The Occult Sylvia Plath: The Hidden Spiritual Life of the Visionary Poet

PREFACE

Missing the Mysticism

Sylvia was not a poet of the Lowell/Sexton self-therapy, or even national therapy, school, but a mystical poet of an alltogether [sic] higher—in fact of the very highest—tradition.

TED HUGHES, LETTER TO AURELIA PLATH, MAY 1966

Don’t look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the stranger’s world.

MALCOLM GLADWELL, TALKING TO STRANGERS

WHY ANOTHER BIOGRAPHY ON Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes? Across the hundreds of well-researched works available on Plath and Hughes, many biographers have overlooked or disregarded valuable information and failed to see the bigger picture. Undeniable correlations between the news events of the day and Plath’s creative work have been ignored, as have the influence of Plath’s husband, friends, family, teachers, and others. Plath’s notes and underlines in the books from her personal library, as she processed and related her thoughts and experiences, reveal much, but no one has taken the time to study them.* Finally, no one has seriously addressed the rich and deep themes of the occult and mysticism woven throughout both Plath’s and Hughes’s families, their history and geography. The Occult Sylvia Plath attempts to fill these gaps.

This book is the result of more than fifteen years of research. What I had originally written as an introduction to my book Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath, published in 2014, took on a life of its own to become this book. This work does not attempt to embellish or hyperbolize the dramatic aspects of Plath’s life, à la Hollywood. Instead, it is a collection of historical and mystical facts about and around Plath and Hughes, so that their writings and actions may be viewed and understood from new perspectives. Both biographers of Plath and readers familiar with her poetry who have no background in mysticism have glossed over the plethora of Plath’s and Hughes’s occult endeavors, especially regarding their creative process, and have missed points of significance. This book is a connecting of the dots.

For over fifty years, Sylvia Plath’s story was controlled and severely restricted by the estates of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Until recently, editors of Plath’s and Hughes’s published letters downplayed their interests in the occult. The Letters of Sylvia Plath (London: Faber and Faber, 2018) reveals that many occult references were excised from Letters Home, along with the less attractive details of Plath’s and Hughes’s personalities. Even many of Plath’s better photos were not published, possibly in an effort to cast her as a dowdier, more depressive poet.*

Ted Hughes’s passion for and use of Hermeticism, shamanism, alchemy, astrology, the Jewish Kabbalah (which evolved into the Hermetic Qabalah), kundalini yoga, meditation, hypnosis, breathing exercises, amulets, Ouija, and the mythical equations structuring and influencing his creative work are widely known. Few have looked at Sylvia Plath’s writings in this same light, reading and teaching her only as a voice for her drama.

All things [. . .] are symbols of other things, Plath underlined in Dante’s The Divine Comedy (Alighieri, xiv). Indeed, singular examples or events alone do not prove a serious passion for the occult or Plath’s poems to be more than confessional. Any mysticism recognized in Plath’s work is usually raced past, focusing instead on her atheistic views (which, nevertheless, do not negate a spiritual life), or else Hughes is charged with forcing her into mysticism. The facts are: Sylvia Plath’s remarkable body of writing, family roots, beliefs and nonbeliefs, and marriage to poet Ted Hughes, along with the people and events around her, build a substantial case for Plath having an intense interest in the supernatural and in being an active practitioner.

Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Hughes’s devoted older sister, Olwyn, downplayed their interests in the occult to questioners, calling it a game. Why might they have kept so quiet if the facts were otherwise? Consider that antiwitchcraft laws—and punishment—remained on the books in England until the early 1950s. Sorcery carried a significant stigma in those stuffier, more conservative years of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Plath had the added ignominy of psychiatric hospitalization for a nervous breakdown and electroshock therapy. Indeed, she needed no more fingers pointing and calling her crazy. Widespread knowledge of Plath’s and Hughes’s activities would have destroyed their careers, and England’s future poet laureate probably would not have fared well being linked with the likes of Golden Dawn leader Aleister Crowley, whom the London Times dubbed the Wickedest Man Alive. Hughes’s correspondence with biographer Keith Sagar indicates that he was fully aware of Crowley’s hypnotic possession techniques and how masterfully Plath used them in her Ariel poems (LTH, 444–45). Back then, any link of Hughes or Plath to the occult would have marred their reputations and affected their young children. Finally, according to Plath’s tarot guidebook, The Painted Caravan: A Penetration into the Secrets of the Tarot Cards by Basil Ivan Rákóczi, practitioners of Qabalah and other forms of mysticism are often sworn to secrecy.

