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The Astral H.D.: Occult and Religious Sources and Contexts for H.D.’s Poetry and Prose. By Matte Robinson.

2016; Oxford University Press; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/litthe/frw035

1477-4623

Rebecca Bowler,

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

The Astral H.D. is an excellent guide to H.D.’s occultism: her reading, her associative processing of that reading, and her appropriation and adaptation of it in her later poetry. It is historicist and complex, and is the result of intense and comprehensive archival research. Matte Robinson is guided through the books that H.D. read by H.D.’s own annotations, and he structures his own journey through the maze of texts through H.D.’s annotations too. We are invited to consider the passages in the books in H.D.’s library that she marked most heavily; that she wrote key dates of events in her life next to, or that she marked with a question mark to indicate confusion or disagreement. We are given in-depth analysis of these passages and we are taken to the places in H.D.’s own texts where they resurface: sometimes as correspondences and allusions, but sometimes as direct, uncited quotations. H.D. read widely in the occult, and therefore many texts present themselves as sources for study. One early text was Fourteen Lessons in Yogic Philosophy and Oriental Occultism (1903), written by ‘William Walker Atkinson under the pseudonym Yogi Ramacharaka’ (p.1). This book was read and admired by Ezra Pound, and given to H.D. as an item of interest. Pound’s influence on this early reading (not just the ‘Yogi Books’ but William Morris, Emanuel Swedenborg, and Honoré de Balzac) gave him significance in her occult journey: much later she lists him as the first in a series of ‘seven minor initiators’. As well as these real-life initiators with whom she had earthly and mundane contact (she lists these as Pound, Richard Aldington, John Cournos, D.H. Lawrence, Cecil Grey, Kenneth Macpherson, Walter Schmideberg—and possibly also Eric Heydt as a double of Schmideberg), there were authors: ‘Denis de Rougemont, W.B. Crow, Jean Chaboseau, Dmitry Merejkowski, Arthur Weigall, E.M. Butler’ and, most significantly, the French occultist Robert Ambelain (p. 4). There was Lord Hugh Dowding, who she considered for a while to be the ‘major initiator’: the big star surrounded by seven smaller stars as in the tarot card ‘The Star’. Then too there are non-earthly entities: Amen/Amen-Ra, Lilith and Lucifer-Venus, Isis-Osiris-Horus, Adam and Eve, Maia, Cybele, Astarte, Azrael, the ‘nameless of many names’, and a spiritual contact called Zakenuto, who may have been the servant of Amen or may have been Amen himself. In H.D.’s working out of the pattern of her life, in her notebooks, in the margins of her reading, and in her poetry, all these figures overlap and double and couple and shadow one another. There is a sense in which all of H.D.’s work is an attempt to repeat, revise, and explain the events in her life. Her occult reading and her use of this reading seems to be no exception. H.D. takes figures from her reading (gods, angels, and demons), from her spiritual voyages (guides and gods-in-other-form), and from her life history (past lovers, friends, and teachers) and she patterns them together.