Margaret Fuller, Wandering Pilgrim

24. Mystic Cleansing

166 the seductive lure of nature 24SMystic Cleansing In a letter about a ten-day visit Anna paid her in August 1840, Margaret tells Cary that the two had been “even happier together” than they were in 1839—before she knew of Sam’s engagement to Anna. In another letter three weeks later to Cary, she exclaims: “Rivers of life flow, seas surge between me and you I cannot look back, nor remember how I passed them.”1 In an 1842 reflection on whether “a woman may be in love with a woman, and a man with a man,” Fuller focuses not on Cary but on her less-complicated relationship with Anna. Echoing Socrates’ argument in the Symposium “that the desiring desires what it lacks,” Fuller affirms that the law of such love “is the desire of the spirit to realize a whole.” “How natural,” she says, “is the love . . . of Me de Stael for de Recamier, mine for Anna Barker.” Such love “is regulated by the same law as that of love between persons of different sexes, only it is purely intellectual and spiritual, unprofaned by any mixture of lower instincts.” About Anna she adds: “I loved Anna for a time I think with as much passion as I was then strong enough to feel.” This love “for me,” she explains, “was the carbuncle (emblematic gem) which cast light into many of the darkest caverns of human nature.”2 In an October 1840 letter to Sturgis, Fuller elaborates on the value of the carbuncle she associates with the very feminine Anna, saying that she (Fuller) has gone to the “heart of the untrodden mountain where the carbuncle has lit the way to veins of . . . diamond.” In using an image of a carbuncle to represent a light by which she explores the “untrodden” depths of nature’s caverns and mountains, Fuller affirms her ability to use feminine instincts and intuitions to burrow to the unexplored unconscious core of power and break through the masculine barriers that restrict her activity as a woman in the social and physical world.3 In light of Fuller’s new knowledge of her psychosexual complexity and power, her search to find a religion into which she could channel her strong erotic energies makes sense. It was during this period of psychological struggle, after her friends had hurt her and when she was trying to define herself sexually and spiritually, that William Henry Channing had visited her in Jamaica Plain. On that summer 1840 day she had shown an “unflagging spiritual energy,” which had caused a throbbing headache. Fuller tried, says Channing, to justify her pain, contending that “we are born to be mutilated; and the blood must flow till in every vein its place is supplied by the Divine ichor.” Identifying with Persephone—the daughter of Demeter and Zeus who was abducted by Hades, her uncle, and forced to live half each year in the underworld—she said: “It is only when Persephone returns from lower earth that she weds Dyonysos [sic], and passes from central sadness into glowing joy.”4 Fuller’s talk at this time of her need to replace her human blood with “the Divine ichor,” as well as her mention of Dionysus, shows her continuing interest in the Orphic cults. Fuller, we recall, was drawn to these ancient mystery cults (as to the cult of Isis) because women were actively involved in the worship, and also because they were forerunners of the Christian idea of spiritual rebirth. In the mythical accounts of this god of the vine and the wet element, Dionysus was known as the twice-born god because Zeus had plucked him from the womb of his dying mortal mother and sewn him into his thigh; Dionysus emerged from Zeus’s thigh at term and perfectly formed. The women who worshipped this god, we recall, were sometimes called Bacchantes or Maenads (mad women), since while worshipping him they experienced fits of mystical ecstasy during which they felt possessed by Bacchus (Dionysus). Women similarly seemed to go insane when they worshipped Orpheus, who myth says was torn to shreds by the Maenads. Because his head kept singing after his death, Orpheus became the center for this mystery cult that helped women endure the cold of winter and promised them life after death. Whether a person’s soul in the hereafter was rewarded with bliss or suffered torment Orphics thought depended on the purity of a person’s life on earth...