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The Qabalah in Finnegans Wake

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.

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So-called “artificial Intelligence” is on everyone’s minds these days. And no wonder we’re all thinking of it: it’s everywhere we look.

Case in point: the other day, I stumbled across a website about Finnegans Wake that appears to be entirely composed by AI, including AI-generated “podcasts” that feature AI voices summarizing someone’s notes about the Wake. These “podcasts” are presented as YouTube videos that accompany this inane droning with AI slop images.

It’s hard for me to express sufficiently my contempt for this sort of thing. I struggle to imagine anything more anathema to the Wake‘s celebration of humanity than the abomination of chipper robot voices reading the book line by line and summarizing the annotations while peppering them with trite phrases (“Okay, now let’s unpack that…yeah, did you hear the circularity there?”). It’s uncanny, creepy, and pointless. I want to hear an actual person’s embodied experience with the text, not a lifeless, thoughtless machine. What is someone getting out of listening to robots, who have no experience and perspective and humanity?

This “artificial intelligence” is of course misnamed because there’s nothing remotely intelligent about a computer program that merely predicts the next likely word. They’re not “intelligent.” They’re generative large language models. They’re a glorified autocomplete that has eaten the internet and can quickly regurgitate mediocrity in the form of the statistical average.

And don’t think it’s lost on me that these pathetic, mindless robot programs have been trained to some extent on my own writing, as well as the writing of other devotees of the Wake, who put our work out there into the world in the hopes of instructing and delighting, and who are rewarded by having our efforts swept into the maw of a hideous funhouse mirror that apes what it means to be human.

I take comfort in the fact that these generative systems are still so bad at what they do and produce material far inferior to what a thinking human can. Seeing this so-called “AI” everywhere and shoved into everything makes me wonder if the self-styled geniuses pushing this technology are getting desperate. So much money has been invested into generative LLMs that the “tech bros” at the helm need this nonsense to be adopted everywhere to justify all the money they’ve been pouring into it. It’s unfortunate for them that their toy is still so miserable at what it’s supposed to do. That’s a lot of money they’ve wasted on an autocomplete. It’s unfortunate for the rest of us that this nonsense is going to wreak havoc on the economy for at least a time as short-sighted employers hand over more tasks to machines.

But what does FInnegans Wake itself have to say about true, human intelligence and creativity, and about the hollow aping of it?

Read on to find out more!