The Astral H.D.

Occult and Religious Sources and Contexts for H.D.'s Poetry and Prose

Matte Robinson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781628924183
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Modernist poet H.D. had many visionary and paranormal experiences throughout her life. Although Sigmund Freud worried that they might be 'symptoms, ' she rebelled, educating herself in the alternative world of the occult and spiritualism in order to transform the raw material into a mythical autobiography woven throughout her poetry, prose, and life-writing. The Astral H.D. narrates the fascinating story of how she used the occult to transform herself, and provides surprising revelations about her friendships and conflicts with famous figures-such as Sigmund Freud and the Battle of Britain War Hero Hugh Dowding-along the way.

1

“Blasted into consciousness”: Majic Ring, Trilogy, Amen, and the Air Marshall

One of the only major scholarly accounts of H.D.’s occultism, Susan Stanford Friedman’s Psyche Reborn, suggests, though it does not flat-out state, that H.D. read Robert Ambelain’s Dans L’Ombre des Cathedrales while or before she was writing Trilogy.¹ Friedman’s chapter “Initiations” includes Ambelain in its list of important influences that precipitated H.D.’s renewed wartime interest in the occult, situated chronologically after Denis de Rougemont and just before spiritualism. During this period, argues Friedman, Ambelain and other occult writers provided H.D. with theoretical information about the occult, but spiritualism offered practical, “personal experience” (172). This claim is in line with the development of Ambelain’s writing, for although he mandated practical engagement with the occult, he did not actually complete a practical manual until a decade later. Instead, he referred readers to the work of Golden Dawn author Dion Fortune. Unfortunately, it is difficult to prove that H.D. read anything by Ambelain until the early 1950s. She was not in the habit of dating her books and seems to make no mention of Dans l’Ombre until 1952, when she writes to Richard Aldington on 15 January: “this was published 1939 and is almost unobtainable, but Sylvia Beach ran it to ground for me. I have been trying for years to get it” (Zilboorg 347). Nevertheless, she would not have been trying to get it for years had she not at the very least heard of it—perhaps read it—long before.

Some of the parallels between Dans l’ombre and Trilogy are striking and cannot be accounted for by her readings of Weigall, de Rougemont, or Crow. The following discussion of those parallels does not prove that H.D. had read Dans l’Ombre when she wrote Trilogy, and my suspicion is that she had not. But the parallels are of some use anyway, for H.D. would have been all the more certain when she did read Ambelain for the first time that he was an important writer, one who thought along her wavelength. Important sources that we know H.D. read in the 1940s include Denis de Rougemont’s Passion and Society, H.S. Bellamy’s The Book of Revelation is History, and Dmitri Merejkovsky’s The Secret of the West, translated by her friend John Cournos. The latter two sources are treated in some detail in Susan Acheson’s “Conceived at the Grave’s Edge: The Esoteric Eschatology of H.D.’s Trilogy.” Acheson outlines several important ways in which these texts influenced the composition of Trilogy; for example, she identifies the passage in Merejkovsky that H.D. used to compose the passage about the flock of birds² in “The Flowering of the Rod” (Acheson 201). Read in conjunction with her article “H.D. and the Age of Aquarius,” Acheson’s work with these source texts fills in important gaps for readers of Trilogy.

This chapter does not attempt to redo the good work that has been done on source texts for Trilogy or the Delia Alton novel; its main purpose is to provide context for the later material that is discussed in depth in subsequent chapters. It is also intended to be read alongside the work of Jane Augustine, Susan Stanford Friedman, Cynthia Hogue and Julie Vandevere, Demetres Tryphonopoulos, and others have done work on the relationship between H.D. and Dowding; my article on H.D., Ambelain, and doubles also serves as a companion to this chapter. Because there is no concrete evidence available to me that H.D. read Ambelain in the 1940s, my focus is on the way Ambelain’s work fulfilled a need that was sorely lacking for H.D., a maverick who was not comfortable with spiritualism, the Theosophical Society, or any group at all, yet who was drawn to the matters they investigated, albeit for her own purposes.

Overwhelmingly, the H.D. who presents herself through the constellation of texts in the 1940s is not someone who already has answers, but a seeker. She chooses her companions in her “researches” based on their potential to help her access the core of the mystery, a fact that implies an important qualification to her status as “seeker”: she is only interested in those who are able to help her particular quest. In other words, she believes herself to be on a particular wavelength, linked to others based on the nature of their individual paths, and whether that connection is explained by past lives, soul contracts, fate, or any of a number of ideas common among esoteric thinkers, it amounts to exclusiveness, if not elitism. The latter term’s being tantamount to a slur in the current critical climate obscures a subject that should be approached without such harsh judgment. So when I use the term “elitism,” it is with the intention of isolating esoteric or occult elitism from political or social elitism, where the two have been yoked in the context of modernist studies since James Longenbach’s Stone Cottage at the very least.³ Elitism, when limited to the context of esoteric work, may be downright salutary in an unregulated world full of quacks, charlatans, sellers of snake-oil, and black magicians; at any rate, H.D.’s elitism is by nature multivalent: esoteric research admits so many different kinds of power, so many interlaced hierarchies and spiritual checks and balances, that it does not at all resemble the kind of political, social, and ethnic elitism that plagued many modernists.

