"Hierophant--.......It will not be the fault of the young mystic who dedicates himself today to wisdom if, in the hours to come, a wrong emotion-proceeding heedlessly out of his heart-should throw its rays upon our sacred rites and rise up to spirit spheres; for from these spheres in consequence will flow destructive forces into human life."

"The guides and the leaders are the guilty ones. Do they still recognize the mystic force which penetrates mysteriously with spirit each word and gesture here within the temple? "

"And still this force will work when even elements of soul pour into it which are injurious to world-becoming."

"If only this young mystic consciously would sacrifice himself unto the Spirit! Instead his teachers drag him like a victim into the holy place; here all unconscious his soul is yielded up unto the spirit, whereas he would indeed find other paths if he could consciously sustain it in himself."

Chapter 8-The Initiation

The Players: Temple Warden, Chief Hierophant , Mystic, Hierophant,

Neophyte

Recorder Keeper of Seals

Air , Water, Fire, Earth-4 representatives

Other Priests and Spiritual Presences

(Who are these people at the bridge to meet me? They are the villagers ---
The rector, the midwife, the sexton, the agent for bees.)

The following is addressed to the Neophyte:

Temple Warden "From out that web of unreality which you in error's darkness name world, the mystic has conducted you to us. From being and nothing the world was made which for you wove itself into a semblance.

Semblance is good when we behold it grounded in reality, but you did dream it in the life of semblance; and semblance known by semblance fades away.

Oh semblance of a semblance, learn now to know thyself."

The Mystic "So speaks the one who guards the temple's threshold. Feel in yourself the full weight of his word."

Representative of Earth Element "Within the weight of Earth's existence, lay hold upon the semblance of thy being fearlessly that you may sink into the cosmic depths. In cosmic depths search for reality in darkness. Bind to your semblance that which that doth find; its weighing down will grant to thee existence.

The Beekeeper's Daughter^B

A garden of mouthings. Purple, scarlet-speckled, black
The great corollas dilate, peeling back their silks.
Their musk encroaches, circle after circle,
A well of scents almost too dense to breathe in.
Hieratical in your frock coat, maestro of the bees,
You move among the many-breasted hives,

My heart under your foot, sister of a stone.

Trumpet-throats open to the beaks of birds.
The Golden Rain Tree drips its powders down.
In these little boudoirs streaked with orange and red
The anthers nod their heads, potent as kings
To father dynasties. The air is rich.
Here is a queenship no mother can contest ---

A fruit that's death to taste: dark flesh, dark parings.

In burrows narrow as a finger, solitary bees
Keep house among the grasses. Kneeling down
I set my eyes to a hole-mouth and meet an eye
Round, green, disconsolate as a tear.
Father, bridegroom, in this Easter egg
Under the coronal of sugar roses

The queen bee marries the winter of your year.

The Bee Meeting^B

Who are these people at the bridge to meet me? They are the villagers ---
The rector, the midwife, the sexton, the agent for bees.
In my sleeveless summery dress I have no protection,
And they are all gloved and covered, why did nobody tell me?
They are smiling and taking out veils tacked to ancient hats.

I am nude as a chicken neck, does nobody love me?
Yes, here is the secretary of bees with her white shop smock,
Buttoning the cuffs at my wrists and the slit from my neck to my knees.
Now I am milkweed silk, the bees will not notice.
They will not smell my fear, my fear, my fear.

Which is the rector now, is it that man in black?
Which is the midwife, is that her blue coat?
Everybody is nodding a square black head, they are knights in visors,
Breastplates of cheesecloth knotted under the armpits.

Their smiles and their voices are changing. I am led through a beanfield.

Strips of tinfoil winking like people,
Feather dusters fanning their hands in a sea of bean flowers,
Creamy bean flowers with black eyes and leaves like bored hearts.
Is it blood clots the tendrils are dragging up that string?
No, no, it is scarlet flowers that will one day be edible.

Now they are giving me a fashionable white straw Italian hat
And a black veil that molds to my face, they are making me one of them.
They are leading me to the shorn grove, the circle of hives.
Is it the hawthorn that smells so sick?
The barren body of hawthorn, etherizing its children.

Is it some operation that is taking place?
It is the surgeon my neighbors are waiting for,
This apparition in a green helmet,
Shining gloves and white suit.
Is it the butcher, the grocer, the postman, someone I know?

