Everything You Should Know About Contacting The Ancestral Dead

BY SOPHIE MOSS

When we lose a loved one, many people believe that they are permanently gone: banished to a plane, heaven, or nothingness from where they can no longer hear us. Some people are fierce non-believers, others choose to believe in a nothingness out of fear, or grief. Since childhood, I have always believed in a gateway: a ‘tween through which the living can make contact and the dead can whisper back.

So, the curious child started to write. I would pen letters, hoping to bridge the gap between worlds. I would write notes to dead people I didn’t know, or supernatural characters from books and television shows. I was enthralled by realms that I couldn’t put my hands on and feel, obsessed with doors that wouldn’t open. With age, I learned to understand my curiosity--my spirituality. The occult--particularly witchcraft -- has played an important role in how I define myself as a human, woman, and writer.

I don’t believe that the people we love ever really leave us--not even in death. When we have a problem, we can ask for assistance. When we’re unsure, we can ask for guidance. Indeed, we can use ritual and spellcasting as a means by which to contact lost loved ones and ask them to work with our own spiritual source to demystify our path, nudge us in a certain direction, or send help. To ask them to whisper back.

I have learned a lot over the years about witchcraft, spirituality, and the afterlife from Silver Ravenwolf’s Solitary Witch, and have taken influence from the volume’s spellwork to create a Luna Luna guide to making contact with the ancestral dead through the art of letter writing.

---

Supplies: a selection of stones (minimum three); a purple candle; paper; pen; envelope; lighter.

1. Choose an outdoor space. I prefer to choose a location that carries a certain resonance, either for myself or the loved one with whom I am seeking to make contact; a place that allows me to feel close, safe, and connected. Ultimately, choose a space that feels as sacred or as neutral as it feels right to you--whether you go to the local park bench on which you and your lost love shared your first kiss, or whether you regard your own back garden as the safest and most comfortable space in which to make contact, the choice is entirely yours. Remember: it is your intent that matters most.

2. Arrange your stones. At this point, it is about doing what feels most comfortable for you--this is not about rigidity. If you prefer to follow the guidelines of Wicca, arrange three stones in the shape of a pyramid (to represent the Witches’ Pyramid), otherwise, collect enough to spell out the initials of the person you will be honouring. Again, this is not about meticulous rule-abiding, but rather honesty and intent. If something doesn’t feel right, play around with it until it does.

3. Light a purple candle. Purple corresponds with expansion of the self: expansion of spiritual power, knowledge, and consciousness. Once lit, ground yourself and focus your energy on the loved one with whom you are seeking contact. Imagine a bright light filling up your body, traveling through cells and organs and out through your fingers into the candle you are holding. At this point, you can intonate prayers for the deceased. I don’t follow a single specific religious path and instead choose to maintain focus and silence, finishing by placing my candle by the stones.

4. Write a letter to one of the people you are honouring, or have honoured in your prayer. It is in the contents of this letter that you will communicate whatever your reason for contacting. Ask for their help. Detail your problem. Thank them for all that they have done. Tell them you miss them. Whatever your reasons, write them all down. Once you have done this, place the letter in the envelope and seal with a final kiss.

5. Burn the letter. Place the envelope on top of the stones, and focus your intent once more. Take the candle and burn the letter, watching the cool ashes escape in the wind as it carries your message to its recipient. Be contented in the knowledge that your questions are being answered. Once finished, leave your stones untouched.

NB: When making the decision to contact the dead, we must take caution. While it can be helpful to ask our deceased for guidance or assistance, it is important that we do not allow them to take the place of our own spiritual source. As with everything in life, it is about maintaining a rightful balance: finding a happy medium between honouring, acknowledging and contacting lost loved ones, and affording the dead a limited place in our lives.

---

Sophie E. Moss is a dark witch & literary maven. She writes essays for LunaLuna and poetry for all the people she used to be. @Sophiedelays

An Interview With Light Witch Courtney Brooke On The Modern Witch, Location As Inspiration & Aesthetic

BY LISA MARIE BASILE

Your art is spiritual and feminine, but it can also be really gritty and intense; what story do you want to tell? 

