Varieties of Mystical Experience in the Writings of Virginia Woolf

Abstract

If one were to catalogue the various types of experience appearing in the writings of Virginia Woolf, the list would be virtually indistinguishable from the topics of interest to the Theosophists and spiritualists of her day: telepathy, auras, astral travel, synesthesia, reincarnation, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of a Universal Mind. Yet, prior to writing Waves, Woolf maintained a posture of utter contempt toward her fellow mystics. In 1918 she attributed lack of a good head on his shoulders to John Mills Whitman, who dabbed in mysticism, & had made tables walz & heard phantom raps & believed it (Diary 1:114). In 1922 she confided that there something a bit silly about her friend E. M. Forster (2:204). A year later she dismissed as absurd the rumor that Katherine Mansfield's ghost haunting an acquaintance's house: But then Brett is not scientific; she at once takes the old fables seriously, & repeats some jargon learnt of Dunning, but no doubt diluted in transit, about day & night, birth, & therefore death, all being beautiful. She feels the she says; & has had revelations; & there she sits deaf, injured, solitary, brooding over death, & hearing voices . . . did K.M. do something to deserve this cheap posthumous life? (2:237-38) Prior to Waves, Woolf's fictional characters, including her narrators, demonstrated the same cognitive dissonance between their mystical apprehensions of reality and their attitudes toward mystics. odious Mrs. Stuart in Jacob's Room kept a parrot, believed in the transmigration of souls, and could read the future in tea leaves. Dirty lodging-house wallpaper she was (72). ridicule is somewhat gentler in To the Lighthouse, where The mystic, the visionary, walking the beach on a fine night, stirring a puddle, looking at a stone, asking themselves 'What am I,' 'What is this?' had suddenly an answer vouchsafed them: (they could not say what it was) (112). Telling fortunes, in Orlando, is a diversion of the riff-raff of the London streets (56). In late 1928, as she preparing to write Waves (at that time tentatively titled Moths), Woolf wrote in her diary that now, if I write Moths I must come to terms with these mystical (3:203); and indeed she did. This article will explore the parallels between Woolf's natural mysticism and the teachings of Theosophy, the reasons why Woolf may have denied her own mystical bent for so many years, and the process by which she sought and received authorization for the mystical world-view from two respected intellectual sources before she could accept and embrace those feelings in herself. Virginia Woolf born in 1882, seven years after Russian emigre Helena Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in New York. organization's original mission, later somewhat abridged, was: (1) To form the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity without distinction of race, colour, or creed. (2) To promote the study of the world's religion and sciences, and to vindicate the importance of old Asiatic literature, namely, of the Brahmanical, Buddhist, and Zoroastrian philosophies. (3) To investigate the hidden mysteries of Nature under every aspect possible, and the psychic and spiritual powers latent in man especially. (Blavatsky 24) Filling the spiritual void left in the wake of Darwinism with non-Christian, non-deistic, humanistic, yet religious teachings, the Theosophical Movement quickly spread to Europe and - rather ironically - to India, where it introduced many westernized Indian intellectuals to the concepts of their native philosophy for the first time. In London, women's rights / Indian affairs activist Annie Besant became head of the European and Indian chapters (1891), and later of the Society as a whole (1907). Her efforts on behalf of Home Rule for India most certainly placed her in contact with Leonard Woolf, who as a member of the Labour Party's Advisory Committee on imperialism consistently advocated self-government and dominion status for that nation (L. …