The evidence is that Plath was never apathetic about spiritual life. She challenged the notion of God from all perspectives, was never uninterested in the topic. Occult influences surrounded her from a young age, with many role models and mentors coaxing her along. Through the first six of her almost seven-year marriage to Hughes, Plath worshipped her husband and hung on his practices, exercises, and direction, using spirit for creativity, even if she was in a personal limbo around faith. Wholly absorbed in the occult and mysticism, Hughes appears to have taught Plath everything he knew. Plath was indeed the magician’s girl and possibly the sorcerer’s apprentice,* who came to learn so much that the magic got out of hand. Some, like editor Al Alvarez, believed it was the reason for her demise.

Given the timing of Plath’s poems against her personal life’s events, there is no doubt that her autobiography flowed into her work. However, this book intends to prove that much more was going on. Sylvia Plath’s work is deeply layered, and it is this layering that gives it its lasting impact and resonance. Readers past and present have imposed their beliefs—or nonbeliefs—on Plath’s story to force her into a tidy, depressive, or hysterical world. It is a comfortable and familiar view when describing Plath. But most people find little that is comfortable or familiar about the occult, Qabalah, and mysticism, much as Plath’s emotional territory can be uncomfortable. The occult has frightening connotations of communing with the dead and conjuring demons, although the word occult simply means hidden.

The information presented in this biography, outside the mystical system identified in Fixed Stars Govern a Life, comes from memoirs, biographies, library documents, archival records, letters, calendars, and other published and unpublished sources. Every event or action presented here is supported in other materials. Sources are divided into two sections. At the end of each chapter is a list of other sources, which pertain to that particular chapter; references to this material are given in parentheses, identified by last name of the author. Primary sources are provided in the back matter, listed alphabetically by abbreviations of their titles. These sources are identified, in both the text and the footnotes, by their abbreviated titles in parentheses. Additional sources are also provided in the footnotes, and a bibliography of some key books that were in Sylvia Plath’s personal library are in the back matter (Sylvia’s Library). All material quoted from the Lilly Library, which holds books from the library of Sylvia Plath, comes from Plath MSS II or Books from the Library of Sylvia Plath. To enhance readability, I have not cited information that is common knowledge, famously quoted, or easily found.

The Occult Sylvia Plath illuminates the history and detail of the geographical areas in which Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes lived and worked, as well as what was happening in the contemporary world around them, including the psychology and philosophies behind medical, political, religious, and occult ideas. Also examined is the architecture, landscape, paintings, sculpture, theater, and music that influenced Plath’s and Hughes’s lives, together and apart. Each chapter is given a title from one of Sylvia Plath’s poems. It is the story of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes in context. Together, these elements contribute to a fuller picture of Sylvia Plath. Plath was not only a famous, gifted writer with a dark side who tragically committed suicide but also a literary mystic of the highest order. I aim to break the world from the habit of reading Plath’s work solely through the lens of autobiography. May this book reveal a family of imperfect human beings, like the rest of us, who simply meant well.

OTHER SOURCES

Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: The Carlyle-Okey-Wicksteed Translation. New York: Modern Library, 1950, c1932.

*Plath’s underlining of passages is replicated in this book. References to her marking the text indicate places she drew vertical lines in the margins and/or starred a passage one or more times.

*For a good explanation of the wars between would-be biographers and the Plath and Hughes estates, see Carl Rollyson, American Isis (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013).

*The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was originally a poem by the mystic poet, writer, and philosopher Goethe.

PART ONE

✧

Sylvia Plath

I am the magician’s girl who does not flinch

SYLVIA PLATH, THE BEE MEETING

Late summer, 1957. Inside a modest flat, their first home together in Cambridge, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes leaned over the coffee table on which Hughes had inked a ring of letters, numbers, and the words yes and no to the smooth surface as a makeshift Ouija board. His and Plath’s foreheads nearly touched, their fingertips lightly pressed against opposite sides of an empty wineglass turned upside down to isolate the glyphs channeled from the spirit world. A Beethoven concerto played quietly on the phonograph. This music felt spiritual and exciting and directly linked to the other side for Hughes. In a couple more years, the great composer’s life mask would be hung high on their living room wall, eyes closed, frowning down upon Plath and Hughes like a god.

