3 - H.D. and Spirituality

Summary

TO TREAT THE TOPIC of H.D. and spirituality, one must first accept that she recognised no firm line between spirituality and religion, the occult, spiritualism, the paranormal, the metaphysical and the extrasensory. The line between religion and science, too, was quite permeable. Astronomy and astrology, Freudian psychoanalysis and Tarot readings, Christian mysticism and theosophical prophecy lay side by side in her capacious understanding of the seen and unseen worlds. Aside from an acute aversion to organised religion, H.D. was extraordinarily open to any manner of thought and belief.

H.D. was a voracious spiritual seeker, but not in the sense that she felt frantic about finding the metaphysical system that would satisfy her curiosity about the meaning of life or offer a comforting source of solace. Her quest was not a desperate one – though there were times, as in the early 1940s, when she was certainly more fervent in her esotericism. On the whole, she scoffed at the notion of a singular key to interpretation or comprehension. ‘My sign-posts are not yours,’ she wrote firmly in her 1919 aesthetic manifesto Notes on Thought and Vision. Her sources were eclectic, her beliefs expansive and accretive, and her search fuelled by a committed writer’s imagination and a lay scholar’s boundless intellectual curiosity. For six and a half decades, she read, marked and annotated, critiqued, revised and reread, never satisfied. The lived life was fodder for art, and spiritual matters were a vital part of experience. For H.D., too, sexuality fuelled creativity and inspiration, and a sexual experience was also a spiritual one.

H.D.’s maternal family were Moravians, a pre-Reformation Protestant sect whose earliest members were persecuted and driven underground until the eighteenth century, when a charismatic Austrian nobleman, Count Nikolaus Zinzendorf, offered his estate to a group of Protestant migrants for the establishment of a colony in Saxony. These Moravians called themselves the Unitas Fratrum and their colony Herrnhut, a German term for the Lord’s watch and protection. Though H.D. was not fully aware of this history until she was an adult, Herrnhut was an experiment in communal living, with mystical ideas about religion and sexuality.