I cannot run, I am rooted, and the gorse hurts me
With its yellow purses, its spiky armory.
I could not run without having to run forever.
The white hive is snug as a virgin,
Sealing off her brood cells, her honey, and quietly humming.

Smoke rolls and scarves in the grove.
The mind of the hive thinks this is the end of everything.
Here they come, the outriders, on their hysterical elastics.
If I stand very still, they will think I am cow-parsley,
A gullible head untouched by their animosity,

Not even nodding, a personage in a hedgerow.
The villagers open the chambers, they are hunting the queen.
Is she hiding, is she eating honey? She is very clever.
She is old, old, old, she must live another year, and she knows it.
While in their fingerjoint cells the new virgins

Dream of a duel they will win inevitably,
A curtain of wax dividing them from the bride flight,
The upflight of the murderess into a heaven that loves her.
The villagers are moving the virgins, there will be no killing.
The old queen does not show herself, is she so ungrateful?

I am exhausted, I am exhausted ---
Pillar of white in a blackout of knives.
I am the magician's girl who does not flinch.
The villagers are untying their disguises, they are shaking hands.
Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they accomplished, why am I cold.

"My heart under your foot, sister of a stone.'".....

"In burrows narrow as a finger, solitary bees
Keep house among the grasses. Kneeling down
I set my eyes to a hole-mouth and meet an eye
Round, green, disconsolate as a tear.
Father, bridegroom, in this Easter egg
Under the coronal of sugar roses

The queen bee marries the winter of your year."

The Element of Earth-excerpt from the Beekeeper's Daughter^B

Ariel^B

Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.

God's lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees!--The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks----

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else

Hauls me through air----
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.

White
Godiva, I unpeel----
Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child's cry

Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies,
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

The Chief Hierophant:

My son, thou shalt upon high wisdom's path

obey with right concern the mystic's words.

Thou cannot see the answer in thyself;

for error's darkness still doth weigh thee down.

Delusion strives in thee for distant heights.

Gaze, therefore, upon this flame which is more close

to thee than is the life of thy own being,-

and read thy answer hidden in the fire.

The Mystic

So speaks the one who leads this temple's rites.

Feel in thyself the ritual's holy power.

The Representative of the Fire Element:

The error of thy sense of self be burned

in fire, enkindled in this rite for thee.

Burn thou thyself with substance of thine error.

In cosmic fire seek reality as flame;

bind to thy semblance that which thou dost find;

in burning, it will grant to thee existence.

The Keeper of the Seals

Thou shalt perceive why to a flame we form thee

as soon as thou hast carried out his word.

We cleanse for thee the form of thy own being!

Know thou our work; or thou must lose thyself

within the cosmic ocean formlessly.

The Mystic:

So speaks the one who guards the temple's seal;

feel in thyself the brightening power of wisdom.

Burning the Letters^B

I made a fire; being tired
Of the white fists of old
Letters and their death rattle
When I came too close to the wastebasket
What did they know that I didn't?
Grain by grain, they unrolled
Sands where a dream of clear water
Grinned like a getaway car.
I am not subtle
Love, love, and well, I was tired
Of cardboard cartons the color of cement or a dog pack
Holding in it's hate
Dully, under a pack of men in red jackets,
And the eyes and times of the postmarks.

This fire may lick and fawn, but it is merciless:
A glass case
My fingers would enter although
They melt and sag, they are told
Do not touch.
And here is an end to the writing,
The spry hooks that bend and cringe, and the smiles, the smiles.
And at least it will be a good place now, the attic.
At least I won't be strung just under the surface,
Dumb fish
With one tin eye,
Watching for glints,
Riding my Arctic
Between this wish and that wish.

So I poke at the carbon birds in my housedress.
They are more beautiful than my bodiless owl,
They console me--
Rising and flying, but blinded.
They would flutter off, black and glittering, they would be coal angels
Only they have nothing to say to anybody.
I have seen to that.
With the butt of a rake
I flake up papers that breathe like people,
I fan them out
Between the yellow lettuces and the German cabbage
Involved in it's weird blue dreams,
Involved as a foetus.
And a name with black edges

Wilts at my foot,
Sinuous orchis
In a nest of root-hairs and boredom--
Pale eyes, patent-leather gutturals!
Warm rain greases my hair, extinguishes nothing.
My veins glow like trees.
The dogs are tearing a fox. This is what it is like-
A read burst and a cry
That splits from it's ripped bag and does not stop
With the dead eye
And the stuffed expression, but goes on
Dyeing the air,
Telling the particles of the clouds, the leaves, the water
What immortality is. That it is immortal.