The pretty, twenty-four-year-old Sylvia held her golden-brown hair back in a headband, ends curled under, in the preppie pageboy cut she was growing out. Formerly a platinum blonde, she now wanted to be taken more seriously. Her transformation into a respected writer and wife of a great poet began with her physical appearance. Hughes filled all roles as friend, lover, and mentor for her. He was handsome, brilliant, talented, spiritual, and rough around the edges; Plath found him exciting and devoid of pretension. While Plath doubted her own abilities to communicate with the other side, she trusted her husband. After all, these rituals seemed to work. His talent came from another world or dimension, and this was a place she wanted to know. Hughes was so focused on his writing that his occult activities and even his marriage had to serve a higher creative purpose. Poetry was everything.

While friends were sometimes invited, Ouija was predominantly a private game for the newlyweds, a way to open up the subconscious for poetic inspiration and question the spirits. Hughes sought winning numbers for the Littlewoods Football pool, and the talking board, as it was sometimes called, proved remarkably accurate, at least in their first explorations. However, it was always a frustrating one number off from winning the £75,000 prize. Plath first documented their play with Ouija in August 1957, but it may have taken place earlier. Hughes had been teaching his fiancée to read horoscopes since they officially became a couple in April 1956. The two studied each other’s dreams, practiced clairvoyant trances and hypnosis on each other, and played with tarot cards and crystal balls. While she had always delighted in magic, myth, and the supernatural, her dalliances in the spirit world with Hughes were a quiet, personal matter. Three years earlier, she had been institutionalized for a suicide attempt, received shock therapy several times, and suffered a complete nervous breakdown. There was no sense in further risking a carefully built reputation and future in academia. After all, witchcraft had, until recently, been illegal in England.

Hughes built a fire to take the chill off the night air. Candles were lit, and husband and wife sipped glasses of brandy to relax and open up to the spirit world. Beside the crackling red embers, they began their contact.

Impatient, Plath sighed. The spirits were not punctual and certainly not trustworthy. On this particular night, she complained to Hughes that nothing was happening. Hughes suddenly felt, or created, a jerking movement, and the glass began its slow rambling around the letters, which Hughes said was the spirits learning the place of each one.

Is anybody there? Plath asked, her voice directed to the darkness surrounding them.

The glass whirred around off their fingertips and landed upon yes. They assumed this was the spirit of Pan, the familiar spirit friend who bore the name of the devilish goat-god of the ancient Greeks. In Greek myth, he was the god of nature and sex, accompanying Hermes, the god of thieves and gypsies. Plath admitted her skepticism about Pan’s information; they had had too many near-wins for her to trust the spirit, almost as if he had purposefully sabotaged them, as devils are apt to do. They repeatedly came close, but the numbers got further and further off with time. Hughes thought Pan might be getting bored with the whole thing. He suggested that Pan preferred the subject of philosophy over finance. Ever practical, Plath wondered what good he was to them if Pan could not make them a bit of money. She asked Hughes what else was there to know.

Everything, Hughes said. He suggested work, love, or the afterlife. Work and love were subjects that made Plath nervous. She indicated the afterlife was best, that was where she felt less dread.

That’s because you don’t quite believe in it, Hughes said. She didn’t mind hearing about the dangers of hell, he said. After all, hell was a fairy tale to his hardworking and perfectionistic wife, who never got the physical world of her present quite right.

I would believe if they would manage to convince me, Plath said. Then she admitted she was afraid. The glass always blurted out what she did not want to know. It liked to steer toward the dark and dangerous subjects. Pan, Plath asked the spirit directly, Is there a life after this life? The glass shot over swiftly to yes.

She continued with the question she had feared to ask for most of her life: Do you know how my father is?

OTHER SOURCES

Plath, Sylvia. Dialogue Over a Ouija Board, in The Collected Poems (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 276–78.