A story that is real, human and natural. As women, we have been told for centuries to be either the fairy tale princess lest we be the old hag, the evil witch.  Within my work I am trying to connect to the endless possibilities, to show that even for a fleeting moment what one can dream, can be real. It’s part of what draws me to photography as a medium. It all has to happen in some form of reality for me to capture it. I want to create a world where we are tuned in with nature, with the cosmos, a world where women can be beautiful, mysterious, wise, and most importantly human first. 

Courtney Brooke, Light Witch

Why do you think the figure of the witch persists (and haunts) in today's culture? 

The witch, for myself and I think for many other women as well, is a symbol of feminine strength and a woman with agency over her herself. She is not afraid to grow old and be wise. It is in her wisdom and agency though that she became something for men to fear. I like to think that she still persists because she is a symbol of what it is to be strong, to be human, to be in touch with one's self, nature and what some might call magic.  Sadly we still need this symbol, women all over the world are still subjected and are deemed less than due to their gender.  We are still fighting so many battles for women’s equality, trans-equality, and battles for the preservation of our natural world and the witch is a great symbol that speaks to those battles. 

You come from New England, a fascinating, natural, sprawling region. How exactly does location work its way into your work. Beyond literally being shot in nature, what does the essence of place to do you? 

Courtney Brooke, Light Witch

A place remembers, a place holds its own history in its earth, in its nature. There is something here in New England that I can’t totally articulate, but it’s dark and ancient. The landscape and nature here refuses to be ignored, but it’s subtle, like a vine tearing down a brick wall or the craggy cliffs cut from slow moving glaciers thousands of years ago. Something here just feels so cloaked in mystery, nothing here feel obvious, and that’s part of what always pulls me back here, there is always something to discover, some crazy beauty, some strange occurrence that I didn’t quite notice the last time. 

How did you discover and explore your aesthetic? When did you understand your drive and, really, how did you learn to execute it so well?

Honestly, I am still discovering and learning. Although I thank you for that compliment. I have ever since I have been a pre-teen been interested in the occult, feminism, nature and folklore. I guess you could say I still am and I am still exploring them. I just have this internal unquenchable urge to create and shoot. It’s like an addiction honestly. It was through that that I think I got better at execution, practice, lots and lots of trying and failing. I once had an art professor tell me that the moment you create a piece of work you are happy with is the day you stop creating. I have learned to never be happy with my work, but to let it pass though me in a sense, to me all my pieces are good enough for now.

Courtney Brooke, Light Witch

Which other artists challenge and inspire you?

I feel pretty blessed to be living in a time that connects so many artists all over the globe and can put just about any art at my fingertips. In truth, I am in constant awe of my contemporaries that, regardless of how hard it is to be an artist and thrive in this economy, persist and create beautiful works of art.  This may not be the challenge you are speaking of but it’s the challenge that I think all of us artists feel, and that’s how to make a living with our work. I am also so humbled to be able to call so many artists my friends and collaborators, such as Gillian Chadwick of Elemental Child, Bill Crisafi, and Jamie Mooers or Burial Ground, Allison Scarpulla, Tea Leigh, Steffanie Strazzere, Emily Theobald and Sam Dere of Paper Bunnies -- to name just a few. 

Courtney Brooke, Light Witch

---

Read more about Courtney Brooke here.

Three Entrancing Witches That Influenced My Childhood

BY TRISTA EDWARDS

I recently revisited an old childhood favorite, the 1971 film Bedknobs and Broomsticks. I’ve been thinking about how much certain movie witches positivity influenced when I was growing up and this film was the first to instantly pop into my mind. I had not watched the film in over twenty years but what I remembered from being a child was that the film had a very foreboding nature; (although that wasn’t quite the language I had for it then but I felt it) and there were several terrifying yet tantalizing scenes of Nazi attacks and witchcraft. An exceptionally brief synopsis for those who have not experienced the film, (released by Walt Disney Productions and marketed as a musical fantasy)—

Miss Eglantine Price (Angela Lansbury) is an apprentice witch living in the English countryside in 1940. She is learning witchcraft through correspondence school and receives spells, lessons, and potions in the mail from the school’s headmaster, Professor Emelius Browne (David Tomlinson). She is awaiting the arrival of spell for Substituitary Locomotion, a spell that will enable her bring inanimate objects to life. With this spell, Miss Price is conceived she will be to help the British war effort and, ultimately, defeat the Nazis. 

