Well, my friends, the book is out.
As I've been doing my first readings, interviews, discussions and presentations around Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath, it has really been a revelation about the preconceptions and assumptions made around me as a tarot card reader, about what my book pertains to, and also about what tarot is. I tend to forget that people outside of my world have often times never even heard of my world, much less visited.
People make the assumption that I am a witch, a Wiccan, and/or a Pagan (I am officially none of those things, although I do respect some of their ideas). It is widely and incorrectly assumed that I conjure spirits and talk to the dead. Some think I can read minds, or perform miraculous healings, and almost as many presume that I think I am Plath reincarnated. No, no, no, no, and no. I am seeing and hearing these incorrect assumptions more and more from interviewers. I have seen embarrassing comparisons to tarot and grade school "cootie catchers," and I have had first memories and childhood recollections inflated into forced analogies that leave me wanting to run screaming.
In some cases, I have been fortunate enough to be granted permission to review the interviews before they're published (oh, bless those reporters!). In other reviews I am not so lucky, and just pray that people don't read/believe it. Sometimes I am able to write a post-published comment, and wag my head and try to clarify the key points. I'll do it here again, just to save the next potential reviewers time:
FIXED STARS GOVERN A LIFE is not a book about tarot. It's not even a book about Qabalah! Nor is it fiction or poetry. It is a book about how to read Sylvia Plath's poetry collection Ariel (the Restored Edition, in the order Plath intended), with the keys to understand the many different levels on which Plath was working. Those levels are Qabalah/Tarot, Alchemy, Mythology, History and the World, Astrology and Astronomy, and the Arts and Humanities. Each Plath poem works on at least all six of these levels, if not more. My work is backed up with years of archival evidence.
The tarot is not a religion.
The tarot is a set of cards, designed to touch upon some ancient mystical systems such as Kabbalah (I'm using the K-spelling here, the Jewish brand, because the Jews used it first. In my book I explain that Plath and Hughes mostly embraced the Hermetic version, spelled with a Q. Christians have their own kind, spelled with a C). The tarot is a psychological tool to reflect the subconscious and give a person direction. The idea is that we know a lot more than we think we know, and the cards help bring that to consciousness. No ghoulies, no ghosties, no chanting or blood sacrifices. Sorry to disappoint. Tarot is just pure psychology, which is why the famous psychologist Carl Jung used the cards for himself and for patients.
Qabalah is not a religion either, although it encompasses some occult systems that people adopt as religion, or that may conflict with some religions. Qabalah is an umbrella term that speaks for all the occult sciences as reflections of a universal force, or one God. This is why I call the facets of Plath's poems "mirrors" in my book--and it's probably why Plath herself liked the mirror metaphor.
In other news, I am planning some events around the book in Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. Watch this blog in the next couple days for locations as they are nailed down.
To buy Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath, go here.
2 comments:
About reincarnation of Plath do you remember Sonja and Florian Flur who believed they were both Plath and Hughes reincarnated!?
I don't know about them, but I have met and read about others. I think when a writer (or other kind of celebrity. How many times have we heard this story about people believing to be either reincarnations or lost daughters of Marilyn Monroe?) really touches on the pulse of the world, we feel the reality of that person and identify. Some of us identify more than others, I suppose! ;-)
Post a Comment