1

April Aubade

SYLVIA PLATH’S FATHER, OTTO PLATH, is perhaps best known as the famous autocrat in her poem Daddy, who died when Sylvia was a girl. Sylvia made him the scapegoat of her poetic drama, cast as a cruel Nazi, at heart if not in reality. Popular criticism suggests Otto is interchangeable with Sylvia’s vampire husband, Ted Hughes, from the same poem (If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two— / The vampire who said he was you) and the lynchpin of Plath’s irredeemable Electra complex.

Otto Emil Plath was born to Theodore and Ernestine Kottke Platt on April 13, 1885. (The family’s surname was originally Platt.) Theodore was a blacksmith, and Ernestine was a housewife. Not much is known about their intellectual or social interests, but they were assumed Protestant based on their home region and Otto’s future training in the seminary. Otto was the eldest of six children and grew up in East Prussia, called the Polish Corridor, in the small town of Grabow, then a part of the German Empire called the Province of Posen. Grabow is a picturesque medieval village in the larger settlement of Gmina Budzyń, north of the regional capital Poznań. This beautiful yet chaotic land was fought over centuries, changing hands back and forth from Polish to Prussian leadership. Paul von Hindenburg, the last president of Germany before Adolf Hitler, was born in Poznań in 1847. Also from Poznań was Arthur Ruppin, a pioneering Jewish sociologist and Zionist who ironically practiced the same eugenicist theories later used by the Nazi party to justify their antisemitism. Ruppin became one of the founders of Tel Aviv in 1909. In her poetry, these strange dichotomies and twists of culture would not go unnoticed by Otto Plath’s future daughter, Sylvia.

At the time of Otto’s birth, the German first chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s government had spent the previous decade and a half forcibly Germanizing the area in something called Kulturkampf, an anti-Polish, anti-Catholic movement that changed names of towns, redistributed land to increase German ownership, and spread the German language and culture. By 1900, Poznań’s Jewish community grew to 61 percent of Grabow’s population, so the Platts knew Jews as their neighbors and probably friends. The Platts were German or at least Germanized.

The Platt family’s village of Grabow sits as a stopping place between Berlin and Hamburg. Today, it is part of West Central Poland, called the Greater Poland Voivodeship. In what might have looked to the FBI like a suspicious move, Otto Plath wrote on various U.S. immigration documents as his place of origin the names Grabow, Grabowo (meaning that Grabow belongs to something larger), Budzyń, and Poznań. All titles were correct, although, in the United States, that might have been difficult to understand.

Grabow is surrounded by the beautiful lowland of the river Elde, with its rolling green landscape filled with birch and pine forests. Young Otto Platt spoke German, Polish, French, and English in this Prussian area, constantly changing borders and rule. Otto showed love for nature and its creatures early, spending his free time playing in the countryside. He was known as the Bee King for his skill at charming bees to steal their honey.

When Otto was young, his mother was forced to abandon her six children and follow their father for unknown reasons. Otto was the eldest of the six siblings farmed out to various relatives. Discarded and alone, Otto and his siblings never heard from their mother again.

In September 1900, a skinny fifteen-year-old Otto Platt stood at the bustling port of Hamburg, Germany, ready to board the Auguste Victoria ocean liner, named for the empress of Wilhelm II. On its maiden voyage eleven years earlier, this colossal ship broke the speed record by reaching New York City from Hamburg in just seven days. By going to America, Otto evaded military service in Prussia, which was compulsory for all young men when they reached age twenty. For their different reasons, he and his other voyagers left with what they could carry. The Auguste Victoria was impressive: several stories high and more than one-and-a-half football fields in length, with beams towering more than fifty-five feet, three great masts, and three giant smokestacks. The ship held 1,100 passengers: 400 first class, 120 second class, and Otto was likely one of the remaining 580 émigrés in the steerage compartment below.

On that day, Otto Platt stepped onto this ship leaving behind what was left of his family, all of his friends, and his homeland. He also knew he would probably never return. Otto was sent to New York by relatives, which could be viewed either as a lack of love or that someone cared enough to want a future for him (OEP, 1). We can be sure he was a boy, alone, bringing only the possessions he could carry. Like his fellow émigrés and the Jews seeking their Zion, Otto sought a new life in the United States and was determined to find it.

