Varieties of mystical experience in the writings of Virginia Woolf

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1995 by Julie Kane

She lives in a village; can't talk a word of the language, which is Cantonese; learns sanskrit with a pundit, and intends to expound the fallacies of Buddha. I pretended that I had not heard of her book. Being excessively vain, she was furious. "Then you do not read your Literary Supplement. There was a very long review of me there - by an exceedingly ignorant man. I also had one in the Indian Observer. That was slightly more intelligent." As she stumped out of the house she drew herself up, pressed her hands to her forehead and muttered some gibberish which she said was the Eastern form of farewell upon leaving a dear friend for some time. (Letters 2:492)

Despite the resistance of Leonard and Virginia Woolf to the "fallacies of Buddha," Eastern religious ideas continued to filter into Western consciousness throughout the early decades of the twentieth century. Ezra Pound and Arthur Waley (whom Woolf thanked in the Preface to Orlando for his help with the Chinese language) aroused further interest in Buddhistic philosophy with their translations of Japanese and Chinese poetry. William James, in his psychological writings, gave scientific credence to trance states and other forms of mystical experience. J. G. Frazer catalogued the mystical religious beliefs of ancient civilizations and primitive tribes. The First World brought on a boom in spiritualism and seances, as bereaved family members desperately sought to make contact with their war dead (Fussell 124-31).

The extent to which eastern philosophy had permeated British consciousness in the years between the wars can be illustrated by the prevalence of belief in reincarnation. Three distinguished Cambridge philosophers - Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, J. M. McTaggart, and W. MacNeile Dixon - were writing and lecturing under the banner of the "Cambridge Reincarnationists." Dickinson and McTaggart, like Leonard Woolf and most of the males in the Bloomsbury circle, were members of the Cambridge Apostles. Dickinson was moreover a close friend of the Woolfs and Roger Fry and would be the subject of a 1934 biography by E. M. Forster, while McTaggart had been Fry's roommate at Cambridge. Prime Minister David Lloyd George wrote in his diary in September of 1919: "My opinion is that we shall be reincarnated . . . and that hereafter we shall suffer or benefit in accordance with what we have done in this world" (Head 348). Spiritual leaders such as William Inge, Dean of St. Paul's, and Mahatma Gandhi, who replaced Annie Besant as President of the Indian Home Rule League and the Indian National Congress circa 1919, were making similar public pronouncements.

Despite her resistance to the very idea of "mysticism," Virginia Woolf's writings were displaying consistent mystical themes. The root "mystical experience" - loss of self; merger with a greater unity; the apprehension of numinousness, timelessness, transcendence, and intensified meaning - is recognizable in many of her novels and in her personal writings. Three such experiences in Woolf's early childhood constituted the most significant events of her life, as is apparent from a reading of her autobiography, Moments of Being. She managed, however, to evade the negative connotations of "mysticism" by terming them "moments of being" rather than "mystical experiences." Such moments constituted true "reality" for Woolf, a belief which she knew to be "irrational," but did not attempt to resolve: "It is irrational, it will not stand argument - that we are sealed vessels afloat upon what is convenient to call reality; at some moments, without a reason, without an effort, the sealing matter cracks; in floods reality" (142).