The Qabalah is a tradition popular in Western esotericism. It was originally a form of Jewish mysticism, dealing with the idea of God’s power “emanating” into creation in ways detailed in a diagram called the “Tree of Life,” a series of ten spheres (called “sephiroth”) that represent various concepts: they are arranged descending toward the sphere representing the physical universe. During the Renaissance, Hebrew Qabalah became an influence on Western Hermeticism, occultism, and “magick.” Ideas derived from the Hebrew system became combined with other esoteric ideas like astrology and tarot. Later occultists, including members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, of which W.B. Yeats was a member, engaged in “magical” practices that drew upon Qabalah, such as imagining spheres of light on the body corresponding to the sephiroth.

So what does any of this have to do with Finnegans Wake? There are several references to Qabalah and other occult topics in the novel, which Joyce likely learned about through his interest in Theosophy, a spiritual movement that blended a number of different beliefs and practices from all around the world. After losing faith in Catholicism, Joyce investigated other spiritual traditions like this, before more or less rejecting most of supernaturalism. I qualify that last sentence because the issue of what exactly Joyce personally believed, at various points in his life, is complicated, but we can be confident from his mocking references to Theosophy in Ulysses that by the time he wrote that novel, he did not accept it and found it at least kind of silly.

The most major Qabalistic reference in Finnegans Wake is the list of ten syllables running down page 308 in II.2, which I have discussed here.

This post will muse a little more about the relationship between Qabalah and the Wake, and I will even suggest that the Wake could function like a Qabalistic classification system and could be the basis of practices that are enriching to an individual. Belief in the supernatural is not necessary to view the Wake this way or to use these practices.

At its core, the Tree of Life diagram provides a framework for understanding the universe, in the sense that everything in the world can be “attributed” to some part of it (that is, classified into one of the sephiroth or the paths between them). We can use the diagram to think about the relationship between those elements of the universe.

There are two advantages to doing this. One is to conceptualize the relationship between different elements of a person’s life and help make a person more aware of the connections between them. The other, related benefit comes about as a result of a contemplative practice. Students of mindfulness often practice “labeling” thoughts that they notice during everyday life. That is, you strive to become increasingly conscious of your thoughts during your everyday activities. For example, you observe yourself in the morning and say to yourself, “A feeling of hunger,” or you notice a thought arise and says, “A thought about that guy at work…a feeling of annoyance toward him.” And so on.

The Tree of Life gives you a place to “put” all those thoughts and feelings, so you don’t just notice them: you slot them into the correct places. Hunger can be attributed to Malkuth (sephirah 10, corresponding to the physical world and the body), annoyance or anger can be attributed to Netzach (sephirah 7, representing emotion), conflict at work can be attributed to Geburah (sephirah 5, signifying conflicts of all kinds).

Why bother doing that? The act of classifying thoughts tends to weaken the “attachment” you have to each one. As practitioners of mindfulness will tell you from experience, there’s a world of difference between, on the one hand, having an angry thought and, on the other, thinking “An angry thought is arising.” The former (attachment to thought) strengthens the idea of the ego, the narratives you tell yourself about yourself and that you can get trapped in. The latter lets you, in a sense, “step outside” your thoughts and feelings, and understand them not as unmediated reflections of some “true you” that’s really in there but as creations of the mind that do not necessarily define you or dictate how you should act. Noticing the thoughts as thoughts helps you break their hold on you, and evaluating the thoughts in order to slot them into the correct sephiroth can help further distance you from them.

With that distance, you start to appreciate how reality is not identical to your thoughts about it. For example, many of us would think “That guy is a jerk” and react to it as a fact. But when you start noticing “A thought that that guy is a jerk is arising” — and when you start looking at it impartially, as some mental phenomenon that goes in sephiroth 5 and 7 — you more easily recognize it as an opinion. Is he really a jerk? Or is your mind attributing motivation to him, or misinterpreting his actions?