"The error of thy sense of self be burned

in fire, enkindled in this rite for thee.

Burn thou thyself with substance of thine error."

The boxes containing the written word of human relationships are the material representations of the self, the"semblance of a semblance". She burns herself with the substance of her error and can now begin to behold the reality in the cosmic flame.

She realizes that the burning fragments of self that flow in the airy currents portray the release of the spirit from the bonds of materiality at death.

"Semblance is good when we behold it grounded in reality, but you did dream it in the life of semblance; and semblance known by semblance fades away."

There is a subtle difference between the dark power that eats away at the essential

self and the flames that consume the accumulations of the lower self. We need the flames to reveal the higher self, but this unveiling then allows the darker forces to move in. (see Apprehensions) Therefore, the more we progress in our purification, the greater the danger to the autonomy of the ego.

The poet describes how materialized, concretized, crystallized thought is returned to the realm of the supersensible. A poet encountering the living being of pure thought may be dissatisfied with the actual translation into words because words and text always materialize the thought to such an extent that the entirety of the original thought can not incarnate in the words. By "burning the letters", Plath sets her ideas free. As they return to the nonmaterial realms of pure idea, they increase in potency and inform the other elements of perceived nature with the archetype of human immortality. Again the "disturbed" psyche of Plath is in actuality a catalyst in healing the rift between spirit and matter.

Beyond the whirling emotional negativity, the visionary poet beholds the archetype of the soul's ascension.

Firesong^B(1956)

Born green we were
to this flawed garden,
but in speckled thickets, warted as a toad,
spitefully skulks our warden,
fixing his snare
which hauls down buck, cock, trout, till all most fair
is tricked to faulter in spilt blood.

Now our whole task's to hack
some angel-shape worth wearing
from his crabbed midden¹¹ where all's wrought so awry
that no straight inquiring
could unlock
shrewd catch silting our each bright act back
to unmade mud cloaked by sour sky.

Sweet salts warped stem
of weeds we tackle towards way's rank ending;
scorched by red sun
we heft ¹²globed flint, racked in veins' barbed bindings;
brave love, dream
not of staunching such strict flame, but come,
lean to my wound; burn on, burn on.

The Representative of the Water Element

Prevent the world of fire's flaming power

from robbing thee of self-sustaining might.

Semblance will not arise into existence

unless the wave-beat of the cosmic ocean

can penetrate thee with its spheric tone.

In cosmic ocean seek reality as wave;

bind to thy semblance that which thou dost find;

in surging, it will grant to thee existence.

The Keeper of the Seals

Thou shalt perceive why to a wave we form thee

as soon as thou has carried out his word.

We shape for thee the form of thine own being.

Know thou our work; or thou must lose thyself

as formless being in the cosmic fire.

The Chief Hierophant:

My son, thou shalt by stalwart exercise of will

obey with right concern these mystics' words.

Thou cannot see the answer in thyself;

by cowardly fear thy power is frozen still;

thou cannot shape thy weakness to a wave

that lets thee sound throughout the spheres.

So listen to the forces of thy soul;

and recognize thy voice within their words.

Lorelei^B

It is no night to drown in:
A full moon, river lapsing
Black beneath bland mirror-sheen,

The blue water-mists dropping
Scrim after scrim like fishnets
Though fishermen are sleeping,

The massive castle turrets
Doubling themselves in a glass
All stillness. Yet these shapes float

Up toward me, troubling the face
Of quiet. From the nadir
They rise, their limbs ponderous

With richness, hair heavier
Than sculptured marble. They sing
Of a world more full and clear

Than can be. Sisters, your song
Bears a burden too weighty
For the whorled ear's listening

Here, in a well-steered country,
Under a balanced ruler.
Deranging by harmony

Beyond the mundane order,
Your voices lay siege. You lodge
On the pitched reefs of nightmare,

Promising sure harborage;
By day, descant from borders
Of hebetude¹³, from the ledge

Also of high windows. Worse
Even than your maddening
Song, your silence. At the source

Of your ice-hearted calling-
Drunkenness of the great depths.
O river, I see drifting

Deep in your flux of silver
Those great goddesses of peace.
Stone, stone, ferry me down there.

The neophyte must submerge herself into the sound ether. Water is archetypely the carrier of the waves of formation, the echoes of the primordial "word". Christ is logos, the force of everlasting creation and formation that permeates humans and earth.

