Emily Dickinson was a fairly uncritical reader in that she liked all manner of sentimental and silly books as well as more salubrious literature. I don’t think this a criticism so much as an explanation of what motivated Emily to read. She read for herself, for what the books (texts that she thought of as conversational and educational friends) could add to her life. She wrote for the same reason I think; she read and wrote as a friend listens to another, to take part in the conversation that marks a social being. (Read Richard B Sewall about this. He has a wonderful little essay called “Emily Dickinson’s Books and Reading.” It was rereading this that prompted this little post.)

She was also a magical thinker.  She believed in the literal truth of incarnation, but not just of the Christian version that has Jesus as an incarnation of a simultaneously equal and greater god. She believed in the Platonic-like magic that is an eternal idea born as temporal matter.

Along with this she believed in the literal truth of human imaginary powers as magical: imagination can effect material change. For her this power was in the word.

In Religio Medici (a book Emily admits to her mind) Sir Thomas Browne argues for the literal existence of sorcerers and witches but qualifies their origins by saying that although the power must have originally come from dark sources, over generations, and by the intent of the user, the power loses its soul sting and can be used to pursue the goodness that comes with knowledge. In other words, Manfred-like, men become material gods.

Combined with the Christian notion of the Power of the Word, and Emily’s acknowledged belief in the power of the word to incarnate idea into the flesh of its printed angles, what we have is a new kind of witch – a Brownian witch, a Christian witch – a woman who sought to cast spells with words that would do what all good Christians of her time sought to do – to console, to teach, to comfort and to enliven.