Was Sylvia Plath a Witch?

A solid quartz or lead-crystal ball 7 inches across weighs about 22 pounds.

Was Sylvia Plath a witch? References in Sylvia Plath’s creative work to the supernatural, weird, and mythic are in fact typical of her time and place, the era of plays and Hollywood movies called I Married a Witch, The Bad Seed, and Bell, Book, and Candle. [1] Plath’s references to the unseen do not mean or prove Plath was a witch. That idea first emerges in the USA and UK around 1970 when faddish interest in the occult, and cute media portrayals, made witches trim and beautiful, feminist and cool. [2] Popular fiction and film have since kept their modern witches young and appealing. Everyone who feels stronger owning an Isis poster or consulting Tarot cards, or takes pride in their zodiac sign, as Plath did -- is a witch an occultist.

For those pursuing the “Was Plath a witch/mystic/psychic?” question, precise definitions of “what she was” are crucial.

An occultist seeks power or advantage through rituals or tools such as Tarot cards, crystals, chanting, Ouija, or horoscopes; the use of such tools for those ends is called magic(k). A person can do occult work with and for other people. Most major religions prohibit occultism. An occultist is not automatically a witch.

A mystic (from a Greek root meaning “with eyes or lips closed”) looks inward, is receptive, seeks personal spiritual union with a higher power, and wants less from the material world rather than more. [3] Therefore Tarot cards, crystal balls, charms, prayers, and so on used to cull deliverables, such as predictions or good health, are not in fact “mystical.” One cannot do mystical work for other people. Major religions revere their mystics, and they are few. Being an occultist or being spiritual or intuitive does not make someone a mystic.

“Mysterious,” “mystical,” and “magical,” are not synonyms. An example to show that word choices matter: Which slogan would the Disney Corp. likely choose?

-Disney World is mysterious.

-Disney World is mystical.

-Disney World is magical.

A psychic (noun) has clairvoyant, healing, mind-reading or prophetic ability. Such ability, on call and consistent enough to make a reputation and money, is extremely rare. It is rarer yet to possess more than one such ability. Psychic (as an adjective) “seers” supported by cards, crystal balls, pendulums, drugs, fire, and so forth are occultists, not psychics. Most “psychics” are, alas, performers. Intuition is not psychic. Intuition originates in the body.

One’s psyche is defined as the totality of one’s mind or spirit or soul; the being, without the body. That we all have a psyche is a useful philosophical concept, but not a fact. Unfortunately the adjectival form of “psyche” is “psychic,” which makes people think of crystal balls and mind-reading. Plath’s post-breakdown “psychic regeneration” is not related to occultism.

A witch is a person of any gender who self-identifies as a witch. Plath never called herself a witch. No one is a witch just because someone says or thinks so. Things we call “witchy,” such as dancing around a bonfire, or using Tarot cards or bibliomancy to reveal desired information (“divination”), do not make Plath a witch. They make her an occultist, like her idol, poet William Butler Yeats.

All the above labels have been muddled, misused, corrupted, sensationalized, and contradicted, because people read Harry Potter and watch Disney and The Craft and anime and Buffy, playful fictions drawn from misinformation. Sylvia Plath herself was misinformed about the differences between “psychic” and “occult” and “intuitive.” She wrote in a 1956 letter to her mother Aurelia Plath:

[a]ll my horoscope points to my psychic, occult powers, & certainly if I give them play, I should at least, with my growing “woman’s intuition” be able to join Ted in becoming a practising astrologist. [4]

Plath soon found out that casting horoscopes is not intuitive or psychic but instead required her to do math, so Ted Hughes remained their house astrologer while Plath elected to use Tarot cards. Friends say Sylvia used Tarot ever more obsessively as her life came to a close. Using Tarot cards or playing Ouija (a Victorian parlor game, trademarked in 1902), still do not make Plath a witch, a psychic, or a mystic. They make her an occultist. Collecting and burning Hughes’s stray hairs and nail clippings for spite is something Plath read in The Golden Bough. [5]

Sylvia Plath only dabbled in the occult. Ted Hughes, through his mother, had lifelong occult interests, but no one asks “Was Ted Hughes a witch?” That suggests that Plath’s gender has encouraged this line of Plath-as-witch inquiry. Even asking the question is frivolous, because whatever the answer, it does not matter. Nor (as Hughes would have it) was his wife bedeviled by “psychic gifts,” seemingly never used except to catch him cheating.

Plath’s writings show a character hyper-rational, practical, keen-eyed, and worldly. The “Mystic” of her eponymous poem after one big moment falls to Earth with a thud. The speaker of “Witch Burning” is “a dartboard for witches” and never admits to being one. It was poet Anne Sexton who in a poem (“Her Kind”) called herself a witch. Maybe “Plath was a witch” persists because people still suspect, as in the witch-burning days, that “black magic” is how high-achieving women get their edge.

Plath above all was a dedicated and hard-working writer. Writers experience inspirations and breakthroughs to higher  levels – not of spirit, but of confidence, nerve, and skill. Such breakthroughs are part of a working writer’s experience: remarkable, but not mystical or magical at all. Sylvia’s hard work on the Ariel poems is documented in the many drafts of them archived at Smith College.

Eternity bores me, 

I never wanted it.

[1] Plath saw the play Bell, Book, and Candle and wrote her mother about it on 21 January 1953. Her letter of 13 December 1954 says she had just seen the play The Bad Seed in New York.

[2] Examples: U.S. TV sitcom Bewitched (1964-72), openly based on a 1942 Paramount comedy starring beautiful Veronica Lake as a witch; U.S. TV program, animated, Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1970-74). Sabrina stars in her own comic-book series starting in 1971. Read here about the U.K. “witchploitation” TV and media fad of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

[3] https://www.encyclopedia.com/philosophy-and-religion/other-religious-beliefs-and-general-terms/religion-general/mystic 

[4] Sylvia Plath to Aurelia Plath, October 28, 1956. “Astrologist” and “astrologer” are synonyms; the former is rarely used. 

[5] Plath's copy of this book is held by Smith College. https://libguides.smith.edu/c.php?g=1227026&p=8978322