1 Australian Aboriginal man, Ben Flick, tells a campfire story of the traditional importance to his people of The Dark Emu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzFYFutiwoA
2. See my discussion of the importance of images and symbols in ‘Ted Hughes and the Occult Tradition’ (Ted Hughes Society Journal, Vol. VI Issue I, 2017). Also available at http://ann.skea.com/TH and British Occult Tradition.html
3. This inscribed copy of Wolfwatching is held at Pembroke College, Cambridge University. My thanks to Pembroke College and to Carol Hughes for permission to reproduce this image
4. Ted Hughes, ‘A Zodiac in the Shape of a Crown’, in George Mackay Brown, (ed.) Four Poets for St. Magnus (Stromness, Orkney: Breckness Press 1987). This poem describes Prince William’s horoscope in detail and takes the form of a Court Masque in which the Prince’s astrological “high godparents” gather round is cradle and each speaks according to their particular mythological and astrological character, offering advice and gifts. I discuss this poem in detail at http://ann.skea.com/Zodiacpoem.htm
5. Ted Hughes, Tales of the Early World (London: Faber 1988). p.26.
6. Ted Hughes, The Tiger Boy (London: Faber & Faber, 2016).
7. British Library, Add Ms 88918/29/10, Diary entry for April 16, 1984.
8. British Library, Add Ms 88918/29/10, ‘my beasts’ appears in a dream on Nov. 4 1983.
9. Ann Skea, ‘Ted Hughes’s Vacanas: The Difficulties of a Bridegroom’, at http://ann.skea.com/THVacanas.html
10. ‘Awake!’ is discussed in detail in Ann Skea, ‘Adam and the Scared Nine: A Cabbalistic Drama’, at http://ann.skea.com/Adam1.html
11. Ted Hughes’s essay ‘Your World’ in The Observer Magazine, 29 November 1992. p.39.
12. Neil Roberts, Ted Hughes: A Literary Life (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan 2006). p. 173.
13. Marcus Manilius, Astronomicon, Book 4, Page 14: from a translation by Thomas Creech (1659-1700)
14. Ekbert Faas, The Unaccommodated Universe, Black Sparrow Press, Santa Barbara, 1980, p.207
15. Terry Gifford and Neil Roberts, Ted Hughes: A critical Study (London: Faber 1981). p. 256.
16. Ann Skea, ‘Ted Hughes’s Vacanas: The Difficulties of a Bridegroom’ at http://ann.skea.com/THVacanas.html
17. Shekinah, in Cabbala, is the ‘quasi–independent’, exiled, female aspect of God and ‘the sphere of Shekina [is] the dwelling place of the soul’. She is the primordial mother, linked with the moon, and her exile due to human sin is ‘sometimes represented as the banishment of the queen or of the king’s daughter by her husband or father’. The task of the Cabbalist is to work to expiate that sin, end her exile, and seal this with a sacred marriage which reunites the female and male aspects of God. These quotations are from Gershom Scholem’s detailed discussion of Shekinah in On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism (New York: Schoken 1996). pp. 135-157. Chokmah , otherwise known as ‘Wisdom’ and ‘The All Father’, is Sephira 2 on the Cabbalists’ Tree of Life where it represents one of the aspects of Divine energy manifest in our world.
18. British Library, Add. Mss 88918/12/9
19. Hughes to Keith Sagar, September/October 1973 (LTH 338); Hughes to William Scammell, 2 October 1993 (LTH 648-9)
20. Rober Graves, Greek Myths (London: Cassell 1981) pp. 72-3.
21. Ann Skea, Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (Armidale: UNE Press 1994). p. 200.
22. When constructing a birth–chart, astrologers adjust the time of birth to accord with Universal Time. ‘A few minutes after one a.m.’, for Hughes’s birth date, therefore becomes approximately 12.05 a.m. which in a letter to Ben Sonnenberg, quoted by Diane Middlebrook in Her Husband (N.Y. Viking 2003) p. 51, Hughes called ‘solar midnight’. In a letter to Olwyn 23 February 1957 (THL 94) he also notes the time and the positions of Jupiter ‘on the cusp of the fifth’, ‘near my Moon’ and ‘Moon opposite my ascendant’.
23. Add.Mss. 88918/10/17. 1970 Collins Desk Diary. These notes are written upside–down on the pages for December 22.