The Mystics’ Table

1922–1999 · England

A Surrey engineer’s daughter who left her convent school at fifteen and refused to go back, worked as a wartime translator for the Foreign Office, and in 1953 was initiated into Gerald Gardner’s coven — then quietly rewrote much of what she found there. She saw that a good deal of Gardner’s supposedly ancient Book of Shadows was lifted from Aleister Crowley, cut it, and wrote in its place the ritual poetry that modern witchcraft still uses, above all the prose Charge of the Goddess. She broke with Gardner in 1957 when his appetite for newspaper publicity outran her patience, walked out on Robert Cochrane when his feuding turned malicious, and spent the rest of her life writing plain, readable books from a cramped Brighton flat full of them. She was also, for about eighteen months in the early 1970s, a member of the National Front — something she let lapse, objecting to its stance on women’s liberation and gay rights, and which her admirers do not hide.

1098–1179 · Rhineland

Benedictine abbess who did more kinds of work at the highest level than almost anyone in her millennium: seventy-seven surviving songs and the earliest known morality play set to music, visionary theology (Scivias), treatises on medicine and the natural world, an invented language — and letters that admonished emperors and popes by name. Given to the church at eight, she founded and led two monasteries and preached publicly in an age when women did not.

c.1373–1438 · England

English mystic and pilgrim who dictated The Book of Margery Kempe — often called the first autobiography in English. A brewer and mother of fourteen who failed at business twice, she walked away from ordinary life to travel to Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago, weeping openly, arguing with clergy, and insisting on the authority of her own experience in an age that gave her none.

1207–1273 · Persia

Persian poet, scholar, and Sufi mystic whose verse — the Masnavi and thousands of lyric poems — is among the most beloved and widely read in the world. His work fuses spiritual longing, love, and the search for unity into imagery that crosses every culture.

1875–1961 · Switzerland

Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology. Breaking from Freud, he mapped the psyche far beyond repression — the collective unconscious, archetypes, the shadow, and individuation, the lifelong work of becoming whole. His ideas reshaped how we read dreams, myth, personality, and the second half of life.