As the poet quiets her mind she becomes "clairaudient" and hears the siren song of the sea. Like the music of the spheres, this song reveals the supersensory beings of creation, the pure archetypes behind the world of matter which in their fullness (pleroma) and clearness outshine the manifestations of the earth sphere.

Plath knows that she cannot bear the burden of this sound in one lifetime in a physical body. Although she draws creative force from this sound, she's aware that her full creativity cannot be confined to an average human life.

Plath herself will become the harmony that will derange the orderliness of the mundane world's intellect.

No matter how daunting her union with the creative forces will be, she can never separate herself from the great song. Silence in the world of spirit is her greatest nightmare.

She can experience peace in the mad singing of the universe when her weightiness of existence pulls her down to her final rest-full fathom five to lie by her father's side.

Stings^B

Bare-handed, I hand the combs.
The man in white smiles, bare-handed,
Our cheesecloth gauntlets neat and sweet,
The throats of our wrists brave lilies.
He and I

Have a thousand clean cells between us,
Eight combs of yellow cups,
And the hive itself a teacup,
White with pink flowers on it,
With excessive love I enameled it

Thinking "Sweetness, sweetness."
Brood cells gray as the fossils of shells
Terrify me, they seem so old.
What am I buying, wormy mahogany?
Is there any queen at all in it?

If there is, she is old,
Her wings torn shawls, her long body
Rubbed of its plush--
Poor and bare and unqueenly and even shameful.
I stand in a column

Of winged, unmiraculous women,
Honey-drudgers.
I am no drudge
Though for years I have eaten dust
And dried plates with my dense hair.

And seen my strangeness evaporate,
Blue dew from dangerous skin.
Will they hate me,
These women who only scurry,
Whose news is the open cherry, the open clover?

It is almost over.
I am in control.
Here is my honey-machine,
It will work without thinking,
Opening, in spring, like an industrious virgin

To scour the creaming crests
As the moon, for its ivory powders, scours the sea.
A third person is watching.
He has nothing to do with the bee-seller or with me.
Now he is gone

In eight great bounds, a great scapegoat.
Here is his slipper, here is another,
And here the square of white linen
He wore instead of a hat.
He was sweet,

The sweat of his efforts a rain
Tugging the world to fruit.
The bees found him out,
Molding onto his lips like lies,
Complicating his features.

They thought death was worth it, but I
Have a self to recover, a queen.
Is she dead, is she sleeping?
Where has she been,
With her lion-red body, her wings of glass?

Now she is flying
More terrible than she ever was, red
Scar in the sky, red comet
Over the engine that killed her--
The mausoleum, the wax house.

During her life, the poet's queen bee, the solar ego, must be brought to its wax hive, the body, and control the activities of the busy cells, processes, and thoughts.

3000 years ago, the neophyte discovered the necessity of total ego incarnation - a civilization destroying force that so shocked the ancient priests.

After 3000 years, despite the excessive love expended upon it, material life grays and grows "wormy". Plath wonders whether it was worth plunging so far down, especially if the queen ego may not even be there. If there, the ego is old and torn with the weight of karma.

The ego must take hold of a body of dying forces that will plunge its divine radiance into the unrelenting blackness - a continuation of the incarnating process of the neophyte in the temple.

The ego incarnates and takes over the honey machine body of warmth which operates without the ego's conscious participation.

3000 yrs ago the neophyte desired it as a place where it "...might feel and hold the sense of joy in warmth of light".

The "daddy" double provided the material body. The 3^rd person husband helped untangled the double from her being where she could expel his speech power from her inner self. These double forces gave her power but interfered with the recovery of the queen ego and had to be burned in the sacred fire.

As if to balance the neophyte's longing for life, Plath makes the opposite movement towards soaring freedom-the red ego leaves the killing fields of the wax body and begins the ascent toward the sun.

Mary's Song^B

The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat.
The fat
Sacrifices its opacity....

A window, holy gold.
The fire makes it precious,
The same fire

Melting the tallow heretics,
Ousting the Jews.
Their thick palls float

Over the cicatrix of Poland, burnt-out
Germany.
They do not die.

Grey birds obsess my heart,
Mouth-ash, ash of eye.
They settle. On the high

Precipice
That emptied one man into space
The ovens glowed like heavens, incandescent.

It is a heart,
This holocaust I walk in,
O golden child the world will kill and eat.