Otto probably traveled in crowded and unsanitary conditions with the other steerage passengers at the bottom of the ship. There were few amenities, and the constant ocean sway with no windows or fresh air left passengers seasick, sometimes for the entire journey. When the Auguste Victoria docked in New York, the first- and second-class passengers were greeted and allowed to disembark and enter the country quickly. It was assumed that if passengers could pay their way with a luxury ticket, they were healthy and law abiding and would not drain public resources in the United States of America, then numbering forty-five states. Steerage and third-class passengers were transported to Ellis Island by ferry or barge to undergo what was known as the six-second physical medical and legal inspection.

Otto Platt stepped onto New York’s Ellis Island in New York Harbor, the portal to the New World. Along with hundreds of others, the boy was led into the holding area for questioning and examination in view of the construction of a large French Renaissance structure of red brick with limestone trim that would open four months later as the main immigration building. He stood in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. Nearly as old as he, that powerful masonic goddess would soon bear the Jewish poet Emma Lazarus’s poem at her base. It is a poem and monument to which Otto’s future daughter, Sylvia Plath, would one day pay poetic tribute.* Like cattle, Otto Platt and others were herded through the long lines that processed some five thousand pre–World War I immigrants per day, playing his part in what was then the largest mass human migration in the history of the world. European Jews immigrated to the United States by the tens of thousands at this time, and Emma Lazarus worked tirelessly with the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society to find a haven from unrest, poverty, and persecution. While not Jewish himself, Otto could relate.

Otto likely, at least originally, pronounced his surname plot. Plath (or Platt), which means flat or low, does not have, in German, the short vowel sound that the British and Americans give it but an ah sound. Nor is there a th sound in the German language. To pronounce Plath to rhyme with the word math may have been immigration’s decision, or Otto Plath may have chosen the Americanized pronunciation in an effort to conform. As an adult, Sylvia Plath is said to have pronounced it plah-th—retaining the German ah but adding the English th—despite the world’s resistance to returning the favor.

Stepping out into shining New York City, the entranced new American Otto Plath saw bustling streets, trolleys and trains, early cars, bicycles, and carriages and tall, grand, clean-lined, and illumined buildings. The United States of America offered him and seventy-five million other citizens every opportunity. In New York, the Lower East Side of Manhattan was known as Kleindeutschland, or Little Germany, and also Dutchtown to the non-German locals. To many, the neighborhood became known as the Bowery as it slid from grace, overfilling its towering tenements with factory-working immigrants in shoebox-sized rooms lacking basic facilities and strung clotheslines with clothes hanging like flags waving off a ship (Burrows and Wallace). Little Germany might have lacked the bucolic scenery of Otto’s homeland, but it was nevertheless a refuge and haven to almost fifty thousand German immigrants and was the third-largest German-populated city in the world, second to Berlin and Vienna. There were factories, workshops, beer gardens, sports clubs, libraries, choirs, shooting clubs, German theaters, schools, churches, and synagogues.

Otto Plath’s record shows that he had always been confident and hardworking, unafraid to take on a challenge. He enrolled in English classes and decided to stay in New York, working as a clerk in his uncle’s store instead of traveling to Fall Creek, Wisconsin, to join his grandparents, which was the original plan. Otto was in New York to witness the terrible disaster of the fire on the General Slocum, a cruise ship on the East River, which killed 1,021 German immigrant men, women, and children by fire or drowning, including possibly friends or acquaintances. This event was the single largest loss of life in New York until September 11, 2001, and it forever changed the mood of Little Germany, with brewing anti-German sentiment of World War I soon to follow. The German-Jewish population surged as Central and Eastern European immigrants fled persecution, political upheavals, and economic hardship in their arduous journeys to the Golden Land of America. Most settled in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, so Otto knew and worked with many of these people and shared a common language.