By the end of the film Miss Price chants the incantation, Treguna Mekoides Tracorum Satis Dee, and erects a ghost army of medieval knights to drive the Nazis back to their U-boat. The many scenes of the medieval knights floating body-less, just shells of the past, still gives me the heebeegeebees to this day. When you think about it, this pseudo-occult film is pretty heavy stuff for a Disney musical and I loved it. 

Now, some twenty years later, I realize how much this film, particularly witchcraft, played a role in how I see myself as a woman and as a writer. It was Miss Eglantine Price along with two other cinema witches from my formative years, The Little Mermaid’s Ursula (1989) and The Worst Witch’s Mildred Hubble (1986), that I bonded with and that gave me examples on how to be powerful woman. 

Miss Eglantine Price

Miss Price’s obsessive quest to find the missing pages of The Spells of Astraroth instilled in me the power of words. I remember distinctly as a child fashioning my own spell book out of colored construction paper. I filled it with astrological symbols I saw in the film and gathered from horoscope section of the town newspaper. I made up words and my own spells of absolute gibberish. I indulged in the sheer enjoyment of language and the potential power it had. I would go out to the wooden swing hanging from a willow tree in the far corner of the yard with my spell book and my mom’s kitchen broom, place the broom on the seat of the swing, chant one of my spells, hop on and fly. Spells—language—could allow me to do anything. As a child this all seemed very literal in that I could make anything possible. I could fly. I could change shape. I could talk to animals. I could control the world around me all with an incantation even if it was all in the world of imagination. This carried on into adulthood and my occupation as poet. Language still allows me to do anything. 

Ursula The Sea Witch

What intrigued me most about Ursula was her massive, rolling body. I thought she was beautiful and threatening. I was entranced by how she inhabited the entire space in which she existed. Much like the film’s protagonist, she was half-woman, half-sea creature—one resembling an octopus. Her lurching tentacles made her appear as if she gliding rather than plodding. This is my first recollected lesson that as woman you could have powerful body without it being sexualized. At the time of the film’s release, my chubby child body probably resembled Ursula’s more than the dainty, slim Ariel. I took comfort in this witch, albeit animated, corporeality. Even at a young age, I knew I would never look like Ariel but I could still believe in the authority of my body. Despite the fact that Ursula is the film’s villain and meets her demise in the end, I try to resist the urge to analyze the film as an academic—that Ursula had to die by the hand of Prince Eric as punishment for her body, which enlarged to giant proportions in the final battle. That she transgressed too far in her power and had to be silenced, to take the place of the role of silenced woman when Ariel found was allowed to have her voice back. I fight to resist this because villain or not, this witch gave me my first lesson in body positivity. 

Mildred Hubble

Mildred Hubble (played by Fairuza Balk and proving she has always been the best witch) is a young girl at Miss Cackle’s Academy for Witches. The 1986 film is based on a series of children’s books by the same name. While not a bad witch she is deemed the worst witch at the academy due to many bumbling yet innocent mishaps. She falls victim to the many cruel pranks at the hand of bully and overachiever Ethel Hallow. Yet through the constant mistreatment from Ethel and the glaring lack of approval from her teacher Miss Hardbroom, Mildred still finds joy in being a witch (particularly at a ceremony in which all the little witches are given their first black kitten and Mildred, as the last girl awarded, is left with the only cat left, a white and gray tabby who she has nothing but love for despite the kitten’s otherness). Mildred, like me, was the shy and quiet girl who was always picked last. I felt that Mildred and I shared a level of companionship through my adolescence in that we both never seemed to get anything right for no apparent reason other than we were struggling to grow up and find our place in the world. 

