Varieties of mystical experience in the writings of Virginia Woolf

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1995 by Julie Kane

The latter passage can stand as an archetype for the many "natural" mystical experiences occurring in Woolf's fictional works. Clarissa Dalloway, for example, associates such states of transport with latent sexual desires:

It was a sudden revelation . . . one . . . felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores! Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. (Mrs. Dalloway 27)

Mrs. Ramsay is "hypnotized" into her trance state by the beam of the lighthouse:

stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight, she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness . . . The ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough! (Lighthouse 56-57)

Bernard in The Waves, like Woolf herself, looks back to his childhood for the genesis of such "moments of being":

for a hole had been knocked in my mind, one of those sudden transparencies through which one sees everything. Then more bread and butter and more flies droning round the nursery ceiling on which quivered islands of light, ruffled, opalescent. (161)

In addition to sustaining episodes of "natural mysticism," Woolf and/or her characters also seemed to undergo several of the distinct varieties of mystical experience popularized by early-twentieth-century Theosophy. An example would be the ability to view the "aura" surrounding the human body. According to Hinduism and Theosophy, the prana or life force flows through the body via seven stepped chakras, or energy vortices. Each chakra corresponds to a different "vibratory level" and color, and to a level of spiritual awareness ascending from the genital, or root, chakra (red), to the crown, or spirit, chakra (violet). These swirling colored energies describe the "etheric double" body, which is visible in the form of an aura to certain sensitive individuals or, in the case of a highly evolved spiritual being such as Christ or Buddha, to all, in the form of a halo.

By 1910, at least, when she read this passage in her friend E. M. Forster's novel Howards End, Woolf had encountered the concept of the aura:

"It's all proteids and body-buildings, and people come up to you and beg your pardon, but you have such a beautiful aura."

"A what?"

"Never heard of an aura? Oh, happy, happy man! I scrub at mine for hours. Nor of an astral plane?"

He had heard of astral planes, and censured them. (150)

In her first novel, The Voyage Out, she has Terence Hewet explain the concept to his friend St. John Hirst:

"Meaning? Oh, something about bubbles - auras - what d'you call 'em? You can't see my bubble; I can't see yours; all we see of each other is a speck, like the wick in the middle of that flame. The flame goes about with us everywhere; it's not ourselves exactly, but what we feel; the world is short, or people mainly; all kinds of people."