Otto eventually traveled to Wisconsin to join his grandparents. In exchange for his education or, one might say, in exchange for his soul, the teenager had promised his grandparents he would become a Lutheran minister. Under this agreement, he enrolled in Northwestern College in 1906, majoring in classical language studies. Northwestern College in Watertown was more like a classic German gymnasium than a typical American academic program. It was called a preparatory school and college, but the eight classes went by the old Latin names Sexta, Quinta, Quarta, Tertia, Unter Und Ober Secunda, and Unter Und Ober Prima. All instruction was in German, and Otto’s textbooks on Latin and Greek were written in his familiar Deutsch (Paulsen). While at Northwestern in 1906, Otto married a woman named Lydia Bartz, a registered nurse in Wisconsin, but the couple drifted apart after a couple of months. Otto graduated in 1910 and continued his education at the Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary in Wauwatosa, which was expected from most Northwestern graduates. He was a top student with enough musical ability to play the oboe in a band.

As a pacifist and humanist, Otto watched his new country build railroads across Native American Indian land and renege on territory promised to these people, disregarding Native spiritual beliefs regarding bones and artifacts. His state of Wisconsin’s eleven Indian tribes lost their children as they were sent to government boarding schools and had their culture systematically removed, in the same way that the German culture had redefined and reorganized his home in Poland. Otto Plath had either been born or placed on the bad guy’s side in both countries. It was said that he felt regret even for stepping on ants—his was a Buddhist-like view on the value and connectedness of all life. At just twelve years old, his future daughter Sylvia would one day write for advocating Native American justice after reading the book A Separate Star by Helen Hunt Jackson.*

Otto Plath was a white German man who had formerly ridden on the blessed coattails of the ruling classes. However, the Bennett Law, passed in Wisconsin in 1889, although hotly contested and repealed in 1891, had political ramifications affecting Plath and the Indians. The law required that major subjects in all public and private elementary and high schools be taught in English. Because the language used in German Catholic and parochial classrooms was predominantly German, this law meant local teachers were replaced with bilingual teachers, such as Otto Plath. However, this did not always work in Plath’s favor: not enough teachers were available in many cases, and the schools were shut down. In the Land of the Free, Plath was not permitted to use his native language in his classrooms.

The real trouble began for Otto Plath when he discovered the writings of Charles Darwin, a personal hero for him. Like Otto, Darwin had first set out to become a minister. As he learned more about Darwin and his personal and professional life, Otto’s fundamental religious beliefs clashed with Darwin’s theory of evolution. Just weeks into seminary, Otto learned that his colleagues had no actual verbal calls from God or signs of being chosen to preach the gospel. The foundation of Plath’s faith crumbled; he became disillusioned, hungering for something more. Ultimately, he dropped out of seminary, as Darwin had. His grandparents and parents disowned him and even struck Otto’s name from the family Bible.

Otto Plath was determined to create a new life once again, and next, he moved across the country to Seattle, Washington, to accompany his good friend from the seminary, Hans Harry Gaebler, who had secured a teaching job there. Harry and Otto remained friends and in contact throughout their lives. Gaebler’s son, Max, born in 1921, later knew Sylvia Plath. Like his father, Max D. Gaebler became a minister of the Unitarian Church and is considered a notable American Unitarian. Unitarianism became increasingly important to the Plath family in later years. Sylvia Plath wrote in her 1945 diary of one influential visit by Max:

"[He] showed us the wonders of the Harvard Peabody Museum, the famous glass flowers, minerals and precious stones, ancient sculls of Java men and such, animals (preserved)—gorillas, fish, squids ect. [sic] Then he took us to the Fogg Museum—old Chinese art, which he is so familiar with."*

Seattle, Washington, was a new, bustling, expanding city where Otto taught German at the University Heights School. At the same time, he took advanced studies in German at the University of Washington, where in 1912, he earned an M.A. degree. Plath moved around, teaching German and biology at Columbia, MIT, Johns Hopkins University, University of Washington, and the University of California, Berkeley. He could not hold a position for long for probably political and nationalistic reasons. The world became increasingly divided, and anti-German sentiment pervaded America. Despite Otto’s high level of education and rigid work ethic, he was reduced to cutting up sausages in a butcher shop at a low point in his career.

In 1915, things looked darker still. The world was at war, and Plath’s homeland was under Polish control. The people of Grabow were forced to acquire Polish citizenship or else be exiled from the country. Estranged from his relatives and childhood friends, Otto Plath undoubtedly wondered about and feared what had happened to them during the uprising. Some siblings made it over to the United States but were distant and out of touch. There would be nothing Otto could do to help, so far away.