The Power Of The Herbal Household

BY SOPHIE MOSS

For most of us, the home is our safe haven. It’s the space in which we sleep, create, cook, nurture relationships, create art, celebrate successes, think our most private thoughts and feel our most deepest feelings, and is a space to be honoured. Just as we respect our homes by dusting away dirt and cleaning up messes, it is also helpful to clean away the energies and vibrations that harbour in our homes over time.

To extend the metaphor, there can be little doubt that an untidy, dirty, cluttered house takes its toll on our happiness and wellbeing, leaving us feeling stagnant, unhappy, and unhealthy. The energies that exist in our home are no different: allowing negative, stagnant energies to manifest in our safe, personal spaces can have a detrimental effect on our professional, personal and creative wellbeing, and it is important that we cleanse these spaces of unwanted energies in order to allow us to fulfill our utmost potential.

There are many ways one can cleanse the home, and these can vary from culture to culture, religion to religion. Using herbs, for instance, has played a major role in magick, religion and divination throughout history, and remains one of the most widely used tools for magick and healing today. In old magickal books, elaborate and strange herbal ingredients were often called upon to create a host of recipes and spells, such as adder’s tongue and the heart of a baboon (which are actually just unusual code names for plantain and oil of lily), and herbs have been historically used for homeopathy, natural medicine, and magickal applications such as health, healing and cleansing.

Below, we have created an easy, cost effective, do-it-yourself guide to using herbal magick to cleanse the home of cosmic nasties and invite health, happiness and prosperity into your household.

The Way of Herbs

There is no easier, cheaper and failsafe method of inviting prosperity into the household (and banishing negativity from it) than to use herbal magick, and I am absolutely fascinated with it. For me, there is something so inexplicably comforting and organic about placing one’s trust in the very Earth itself and, in turn, having this trust rewarded with love and protection.

The great thing about using herbal magick is that a) there are so many ways to use herbs, and b) we can use them for so many different purposes:

• When it comes to inciting general positive vibrations into the home, a really easy way to do this is to incorporate herbal magick into your household decor. Buying small pouches or sachets from the store and filling them with different herbs, for example, is an easy way to not only spruce up the come with kitsch decor, but also to incite positive vibrations and a host of positive magical properties.

• Hang a sachet filled with chamomile flowers from the doorknob in your bedroom to calm the nerves and promote natural sleep, or place a chestnut in the corner of your bedside table to bring love and peace into the bedroom. Similarly, you can sprinkle cumin seeds into a pouch and hang it from the doorknob of your kitchen cupboard as a general home blessing.

• An interesting way to incorporate herbal magick into your household and inspire positive, protective vibrations is via a locket. Sprinkle fennel seeds into a locket and hang from your bedpost, nightstand, or even your jewelry stand to bring protection, purification, healing, passion, courage and strength. Alternatively, wear it around your neck and carry the good energies with you.

• Sprinkle allspice in all four corners of the home, or burn it as incense. It is thought to attract success in both personal and business life.

• After going through a difficult break up, moving into a new property, or embarking on a new venture, it is important to rebalance and realign the energies in a household, and an efficient way to do this is by performing a sage cleansing ritual. To perform this, purchase a sage smudge stick (I typically buy mine from natural food or new age stores) and set it over a flame-resistant bowl. With every window and door in the house open, light the stick, blow it out and watch as it begins to smoke. Visualising your intention, wave the stick gently and watch as the smoke glides through the room. As the smoke ghosts towards the far corners of the room… along the ceiling… around the windows… up the fireplace… imagine it absorbing the negativity, toxicity and harmful energies from the space, taking any cosmic nasties with it as it dissipates out the open windows. When you have cleansed each room of the house, extinguish the sage smudge stick and discard.

• Research the different properties of different herbs, and see which ones are relevant to your needs and requirements, using as necessary. Remember, thorough research is absolutely imperative, as some herbs can be toxic once ignited or ingested.

A Magickal Garden  

Indeed, if you are lucky enough to live in an area that affords you garden space (or, even, a window-box on a balcony area), you might want to take advantage of this blessing and plant a garden, grow some herbs, and harvest some plants. However, before jumping right into creating a magickal garden and earning your green thumb status, it is important to keep in mind the general magickal rules for gardening.