I think it is essential to consider H.D. an elitist but only in this specialized way because otherwise it is difficult to gain any clarity about the reason Hugh Dowding haunted H.D.’s works for decades, long after the initial sting of his repudiation. Without mentally separating esoteric elitism from the run-of-the-mill political kind, all sorts of unnecessary problems arise in considering H.D.’s work.⁴ In seeking out companions, H.D. had her goal in mind; she did not wish to be distracted by the rules of table-tapping or Blavatsky’s emanation theories: something important was happening in the spiritual development of the human race, and her writing had something to do with it. She only had time for those whose tasks in this incarnation crossed with hers, and Dowding was the chief of them. She was certain of it.

Against the grain

As I mentioned in “Reintegration: Kabbalah and Spiritualism in H.D.’s Late Work,” H.D. sometimes uses information from source texts in ways that would make their authors uncomfortable, and a particularly piquant case of this tendency is her treatment of Arthur Weigall’s The Paganism in our Christianity. It is instructive to contrast her use of Weigall with her subsequent appropriations from Ambelain and Chaboseau; in contrast to her reverence for the latter, H.D. reads counter to Weigall’s thesis: Christianity has been, for nearly its entire history, contaminated by pagan influences, which must be purged in order to restore the one truth of the historical Christ. Weigall comes close to suggesting that Satan’s influence has been able to grow because of the spread of the church and its various institutions: “I believe that the adoration of these ancient gods has never died out, and that in places of Christian worship to-day we still unwittingly maintain it, and solemnly recite the myths of heathendom” (16). If that is the case, then H.D. is, like William Blake, “of the Devil’s party,” for she reveled in these influences.⁵

Norman Holmes Pearson’s foreword to Trilogy names Weigall’s book as “a favourite of hers” and a “better guide” than “true” Egyptian or Greek myth (viii), but the newer edition of Trilogy has excised Pearson’s foreword and makes no reference to Weigall’s book, instead ignoring his advice and going straight to “true” Egyptian and Greek mythology. In some ways, this decision is understandable for an edition intended for a general readership: cluttering up a reading with layers of ambiguous, esoteric significance takes away the immediacy of the poem for casual readers; Pearson’s explication of H.D.’s intentions for Trilogy, that “readers also need to be instructed” (viii), is not a very friendly or digestible notion for readers or some scholars alike. Debo and Vetter are generally supportive of this edition for those very reasons in their introduction to the Approaches to Teaching volume on H.D.: “The notes are intended for readers rather than scholars, in keeping with the publisher’s goals. Many teachers find these notes especially useful for their students; others invite students to extend Barnstone’s notes with their own research into H.D.’s wide-ranging allusions” (9). In light of this current study, I necessarily cannot be quite so pleased with the edition, because it is difficult indeed to “extend” something that is not firmly attached in the first place. In eliminating Pearson’s (and H.D.’s) voice about how to read the references and allusions, replacing it with straight explication from conventional mythology, the reader’s edition commits an erasure that can in turn lead to misdirection. Rather than liberating the reader from the hegemony of authorial intention and the “correct” reading, such an edition inscribes ambiguity upon the text because it ignores or elides the way the allusions generate meaning; the poem makes little sense unless the mythic references are taken as having already been co-opted into H.D.’s personal mythology.

A more disturbing implication of the elimination of Pearson’s voice from editions of Trilogy is that H.D.’s place as a major modernist writer is made subtly more tenuous. The edition of Joyce’s Ulysses that I own, part of the popular Oxford World Classics series, contains hundreds of pages of paratextual material, including accounts of every important thing that Joyce said about his text, graphs, and elaborations on the two schema Joyce provided to help “instruct” his readers, and generous summaries and notes that incorporate information known about Joyce’s writing process and the specialized ways he uses myths, allusions, song, and other material. Trilogy, by contrast, was published as a collection with a short but informative forward by Pearson, H.D.’s dear friend and literary executor, and an important scholar of American literature, in which he states what he knows to be an important approach to the poem: to get a “better start” (viii) than the critics who assume she is “being true” to her mythical sources, one must look into her idiosyncratic readings, which he is generous enough to name. The voice of H.D.’s equivalent to a Frank Budgen is then entirely removed in the next edition, which in addition provides notes that often read as if H.D. is “being true” to her sources. Joyce’s work—or Pound’s, or Eliot’s—would not be treated this way, and readers approaching Ulysses or The Waste Land have decades’ worth of exegetical material to help with readings of these difficult texts. H.D.’s writing came into prominence after the exegetical, text-based critical moment was ended, and while there have been notable efforts to catch up,⁶ it is rare to find a work that is not part of some other current critical conversation, and so readers who wish to find readings based in the richness of the source material often have to find pieces of it in works on other subjects. I belabor this point not to excoriate the edition, which has served an important purpose, but to plead the case for an updated edition that better reflects what is now known about H.D.’s work.