Although the United States had yet to enter the fray of World War I, patriotism ran strong when the Liberty Bell toured the nation in 1915. It was hard for German immigrants in America, especially those who taught the unappreciated German language. Strictly speaking English was required to prove fealty. American banks did not lend to immigrants without collateral or credit history. German Americans were sometimes accused of being sympathetic to the German Empire with little substantiating evidence. U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt insisted that dual loyalties were impossible in wartime. A small minority of immigrants came out on the side of Germany or ridiculed the British, but most took the safer path of American patriotism. After World War I, many German Lutherans redefined themselves as old stock or Nordic Americans, carrying an adopted culture of Norse folklore and myth. These Nordic Americans stressed their colonial roots in Pennsylvania with the Dutch and distanced themselves from the newer immigrants.*

In 1917 and 1918, the U.S. Justice Department documented about 480,000 German aliens. More than 4,000 were imprisoned on flimsy charges of spying for their birth country or endorsing the German war effort. German Americans tended to support the German government’s actions, and even after the United States entered World War I, these new American citizens often voted for antidraft and antiwar candidates, as any pacifist like Plath would have done. A Federal Bureau of Investigation file was opened on Otto Plath. He was labeled an alien enemy for having pro-German sympathies and expressing a desire to return to his homeland one day. His Freemasonry connections may have also tainted him in the view of the Christian right-wing, whose anti-Masonic agenda kept growing in political strength through the 1960s. Otto Plath’s file stated he was a man who makes no friends, and with whom no one is really well acquainted and was unable to connect with students. Thousands of German immigrants were forced to buy war bonds to show their loyalty to the United States. FBI files reveal that Plath lost a job in sales because he refused to purchase Liberty Bonds to aid in this war effort, claiming he was too poor to afford them. Plath’s record of pacifism also did not endear him to the U.S. government or employers in academia and elsewhere, and he continued to have difficulty holding down jobs in this era. However, Plath was required to register for the draft and did so in Berkeley, California.

It was there in Berkeley, in the summer of 1920, that Otto Plath’s childhood passion for bees was reawakened. In June of 1921, he returned to New England and began detailed observations of the bees at Arnold Arboretum (OEP, 1).

It was a time of great paranoia in the United States. Fearing sabotage, the Red Cross barred individuals with German last names from joining. There were reports of German Americans killed by mobs or dragged from jail as suspected spies and lynched. A Minnesota minister was tarred and feathered for praying in German with a dying woman. In Chicago, the German-born conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was encouraged to step down until he finalized his naturalization papers. Orchestras replaced music by German composers with that of the French. Public libraries withdrew German books from their shelves. German-named streets and towns were renamed. In some states, all foreign languages were prohibited in schools, churches, and public places, and instruction in any language besides English was forbidden. Italians did not fare much better: Italian-born anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in Massachusetts in 1927 in a controversial case, with questionable evidence, on charges of murder and robbery.

On top of these political struggles, the 1920s had significant health challenges. Influenza, pneumonia, scarlet fever, and tuberculosis were absolute killers. There were no antibiotics, and one could die from infection. Becoming a young man, alone with no family and few friends in a foreign country, Otto Plath endured it all, probably not without significant emotional damage.

In 1928, Otto Plath was initiated as a Freemason to the Massachusetts Grand Lodge of Masons in Boston (Masons being a centuries-old secret society historically Christian and usually Protestant). Freemasonry is an esoteric society with secret rituals and an initiatory system of degrees exploring ethical and philosophical issues. It is described as a beautiful system of morality veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols. Freemasonry requires a belief in a supreme being and is famous for its ties and connections with mystery traditions, philosophies, and organizations, including Egyptian mysticism, Zoroastrianism, Kabbalah, Gnosticism, alchemy, astrology, and Rosicrucianism.

Bees, Otto Plath’s childhood passion and later his adulthood entomological specialty, are powerful symbols of Freemasonry and alchemy for their models of societal life, critical role in pollination, and ability to make golden honey. According to The Painted Caravan, European masonic lodges began as craft guilds in the Middle Ages. Before the French Revolution, they became either secret orders for heretical philosophical ideas, subversive political organizations, or both. While Sylvia Plath attended masonic events as a child (LSP1, 47), she did not know what a Freemason was until college: on page 42 of her college-era copy of The Portable James Joyce, she underlined the word Freemason and wrote a definition of it in the margins. Therefore, it is assumed that Otto did not discuss Freemasonry with his family. The society was secret, after all.