In her widely acclaimed book, Solitary Witch: The Ultimate Book of Shadows for the New Generation, magickal practitioner Silver Ravenwolf details a host of astrological rules and considerations for growing a successful magickal garden:

• When collecting seeds, for instance, it’s better to do so when the moon is full, or in a fire or air sign — Aries, Sagittarius, Leo, Aquarius, Libra or Gemini.

• If you are growing plants that will produce crops above ground (perfect for those of us who live in apartment buildings), it is important that they are sown the day after the new moon and up until the first quarter.

• Growing plants that will produce crops below the ground, however, will require plantation during the day after the full moon.

• When it comes to harvesting, the smallest harvests and fresh flowers needed for immediate ritual (or recreational! Or culinary!) use should be done in the evening, during which time the plants have maximum food reserves. Herbs and flowers that will be dried and preserved should be cut mid-morning, once the morning dew has cleared. Also, it is better to harvest fruit and vegetables during the waning moon, and when the moon is in the barren (or semi-barren) air or fire signs of Aries, Sagittarius, Leo, Aquarius, Libra or Gemini.

• When cutting flowers, always try and cut the stem at a slant. This way, the stem can continue to absorb water and nutrients.

• During the Autumn, when the last of the herbs, fruits, and vegetables have been harvested, the last of the dead leaves and plants should be cleared away. It is when the last of the dead plants have been swept that you can perform an Autumn Blessing. To perform this blessing is simple. Firstly, you stand in your garden and ignite a white candle, taking in your surroundings and giving thanks to the year’s harvest. When you feel ready, or when the candle has extinguished, simply bury it somewhere on your property. (Important: please, please take extra care with this if you have animals or small children and bury the candle in a place where children and animals won’t be able to find it. If this isn’t possible, keep it somewhere safe within the household.)

Solitary Witch also contains an incredibly helpful gardening guide to help you with your astrological timings when growing, planting or harvesting, such as being careful to plant beans in the second quarter when the moon is in Taurus, and planting house plants in the first quarter when the moon is in Libra, Cancer, Scorpio or Pisces. Seriously, that book is 590 pages of pure magickal wisdom.

---

Sophie E. Moss is a dark witch & literary maven. She writes essays for LunaLuna and poetry for all the people she used to be. @Sophiedelays

Salem: Is it a Must-See Destination for the Occult?

BY ALAINA LEARY

As a kid, I was enchanted by Salem at Halloween. Growing up just outside Boston, Salem was one of the hottest travel destinations for Halloween night for kids, teens, and adults in the area. Grasping my mom’s hand, I felt that I was a part of something larger – something magical. 

I’ve always been sympathetic to the plight of those harmed by the witch trials in Salem in the 17th century. As a child, I saw these people as mere outsiders, those who maybe came off as quirky or different in society. Not all who were accused were even experimenting with anything occult. Jenny Rogers sums it up in her essay in Autostraddle: “A few young girls from well-to-do families allegedly experimented with trivial fortune-telling — the kind of folk rituals that claim to tell girls who their husband will be. Afterwards or around the same time, children in the village began to fall ill with alarming symptoms — convulsions, claims of pain all over their bodies, fevers and hallucinations. Witchcraft was suspected.”

According to Rogers, people think the real life probably causes ranged from ergotism from hallucination-causing fungi, biological illness, true mass hysteria, or simply an easy way to kill off women and men who were “disliked, too powerful or inconvenient.”

Two years in a row, I’ve gone to Salem around Halloween. Not exactly on the weekend that the holiday falls, but sometime when it’s nearing in October. What was on my mind while I was there was this: is Salem a good place for those who are genuinely interested in witchcraft and the occult, in the way that they are practiced today, to visit? Or is it simply a tourist city, filled with too many black cat mugs and cheesy professional witch photography?

As someone who actually did Salem Vintage Photos with my girlfriend’s family during one of my two Salem visits this year, I can say this: there’s a fair amount of both hokey and legitimate to be found in Salem, and it all depends on what you’re looking for.

