Decoding series, to break that textbook tome down into short books with easy, real-world language so that all can understand without getting too lost in that godawful terrifying Q-word. And it really doesn’t matter if they understand the decoding system itself—they will still be rocked by the corresponding interpretations. “Morning Song” is Brave New World! “The Couriers” is Wuthering Heights! It makes so much sense. Plath was such a genius.
Dr. Skea is correct that many can use tarot with no knowledge of Qabalah. I personally didn’t even know what Qabalah was until I began this Plath work in 2007 (then, with 28 years of tarot behind me) and I fell into it headlong. Dr. Skea cites one of Plath’s most treasured books, The Painted Caravan: a penetration into the secrets of the Tarot cards, by Basil Ivan Rakoczi. Yet how could she have not seen numerous references to Kabbalah and Alchemy within the text, as well as that Mount Abiegnus, pictured in nine cards of the Major Arcana (Plath’s “nine black Alps”)? This is explained in this book to have been credited to the English Rosicrucian Master, A. E. Waite, designer of the modern tarot deck. Rosicrucians are alchemists, by the way. Please know I never took the credit for thinking this stuff up. The evidence is all over that Plath knew these facts long before I ever wrote about it. One just needs to read what she read (this is why I’m so damned busy and struggle keeping up with my social networks).
In Skea’s essay, she suggests I made an assumption that Plath used the Rider-Waite deck. Skea assumed that I assumed. In fact, I did check that fact with tarot expert and author Mary Greer on what decks were mass-published and available to purchase in England in 1956. This is noted in FSGL. Further down her essay, Skea goes on to match Plath’s poems against a deck that is based on illustrations of the Tarot de Marseille, and therefore is incorrect, as these cards don’t contain the same artwork/symbolism. Of course Skea couldn’t find the answer. She was decoding with the wrong cipher.
It is my personal belief that Dr. Skea does not understand enough about Qabalah to recognize its broad use across Hughes’ work. How can one recognize what they don’t know? How can one write about what they haven’t read? My Hughes books are full of notes on his Qabalah use, starting with his first collection written when he was with Plath, Hawk in the Rain. Think Hughes didn’t read The Painted Caravan, despite the occult being his number one interest? Doubt it. One day I’ll publish my work on Hughes. Meanwhile, Hughes scholars Ekbert Faas and Keith Sagar have done a fine job of recognizing the occult in all its forms within Hughes’ work, and Skea herself sees “Cabbala” in some of it.
I’m happy to say that since I got the rights back, and since my new Decoding series has begun, remaining copies of the old Fixed Stars Govern a Life are nearly gone. I will not be republishing it in this form, as it wasn’t the book I wanted it to be. This is an exciting time for me, and I want to grow forward, not back.
It is more important than ever, in these strange political and societal times, to learn to think for ourselves and not be programmed by others because we are too lazy to do the reading. I see it every day with news stories. If you have a question about my work, or if you want to challenge me on something, I am very accessible and I welcome all interaction. I want to always be getting better. I do not know it all. But if you’re just riffing off what you think you already know without doing the reading, well that, “is not mine. Do not accept it.”[1]
[1] Quote from “The Couriers” by Sylvia Plath.