Knowing the Bible Right Down to the Bone: Ted Hughes and Christianity

Abstract

Much has been made of Hughes’ paganism, and indeed Hughes made much of it himself: in both published drafts of a letter to Bishop Ross Hook he likens poets to country healers providing an alternative to the Church’s National Health Service (LTH 459–60), a notion which jibes with his well-documented interest in astrology, cabbala and all things occult. Yet what are we to make of the passage above? Hughes’ matter-of-fact relation of the defining image of Christian faith to both cultural radicalism and spiritual health may not sit easily with our expectations — expectations formed, I would suggest, as much by critical commentary on Hughes’ writing as by the writing itself. The centrality of shamanism to Hughes’ work is beyond dispute, but I will argue in this chapter that from the beginning he proceeds under an assumption of compatibility between shamanism and Christianity, such that some of his most characteristic achievements rely for their success on the integrity of Christian symbols, and constitute genuine collaborations with Christian tradition.

Perhaps here too in the Metamorphoses he set out simply to entertain. But something else joined in, something emerging from the very nature of his materials yet belonging to that unique moment in history — the moment of the birth of Christ within the Roman Empire. The Greek/Roman pantheon had fallen in on men’s heads. The obsolete paraphernalia of the old official religion were lying in heaps, like old masks in the lumber room of a theatre, and new ones had not yet arrived. The mythic plane, so to speak, had been defrocked. At the same time, perhaps one could say as a result, the Empire was flooded with ecstatic cults. For all its Augustan stability, it was at sea in hysteria and despair, wallowing at one end in the bottomless appetites and sufferings of the gladiatorial arena, and at the other searching higher and higher for a spiritual transcendence — which eventually did take form, on the crucifix.

—Ted Hughes, Introduction to Tales from Ovid (TO x–xi)