Salem capitalizes on its reputation to foster tourism, and I can’t blame them. It probably brings in enough revenue just in the fall to profit the local economy year-round. If you’re into cheesy, spooky tourism, there’s plenty to be found in the area, from the Harry Potter themed store selling Butterbeer and wands to the hokey haunted houses to the vintage white dress-up photos, it’s a prime destination for kids with families who just want to gawk. To be fair, the witch photos are a great way to get a laugh out of everyone involved, even if they’re super cheesy, with poses on broomsticks while a fan blows your hair out of your face.

The slightly-less-hokey tours are one way to connect past and present. It depends on the tour, since there are quite a few, but many of them seamlessly blend the history in a way that is factual and pays tribute to the people who were tortured and killed during the trials. The Bewitched After Dark Walking Tours, Salem Witch Walk, and Candlelit Tours are known for being detailed and informative.

There’s also plenty to see if you’re interested in learning more about modern witchcraft and the occult. Magic Parlor has a lot of gags and jokes, but there are items like candles, herbs, incense, and oils in the back of the shop. It’s also less expensive than a lot of other frequently visited tourist stores. Pyramid Books offers psychic readings, stones, candles, jewelry, and everything ranging from Wicca to Reiki. Artemisia Botanicals is an apothecary filled with over 400 herbs, 100 teas, and more magick. Crow Haven Corner is said to be Salem’s first witch shop, and hosts classes in addition to readings with Tarot, palms, and mediumship. My friends and I found that it matched its quality items, such as smudge sticks and hand-mixed spells, with its tourist items. 

I also attended a psychic reading last year, and a spell casting this year. The psychic reading had me more skeptical, as a lot of what was said seemed very general and like it could easily apply to anyone. The spell casting was a lot more interesting, and was held by a woman who said she’s a practicing witch. She left us by saying “Blessed be,” to everyone, and we cast powerful, positive spells under all the elements and with the power of the spirits. I felt a palpable energy in the room as we all chanted, “So mote it be!” as we held our spells in between the palms of our hands. 

A few weeks later, I buried the knotted string, the source of my spell and positive energy, into the ground at the base of a beautiful tree in a Boston park. I spoke my desires aloud as I buried it, because giving voice to your spells is said to make them more powerful. Everything that I cast was in hopes of a brighter future for the people I love, so even if a lot about Salem has the potential to be cheesy, I feel this is one experience that I really want to believe in.

I’m giving my spell a chance to settle its roots and grow. 

On Sylvia Plath, The Tarot And Bad College Writing

BY PATRICIA GRISAFI

The file name is embarrassing enough: “Sylvia Plath and My Fabulous Genius Paper.” The essay itself is excited, earnest, overblown, quick on impressions - in essence, a typical college English paper written by an enthusiastic fan. But I look back at this sloppy, eager mess of words with kindness and generosity, as it’s probably one of the most sincere documents I’ve ever written - and a genuine attempt at self-discovery. 

The actual title of the essay is less mortifying than its file name: “Sylvia in the Lion’s Mouth: Symbolic Transformation and Rebirth in ‘Ariel.’” A long-time Plath reader and budding scholar, I spent hours in the college library making exciting discoveries about her life. One day, I learned that Plath practiced the Tarot. Although I had observed Tarot imagery in poems like “Ariel,” “Daddy,” “The Hanging Man,” and others, I hadn’t known that Plath and husband Ted Hughes used tarot cards, the Ouija board, and divining tools to help foster creativity. So, for my sophomore college poetry class, I decided to write an essay on Plath and the Tarot, specifically lion imagery in “Ariel.”

Perched on my desk chair like I imagine Beethoven at the piano - crazy-eyed, hair flying - I pounded out what I thought was the most incredible essay on Sylvia Plath. Not only would the language impress my professor, who was one of those serious, sweater wearing, name dropping kinds (“We had Robert Pinsky over the other night for tea”), but my argument would be wholly original. Surrounded by seven beta fish all named Rasputin, piles of books, and my Tarot pack, I worked deep into the night. 