Put another way, there’s a difference between, on the one hand, noticing that a thought is arising and watching it pass away, and, on the other, getting trapped in that thought and telling yourself more and more stories about it. In the former case, you might notice that an angry thought arises, and that gives you more information about your mind as you get on with your day and focus on other things. In the latter case, you might spend an hour thinking about this “jerk” that you’re angry with, telling yourself all kinds of stories about how you’re right and he’s wrong, and imagining what you’ll say to him or what he’s thinking about you or etc., etc., etc. And then, lo and behold, you’ve lost that hour: your attention was swallowed up by stories you’re inventing, when you could have been attending more fully to your experience of life in the moment.

This sort of “storytelling” tendency of our minds is happening all the time. We’re almost constantly lost in thought without realizing that we’re lost in thought. We wander through life telling ourselves stories about everything we see, perceiving everything through a veil of discursivity, and constructing elaborate narratives in which there is a “self” that is the star of the show.

This storytelling tendency — this tendency to become lost in our stories without realizing that this is what we’re doing — is a major part of what is called the ego or Selfhood. On this blog, I’ve also called it “believing in the self as an essence,” believing that other people and things are stable essences and correspond to Platonic ideals. You can read my thoughts on that here.

Simply put, the practice of mindfulness is an attempt to interrupt the mind’s tendency to trap us in narratives. The Qabalistic Tree of Life can be a tool for such contemplative practices, helping us to observe and classify the contents of our minds dispassionately and loosen our “attachment” to them, our tendency to identify entirely with those contents and spin off into more narratives about them.

Finnegans Wake, that love letter to storytelling, also reveals how our minds entrap us in ego and Selfhood (represented especially by versions Shaun) and how we can seek to rise above these narratives.

And to that end, the Wake could be used as a kind of Qabalah, to which we could attribute the contents of our minds and our experience. Each of the characters of the novel is ultimately an archetype to which many different things can be attributed. HCE is Adam, Caesar, Wellington, Napoleon, Humpty Dumpty, Parnell, etc. But he’s also the insecurity in each of us, our worry about our reputation, our desire for popularity, our non-normative desires, our sorrow and defeats. Tristan is our victories and our pride. ALP is our emotional connection to others, our generosity, our longing, our feelings of duty to family, our “maternal” emotions. Etc. etc.

I’m not inspired at the moment to sketch out a fuller list of correspondences of all possible characters in the Wake, and I suspect that doing so wouldn’t be all that useful to readers. In the way that each of us has to make our “own Qabalah,” in a sense, we each can develop a unique relationship to Finnegans Wake and a unique way of mapping the contents of our minds and our personal lives to it. As I’ve said elsewhere — when the Bay Area’s “Clipper Card” reminded me of a line in I.4 — Finnegans Wake truly comes alive when a reader starts associating it with everyday experience. And everyone will do this in different ways. Perhaps this is the way in which we each have our “own Finnegans Wake.”

I’ll add this point: I’ve long been taken by the fact that tarot cards can be regarded as a different kind of framework for correspondences, and can be thought of in a sense as illustrations of the Tree of Life (briefly, the trumps are attributed to paths between sephiroth while the small cards are attributed to the sephiroth and the “four elements” in each sephirah). I’ve had this wild idea bouncing around in my head for a “Finnegans Wake Tarot Deck,” and if there are any artists reading this who are interested in collaborating, please get in touch.

My fear is that such a project would be too niche, or looked at as some kind of “woo woo” nonsense. Hopefully, this post has convinced readers that there is value to be had in esoteric symbols even if the person using the symbols does not believe in anything supernatural. One does not have to believe in God or his “emanations” or in the ability of pieces of cardboard to predict the future or in the positions of stars influencing events on earth, etc., to see the Tree of Life, tarot cards, astrological signs and other pieces of occult symbolism as useful in ways that can be described purely in terms of psychology, neuroscience, and other subjects that do not depend at all on dubious claims unsupported by evidence.

*

There’s more work to be done attributing the syllables on page 308 to various other concepts throughout the novel. For example, I want eventually to attribute the 12 Buddhist nidanas from page 18 to the Tree of Life and to the ten words.

