Tag Archives: Close Reading

The Middle Pillar and Chakras in the Wake

Leave a reply

Coming off my last post about Qabalah, I thought it would be useful to discuss a passage of the Wake in which the yogic “energy centers” of the body appear. This is another piece of occult beliefs that Joyce probably first encountered as part of Theosophy: in some traditions of yoga (that is, Indian systems of mysticism), there are said to be seven energy centers or “chakras” running down the body, along the spinal cord. In Western occult traditions, a similar belief in energy centers was endorsed by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which attributed five energy centers to some sephiroth of the Tree of Life, the central column of spheres called the “Middle Pillar.” The idea is that the Middle Pillar is balanced between the pillar of severity and the pillar of mercy, just as Tipareth (the central sephirah) balances also the spheres above and below it (and thus is the union of the physical and the spiritual, the human and the divine).

Read on for my discussion of Joyce’s attribution of Irish writers to these energy centers.

Continue reading →

The Qabalah in Finnegans Wake

1 Reply

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.

Continue reading →

“We’re Not Gonna Talk about Judy at All”

Leave a reply

The first time I saw the word “pentschanjeuchy” in Finnegans Wake I.1, I thought it simply referred to the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. Thanks to my days in Catholic school, I had memorized the names of these books in order (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), and I recognized references to them in the lines just before “pentschanjeuchy” appeared. Why the weird spelling? Eh, who knows, I figured. Joyce can be weird. The Wake is a weird book.

Years later, I consulted annotations and was surprised to learn that this word is also a reference to a puppet show called “Punch and Judy”: “a traditional British slapstick puppet show; Punch is a hunchback [HCE symbol], Judy is his wife [ALP symbol].”

Okay, I thought. The dreamer’s mind contains both his ego and Anima, the feminine portion of the psyche (cue Buck Mulligan’s dirty joke from Ulysses: “Every man his own wife”).

I didn’t think that much of it, and I certainly never set out to learn much about Punch and Judy. Perhaps over the years I came across the idea that Punch is over-the-top violent, but it never interested me much. Flash forward to just the other week when I was reading The Magicians of Caprona with my daughter. This book is a fantasy story by Diana Wynne Jones, author of Howl’s Moving Castle, which I’ve written about here. In this story, the show Punch and Judy plays a rather large role, as one of the characters is a fan and collector of the puppets, and there’s a brilliant chapter later in the book where the show takes center stage.

When a character attends a Punch and Judy show early in the book, I was surprised to see a sentence announce that the character got to the front of the crowd and was “able to watch Punch beat Judy to death at the top of his little painted sentry-box.”

The content of the sentence is horrible, but the casualness with which it is relayed is funny (the essence of comedy is in contrasts, mismatches, and exaggerations). It also made me read up some more on Punch and Judy and ponder their connection to Finnegans Wake.

Read on for a few of my thoughts and my musings about the question of whether HCE is an abuser.

Continue reading →