I’m not very spiritual, and I don’t practice the Tarot anymore. But at the time, I was entranced by the cryptic images of the Raider-Waite deck and consulted the cards constantly. The card I was most interested in was Strength.  

Even though I remember my sophomore year of college as a time of discovery, fun, and experimentation, my life leading up to that point had been somewhat troubled. For most of my adolescence, I suffered from unchecked depression and anxiety and often felt powerless, invisible, and misunderstood. I would meditate on the Strength card, transfixed by the calm expression on the woman’s face as she nonchalantly pries open the lion’s jaws (looking at the card now, she seems to be merely petting the lion’s snout as he looks lovingly at her, and I wonder why I saw such violence when currently I see none). I read deeply into the struggle between the woman and the lion. Like most burgeoning academics, I tried to work out my own psychodrama through literary analysis. Here’s an excerpt from my bad college essay:

“God’s lioness” (4) is a loaded image that describes the horse and the poet as they become one during the ride. Merged with the animal, the speaker obtains a sense of power and strength not previously apparent within her. In the Tarot tradition, the “Strength” card depicts a woman wrestling with, prying open, or closing the jaws of a lion is usually depicted. This is an act of brute force; the woman’s intention is to elicit cooperation from the wild beast.

The “Strength” card symbolizes inner spiritual strength and fortitude, overcoming obstacles, and victory against overwhelming odds (Hollander 64-65). More so, the lion is also symbolic of desperate boldness, the fire within, the ‘beast within,’ fear, passion, and loss in surrender. Through rebirth, the speaker wishes to gain all of these qualities. She surrenders, losing the psychological battle but winning the creative one. 

As a college English teacher, I would be quite pleased to receive an essay with a section like this. I might turn to my colleagues with a silly smile and declare that we’ve won ourselves a new Plath devotee, as if we ran a secret club. We might laugh about the essay’s pretensions, the lack of evidence, the sprawl of it all - but I think we’d identify the student as a kindred spirit. 

The date on the paper is October 28th - one day after Plath’s birthday. When I think of Sylvia Plath around her birthday, I think of her devastating poem “A Birthday Present,” especially these lines: 

I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year. 

After all I am only alive by accident. 

I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way. 

Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains, 

The diaphanous satins of a January window

White as babies’ bedding and glittering with dead breath. 

I also think of this quote from Al Alvarez, who maintains that Plath’s occultism consumed her towards the end of her life:  

“I hardly recognised Sylvia when she opened the door. The bright young American house wife with her determined smile and crisp clothes had vanished along with the pancake make-up, the school-mistressy bun and fake cheerfulness. Her face was wax-pale and drained: her hair hung loose down to her waist and left a faint, sharp animal scent on the air when she walked ahead of me up the stairs. She looked like a priestess emptied out by the rites of her cult. And perhaps that is what she had become. She had broken through to whatever it was that made her want to write, the poems were coming every day, sometimes as many as three a day, unbidden, unstoppable, and she was off in a closed, private world where no one was going to follow her.”

Plath would have turned eighty-three this year. It’s not difficult for me to imagine her at this age because my friend and I ran into her doppelgänger at the Merchant House Museum the other week. Our docent, an elderly woman with a stylishly retro hairdo and a dirndl skirt, lectured in a thick Boston accent on the social customs of family life in turn of the century Manhattan. When we left, my friend and I turned to each other and grinned: “That was totally Sylvia Plath, right? That’s exactly what she would look like now, isn’t it?” The idea of Sylvia Plath living, being a docent at an infamously haunted museum, and teaching us about Victorian gardens, seems much more beautiful than the terrible reality of her suicide. 

I’m not a particularly sentimental person, and I don’t tend to save things - especially essays written in college. But I keep “Sylvia Plath and My Fabulous Genius Paper” around. I transfer it to each new computer and place it in a file called “College Writing” (which is filled with bad poetry, but that’s another story). Every year around Plath’s birthday, as I’m fluttering about the apartment stuffing foam brains into faux-bloodied mason jars and arranging knobby gourds in a battered basket, I imagine Plath fixated on her Tarot pack or hunched over the Ouija board. I wonder what she was looking for.