As is well known, Emily Dickinson read Browne.  He defines a view of witchcraft and magic that has a bit of a twist. In effect, it enables the positive use of “extra-curricula” powers and sites magic and its practitioners in the world with us. In fact, Browne makes some of our greatest claims to fame (our inventions, our science) a “power” of this sort, or at least it gives the human versions of it (philosophy, etc.) a transcendental pedigree.

Given that, and given that Emily’s view of witchcraft was likely shaped in some part by Browne, what does that do to how we interpret the poems I have copied below?

Sir Thomas Browne Religio Medici

I conceive there is a traditional magick, not learned immediately from the devil, but at second hand from his scholars, who, having once the secret betrayed, are able and do empirically practise without his advice; they both proceeding upon the principles of nature; where actives, aptly conjoined to disposed passives, will, under any master, produce their effects. Thus, I think, at first, a great part of philosophy was witchcraft; which, being afterward derived to one another, proved but philosophy, and was indeed no more than the honest effects of nature:–what invented by us, is philosophy; learned from him, is magick.

Emily Dickinson
in Johnson, poem 1158 (1870) / In Franklin, poem 1158 (1869)

Best Witchcraft is Geometry
To the magician’s mind -
His ordinary acts are feats
To thinking of mankind -

in Johnson, poem 1583 (1883) / In Franklin, poem 1612 (1883)

Witchcraft was hung, in History,
But History and I
Find all the Witchcraft that we need
Around us, Every Day -

in Johnson, poem 1708 (unknown date) / in Franklin, poem 1712 (unknown date)

Witchcraft has not a pedigree
‘Tis early as our Breath
And mourners meet it going out
The moment of our death -

Another theme in Tate’s essay, having outlined the conceptual context of Dickinson’s place as a poet, is his understanding of her cognitive processes as they pertain to achieving an accurate understanding of her poetry as a reader.  He says of her, “She lacks almost radically the power to seize upon and understand abstractions for their own sake; she does not separate them from the sensuous illuminations that she is so marvelously adept at; like Donne, she perceives abstraction and thinks sensation.

Stars! What a phrase – “perceives abstraction and thinks sensation”.

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I’ve been thinking about the Tate essay all day. It’s not so much what he says but the implications of his essay and how these implications fit with other pieces of knowledge that I have acquired elsewhere.  What he does is simple really. He places Dickinson in her conceptual context. He outlines the cognitive transition that occurs as a consequence of the end of the Puritan theocracy and the rise of industrial life.

Where the old-fashioned puritans got together on a rigid doctrine, and could thus be individualists in manners, the nineteenth-century New Englander, lacking a genuine religious center, began to be a social conformist. The common idea of the Redemption, for example, was replaced by the conformist idea of respectability among neighbors whose spiritual disorder, not very evident at the surface, was becoming acute. A great idea was breaking up, and society was moving toward external uniformity, which is usually the measure of the spiritual sterility inside.

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Written in 1932 Allan Tate said “We lack a tradition of criticism. There are no points of critical reference passed on to us from a preceding generation. I am not upholding here the so-called dead hand of tradition, but rather a rational insight into the meaning of the present in terms of some imaginable past implicit in our own lives: we need a body of ideas that can bear upon the course of the spirit and yet remain coherent as a rational  instrument. We ignore the present, which is momently translated into the past, and derive our standards from imaginative constructions of the future. The hard contingency of fact invariably breaks these standards down, leaving us in the intellectual chaos which is the sore distress of American criticism. Marxian criticism has become the lastest disguise of this heresy.”

Oh yes. What a pleasure to read. The hard contingency of fact… Imaginative constructions of the future…

Like all those theories of Emily’s imagined lover, no real evidence, just a disbelief that her passion wasn’t aimed at a specific man or woman.

And like Frank Kermode who, wonderful critic that he is, saw this narrative need of ours to live in the apocalyptic story, to define ourselves by something that isn’t amenable to reason or evidence.

There is so much more in that essay. As I process what he had to say, I will post.

It’s nearly noon and the best part of the day is gone. I only got about 4 hours of interrupted sleep last night, woken after 3 hours by a cat fight in my bedroom and then after 3 hours of wakefulness I slept for an hour, to be woken by a bad dream. So these last hours have been hazy, headachy and largely barren.

Bleh. I am grouchy.

I think a nap at the beach is called for. It is kind of a grey, cloudy day so Jericho Beach might not be too crowded. I have my blankets in the car and a book of essays about Emily Dickinson, so I will probably survive the day.

I did read a delightful essay in my very early morning wakefulness. By Conrad Aiken, “Emily Dickinson” was originally published in 1924, 31 years before Thomas Johnson’s edition of her complete poems was released. That means he wrote that essay based on the few, highly (and mostly poorly) edited versions of Dickinson’s work that were then available. And yet Aiken’s essay is wonderfully perceptive of Ms. Dickinson and prescient with regard to what some critics would do when pondering Emily’s personal oddities.  In other words, all the things he warned against have been picked up and the resultant theories shaken loose of all evidence, so fascinated have we become about the source of Emily’s “psychic trauma.”

Alan Tate’s essay of 1932, also called “Emily Dickinson,” is in the same volume. I haven’t read it yet;  I am looking forward to it, I have seen it cited so many times.

It’s nearly noon and I haven’t had breakfast yet. I am off to a cafe somewhere, then the beach for a nap. Then Tate.  The best recipe for grouch-hangover that I can devise.

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.
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Much of what I have been reading of late are things to do with Emily Dickinson, mostly criticism with a little biography thrown in. The critics can’t seem to agree on anything, except maybe that she was a poet, and that might be because her lines are usually so short and often fractured that there is no way to see it as prose.

Whether or not Emily was a mystic, for example: lots of people write about her “mystic poetry” and her links to the metaphysical poets by virtue of her obsessions, but then Sister Humiliata (in College English., Vol. 12, No.3, 1950) writes that she isn’t a mystic because she doesn’t renounce life as, according to her, a Christian mystic must. And of course Emily was a Christian, at least her thought patterns, obsessions, and spiritual doorways sought were trained and framed by the Christian doctrine of the Puritan and Transcendental sort.
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Project Gutenburg has a copy of Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts by Dr. Herbert Silberer. This famous rendition pictured here of the goal of alchemical practice has always been one of my favourite emblems of human desire and the western European narrative that tries to make sense of the experience of wanting. The whole project of alchemy as it pertains to the human psyche is fascinating.

Silberer lived between 1882 and 1923. He was four years old when Emily Dickinson died. Dickinson had been influenced in her thinking by many things but one of them was Transcendentalism, or at least Emerson’s writings about it. Emerson was influenced by the various magical traditions of the west largely through Swedenborg (1688-1772) just as Ethan Allen Hitchcock (1798-1870) was. Although Hitchcock and Emerson focused on different things, one thing stayed the same, they were both obsessed by the notion of the transcendence of the individual human being, as was Dickinson in her own fashion.

Hitchcock was fascinated by alchemy. In fact, it seems as if the finest literary collection of early alchemical works in the United States was his. Hitchcock knew Emerson, and certainly Emily Dickenson had access to Emerson’s essays in her daily papers.  Emerson and Dickinson: arguably two of the most influential writers in American history. And of course there are the Great Awakenings, the first occuring between the (approximate years) 1730 and 1775 and the second between 1790 and 1840. The third rolled around only 10 years after that, between 1850 and 1900. I don’t think it can be underestimated how woven a magical world view is in American society and Letters.