Partially to escape persecution, Otto Plath stopped teaching German and became a naturalist, entomologist, and professor at Boston University while earning his M.S. from Harvard University in 1925. In 1928, he obtained a Ph.D. in science with a specialization in entomology from Harvard. Otto Plath’s dissertation was entitled Bumblebees: Their Life History, Habits, and Economic Importance, with a Detailed Account of the New England Species.

OTHER SOURCES

Alberge, Dalya. FBI Files on Sylvia Plath’s Father Shed New Light on Poet, Guardian (Manchester, UK) August 17, 2012.

Bruzas, Melissa Dawn. The New Anti-Masonic Movement in America, Explorations: The UC Davis Undergraduate Research Journal 8 (2005): 71–88.

Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Cavitch, Max. Emma Lazarus and the Golem of Liberty, American Literary History 18, no. 1 (2006): 1–28.

Gaebler, Max. Memoir: Sylvia Plath Remembered, Wisconsin Academy Review 46, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 28–32.

Helle, Anita. Helle Collection of Plath Family Photographs 1910–1963, Mortimer Rare Book Room, MS 273.

Library of Congress. Chronology: The Germans in America, European Reading Room.

Nolt, Steven M. Foreigners in Their Own Land: Pennsylvania Germans in the Early Republic (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2008), 13.

Norway-Heritage: Hands Across the Sea. S/S Kaiserin Auguste Victoria, Hamburg America Line, norwayheritage.com.

Padutch.net. What Is Pennsylvania Dutch? (web page), no date.

Paulsen, Friedrich. German Education, Past and Present, trans. T. Lorenz (New York: Scribner, 1908).

Reading Eagle. Here’s Why the Pennsylvania Dutch Are Called ‘Dutch,’ November 17, 2021, readingeagle.com.

Rossen, Jake. When the Liberty Bell Went on a National Tour, Mental Floss, May 8, 2017.

Siegel, Robert, and Art Silverman. During World War I, U.S. Government Propaganda Erased German Culture, All Things Considered, National Public Radio, April 7, 2017.

Statue of Liberty—Ellis Island Foundation, Inc. Ellis Island, no date, ellisisland.org.

U.S. Diplomatic Mission to Germany. History of German-American Relations, 1682–1900: History and Immigration, U.S. Embassy, Berlin, usa.usembassy.de.

Wikipedia. Little Germany, Manhattan.

Wingfield, Valerie. The General Slocum Disaster of June 15, 1904, New York Public Library, June 13, 2011.

Wisconsin Department of Health Services. American Indians in Wisconsin: History, March 24, 2022, www.dhs.wisconsin.gov.

Wisconsin Historical Society. Americanization and the Bennett Law, no date, wisconsinhistory.org.

*See DSPLL.

*In the unpublished journals of Sylvia Plath, Sunday, January 7, 1945, Sylvia Plath Archives, Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington.

*From the unpublished journals of Sylvia Plath, September 20, 1945, Sylvia Plath Archives, Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington.

*A prevalent misconception is that the word Dutch is a mispronunciation of the German word Deutsche; however, these two words are cognates and originally simply meant people. In 1750 Dutch was a well-established term referring to the people of Germany and not an English speaker’s confusion over Deutsche (see Reading Eagle).

2

Love Is a Parallax

NO ONE IS BORN IN A VACUUM, and one generation is always influenced by the preceding ones. The influence of the parents, culture, and environment is inescapable as one’s genetic predisposition to a Roman nose, fair skin, or a disciplined personality—for better or worse.

Over the last fifty years, Sylvia Plath’s mother, Aurelia Schober Plath, has unfairly carried the reputation as the Medusa, the smother-mother, an all-controlling, repressed, submissive, censoring martyr who lived through her children. Many, including Plath’s husband Ted Hughes, have blamed her for emotionally crippling her dependent daughter.

Born Aurelia Schober on April 26, 1906, in Boston, Sylvia Plath’s mother was