All of these difficulties combine to make Weigall’s a relatively unknown voice in H.D. scholarship, meriting only a few terse mentions here and there. Even Friedman only mentions him in passing in Psyche Reborn: “Influenced by Arthur Weigall’s The Paganism in Our Christianity, H.D. believed that Christianity arose out of a convergence of mystery cults, especially those associated with Mithraism and the worship of Isis” (180). Without context, it would seem that Weigall was providing a Frazerian account of the development of Christianity; on the contrary, he was actively attempting to strip such historical influences away in order to isolate the pure message of Chrisiantity from the social and theological influences that early Christians allowed in. The paganism in Christianity is for Weigall a dangerous subconscious mind of the church, manipulating from the gloom the foolish multitudes who are unaware of its existence. Dismissing the notion that incorporating and appropriating pagan rituals and holidays helped draw people to the church, Weigall warns that it has instead perverted the core of the church itself, a danger that has not subsided over time: “The widespread undercurrent of undigested criticism now circulating beneath the outward aspect of Christianity is dangerous in the extreme to the spiritual life of the civilised world, and a bold and rational restatement of the theology of the Faith is urgently called for” (17).

What could H.D. want with such a book? On the one hand, she simply used its scholarship against itself by collecting, using, and celebrating the material that Weigall wishes to have expunged. Turning Weigall’s argument on its head allows her to transform the exoteric church of Christianity into an occult text, like the immense physical “books,” the cathedrals revered by the Masonic Rite of Memphis-Misraim, of which Robert Ambelain was International Grand Master. Ostensibly, the great cathedrals pass on knowledge of the church’s dogma, but they also are the chief means of preserving otherwise dead traditions, rites, and gods. The worship of Isis is not a merely historical fact if the institutions of the church have preserved even distorted cues about its original form. For both Weigall and Ambelain, the old ways are merely dormant or hidden, like the DNA of extinct species preserved in ice. H.D. most obviously makes use of this idea in the figures of the seven demons that Jesus cast out of Mary, which are reworked in Trilogy as distorted images of seven goddesses. The stories passed down and codified in gospels both obscured and preserved these figures, allowing them to be one day resurrected and restored to their nondemonic forms. Broadly, in Trilogy, the method of finding traces of recoverable pagan spirituality in the contemporary Christian world suffuses every passage, and by and large, this effort is Weigall read against the grain. Weigall wanted a witch-hunt but instead handed out maps to the stars.

The “seven daemons” that were cast out of Mary Magdalene in Trilogy are in fact pagan goddesses, and Kaspar might have the ability to recognize them as such (T 145) because he is a heathen. Where Weigall’s readers are asked to imagine the historical Jesus and the pagan influences that must have infected the Christian message, H.D.’s version of history has the magus recognize both the advent of the new Master and the identities of the older gods concealed within the outcast demonic forms. H.D. does not depart from fact, so far as fact is available: it was reported that three Magi⁷ visited the site of the birth of Christ, and indeed it would have been the esoteric knowledge of their own religion that led them to follow the star and to present the appropriate gifts. H.D.’s playing with history is a matter of interpretation, but not too much of a stretch: the practice of converting older gods into demons under the new dispensation was common. All that H.D. genuinely adds is the idea that the goddesses are thus preserved for recovery at a later aeon (with, it so happens, a new Master).

The daemons are also fashioned to parallel the Magi: the seven, “by crossing the threshold” of Mary’s body, had come “perhaps to pay homage” (147) in much the same way that the pagan Magi had come to pay homage to the new Master. H.D. chose to excise the section that makes most explicit what she intends to have happened with the daemons: during his visionary/auditory experience catalyzed by Mary’s presence, Kaspar experiences an apocryphal story of Jesus taking Mary aside and assuring her that after his death he will “save all beauty [the spirits] that has been” and “create all beauty that shall be.” Then he says “Peace spirit of beauty that has been,” and continues to offer “peace” to each of the seven (which is also an act of silencing), naming them by their goddess names (Box 31 folder 820). I would suggest that H.D.’s deletions of these sections are in line with the modernist tendency to suggest rather than to state outright; the published version of Trilogy implies what the draft makes explicit.

Trilogy’s statement is not as unorthodox as at first appears: the canonical Jesus has one message for the masses and another for the inner circle, an idea that is fully exploited in Trilogy with its emphasis on the new Master and the initiates who have the gift of enhanced powers of interpretation. In granting Kaspar (and, in the deleted section, Jesus) the power to discern the porousness of the boundary between gods and demons, H.D. extends the idea of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: H.D.’s Occult Education
• 1. “Blasted into consciousness”: Majic Ring, Trilogy, Amen, and the Air Marshall
• 2. Dans l’ombre Des Cathédrales and Hermetic Definition: Other Bodies, Other Initiations
• 3. “Don’t let me forget this, when I wake up”: The Luciferian Doctrine
• 4. Theurgy, Helens, and the Nameless-of-Many-Names
• 5. Synthesis, Conclusions, Applications
• Works Cited and Consulted
• Index
• Imprint