Back in the late 1950s, Sylvia Plath and her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, had a regular guest at their table—a spirit they called Pan—and they reached him the low-budget way. In his notes to Plath’s Collected Poems, Hughes described her “holding her finger on an upturned glass, in a ring of letters laid out on a smooth table, and questioning the ‘spirits.’” The Plath scholar Kathleen Connors writes that Hughes, who brought the occult into the marriage, “used hypnotism and their hand-made Ouija board on a regular basis.” Mental Floss has counted Plath among the Ouija board’s famous users, and her journals show just how much the spirits had to say.
Pan Comes to America
On July 4, 1958, Plath wrote in her journal, “Last night Ted & I did PAN for the first time in America,” implying the sessions had started back in England. Their planchette was “the overturned brandy glass,” which, she wrote, “responded admirably, oddly, often with charming humor.”
Pan had plenty of advice. He said Plath’s book of poems would be published by Knopf, not World, and that it should have fifty poems. He predicted two sons before a daughter and supplied the names: Owen or Gawen for the boys, Rosalie for the girl. He named his favorite Hughes poem, “Pike,” and his favorite Plath poem, “Mussel-Hunter,” and he introduced a higher power, Kolossus, as his “family god.” He also told Plath to write a poem about the Lorelei, the sirens of German legend, because they were her own kin, and the next day, she did, writing, “So today, for fun, I did so.”
At least one prophecy came true: Heinemann published Plath’s first collection, The Colossus, in London in 1960, and Knopf published The Colossus & Other Poems in the United States in 1962.
The Believer and the Skeptic
Plath never fully bought it. In the same entry, she allowed that “our own hot subconscious” might be moving the glass, and she wondered how much of Pan was intuition, how much was accident, and how much was “my father’s spirit.” Either way, she wrote, “we had more fun than a movie.”
Hughes's occult interest ran deeper; he cast horoscopes for most of his life. A notebook of his now held at the British Library holds his astrological charts for Sigmund Freud, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Plath, including one connected to the publication of The Colossus. In a May 1956 letter to his sister, Hughes compared his own chart with Plath’s and liked what he saw: “her Mars smack on my Sun . . . very appropriate.” Plath tried to keep up. Her journals are full of resolutions to study the planets and learn the tarot, and by November 1959 she was admitting, “Ted is weary of my talk of astrology and tarot and wanting to learn, and then not bothering to work on my own.”
The Board in the Poems
The sessions made their way into her work. In August 1957, Plath was drafting what she called “my long lumbering dialogue verse poem with two people arguing over a Ouija board,” a piece she thought was “more ambitious than anything I’ve ever done.” “Dialogue Over a Ouija Board” went unpublished in her lifetime and first appeared in 1981, both as a limited edition and in her Collected Poems. A shorter poem, “Ouija,” ran in The Hudson Review in 1960. Hughes returned to the subject decades later, with a poem of his own called “Ouija” in Birthday Letters, his 1998 collection about his marriage to Plath, published almost 35 years after her death.