Other moments in the Wake offer tantalizing references to the Qabalah. From the last page of I.1, regarding the misdeed of HCE: “Though Eset fibble it to the zephiroth and Artsa zoom it round her heavens for ever.” Eset comes from a Hebrew word for “wife,” ALP, who has fibbed and gossiped about the misdeed and also fiddled it; she has told it to the wind, the zephyr, and to all of creation, the sephiroth. The immediate next sentences are “Creator he has created for his creatured ones a creation. White monothoid? Red theatrocrat? And all the pinkprophets cohalething? Very much so!” The first of those sentences sound like creation understood as the Tree of Life, which is typically divided into four worlds (corresponding here to the four forms of the word “create”): HCE is the first sphere (Kether, the “white monothoid”) that has emanated forth into the universe. Red is usually attributed to Geburah (5) as white is to Kether, but I’m unsure if this is also a Qabalistic reference. There is no path directly from Kether to Geburah on the Tree of Life, for what it’s worth, but Geburah is linked to the supernal triad (sephiroth 1-3) by a path attributed to the Hebrew letter Cheth and the tarot trump “The Chariot,” symbolizing forward motion, willpower, and acting in accord with the flow of life (I always associate it with the Taoist concept of “Wu Wei,” doing by not-doing, by not resisting the natural motion of the universe, which includes your own inclination). “Theatrocrat” blends theocrat (who may be a monotheist/monothoid) with theatre, anticipating how HCE is depicted as attending the theatre in I.2 and how the children put on a play for him in II.1. Perhaps the idea here is that God, or each individual in the highest sense, is both playwright and audience; I ought to make a post about Stephen Dedalus’ comments on drama in Portrait of the Artist.

Early in II.2, HCE is called Ainsoph, Hebrew for “without limit,” which is the title of one of the “negative veils” above the Tree of Life and from which the Tree comes. As I discussed in my Grace Before Glutton post, the veils could be thought of as ways of conceiving the undifferentiated flux of the universe, a No-Thing riverrun of Becoming, which the mind cannot even conceptualize. Kether (sephirah 1) is a single point in that flux that comes to drape itself in the illusion of individuality so as to make experience possible.

Issy’s footnote says that Ainsoph is “Groupname for grapejuice,” alluding to the wine of communion. I am reminded of how alcohol represents throughout Finnegans Wake both the Fall and the Rise. HCE is described alongside “that noughty besighed him zeroine.” Here, HCE and ALP are attributed to the negative veils that precede the manifest universe (or, rather, that precede our perception of it). I am reminded of that idea contained later in the math problem of II.2: that zero raised to the zero power produces some undefined number. Out of absolutely nothing comes something: out of endless flux come our stories about relatively stable “things.”

Page 262 calls him the “decemt man”: a decent man who is in the end of his days like the month of december (who “may again when the fiery bird disembers,” from 1.1). But maybe he’s also the “descent man,” from who we descend and who descends from Kether down to Malkuth: page 262 has short sentences running down the page that I’m tempted to attribute to 1-10 on the Tree of Life:

This bridge is upper.
Cross.
Thus come to castle.
Knock.
A password, thanks.
Yes, pearse.
Well, all be dumbed!
O really?
Hoo cavedin earthwight
At furscht kracht of thunder.
When shoo, his flutterby,
Was netted and named.
Erdnacrusha, requiestress, wake em!
And let luck’s puresplutterall lucy at ease!
To house as wise fool ages builded.
Sow byg eat.

I would attribute “At furscht kracht of thunder” to Geburah (5, conflict) and the two lines about the butterfly being netted to Tipareth (6, the center of the Tree and the “soul”). Counting down from there, “Sow byg eat” would be Malkuth (the cosmic meal: “Their feed begins,” from page 308 — this is also the “so be it” that appears on page 27 as “So be yet!” when the mourners of I.1 hold down Finnegan so that HCE can replace him). Counting back up, “Yes, pearse” is 1, and maybe everything above that is also attributed to 1 or to the negative veils (above the Abyss, precise identity doesn’t much matter).

Fun fact: it was from this passage that I learned that butterflies were originally called flutterbys, which is a much more logical name.

There’s much to say about this section — especially given that Shaun’s marginal comment calls this passage “PROBAPOSSIBLE PROLEGOMENA TO IDEAREAL HISTORY.”

But this post is getting long enough. Interested readers might reflect on my comments on probability and possibility in the Wake, including this post and this one.