The James Joyce Connection (1)



I finished “Portrait” fifteen years ago, completed Ulysses about four months ago and soon started reading Finnegan's Wake. There is clearly a Bardic Astronomy connection to all three books. After two chapters of “Finnegan” and reading into a few commentaries like Campbell’s Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake I can begin to see what Joyce is doing with it. I don’t have the cultural and linguistic abilities to just sit down and read “Finnegan” from cover to cover. It is going to take a long time to get through it. Here, I’m giving the Bardic Astronomy connection to the story‘s beginning.

James Joyce is one of the greatest literary masters ever to have lived on the face of the earth. Near the end of his life he spent much of his time writing what seems to be gibberish. This was a major part of the humor of his last work, Finnegan‘s Wake. He had such excess capacity that he could apparently put it to no useful purpose better than thwarting those who could not or would not climb the snowy peaks on which he lived. He’s sort of a “good man gone bad” that manages to redeem himself in the end. He’s like a hermit, all one has to do is finally get up there with him and look at the view.

Bishop James Ussher deduced around 1654 that the first day of creation began on the nightfall preceding Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC. This is a time horizon of about 6,000 years. Joyce was looking back and forward at least twice this amount. Joyce’s time horizons were probably related to the Great Year. Joyce was planning a fourth work after Finnegan’s Wake but he died soon after completing “Finnegan.” This cut his dream short. We are left with a classic story like the Illiad or Odyssey but a story in which the usurpers are never completely thrown out. The story we are left with consists of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegan’s Wake taken together. My commentary here is limited to those three works.

If you are reading Finnegan’s Wake then expect to be going around to different sources, suffering and struggling for each little shred of understanding. It’s a rocky climb. No human being can read that strange book without the help of others and spending lots of time. Even the seemingly mundane plot has been painstakingly extracted by persons over generous periods of study. The “meat” of the work appears to be to grasp a relatively small number of motifs (perhaps ten or twenty) and how they relate to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and classic literature in general.

There are commentaries on the cultural and linguistic parts of Finnegan‘s Wake. Here I will attempt to present a few aspects of the “Bardic Astronomy” connection. The bards thought in symbols and I may be able to diagram most of this.

The ancients thought in cycles. The year is a cycle that can be presented by drawing a circle. The year has the four seasons of Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall. Harmony with the seasons was very important to the ancients.

It was important for them to have good stories about each of the four seasons. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a winter story, Ulysses is a spring story and Finnegan’s Wake is a summer story. Joyce’s missing last work was to be a “fall” story. James Joyce was a big fan of Dante Alighieri and this is the same structure of four of Dante’s works: La Vita Nuova, Inferno, Pergatorio and the Paradiso. Finnegan’s Wake corresponds with Dante’s Pergatorio.

Let me say at the very beginning that one stays in purgatory until one’s sins are washed away. This is why Finnegan’s Wake begins half way through the same sentence that ends it. A person stays in that mode of life--in early adulthood--until one understands the spiritual nature of the world. One stays in this purgatory until one sees the self and others as spirits.

Bardic literature uses or follows the ancient methods of the bards. Joyce’s works use the same framework as the most ancient stories. Before writing, the bards would go around the sky and use constellations and parts of old astronomy as “memory jogs” to help in remembering their stories. Joyce appears not to use the constellations so much as follow the thresholds, boundaries and underlying astronomical framework of the old stories. Because writing has been invented one is now free to do this and move away from using the constellations. Homer crafted the Odyssey before writing and constellation motifs can be found in the modern written versions that can lead one back to the old methods of remembering the story. Joyce writes like the ancient bards but without the constellational motifs. This ability to use the old framework came from Joyce reading many old stories and knowing old cosmology. This is also why it takes a lot of background to understand James Joyce.

Ancient bardic stories that went from Virgo/Leo past Gemini/Taurus and then on to Pisces/Aquarius were old cosmology. The world around us was thought to be about half way through its life cycle. In most of these stories, there was some great spirit that died or was killed and the spirit’s carcass became the world. The stories with death in them postulated “dead matter.” Other stories presented alternate cosmologies and left the cosmos asleep or imprisoned at Pisces/Aquarius. Matter in these cosmologies was like “mother earth” and thought to be still alive but somehow dormant. Either way, because we grew up out of this cosmological being or it‘s carcass, we were thought to inherit it’s qualities. The dead or dormant cosmos was thought to be like our father or mother. The death and resurrection in the beginning of Finnegan’s Wake is a reference to old cosmology.

In Finnegan’s Wake, Finnegan the hod carrier climbs up a ladder to do some work on a castle. The ladder is the World Tree. He falls down the ladder and hits his head. The people think he’s dead. His wife puts his body out to “feed the people” and for a wake. During the wake there is an argument and some whiskey gets splashed on Finnegan and he returns to life. Soon after this in the story, Finnegan is replaced with HCE (Here Comes Everybody) otherwise known as Humbolt C. Earwicker. HCE is an ordinary man like Horus is the ordinary man version of the cosmos Osiris. Finnegan was the Cosmos and HCE his resurrected son, like an Adam. The death of Osiris occurs in this same area (Pisces/Aquarius) as does the death of Ishtar and others. The ladder that Finnegan climbs is the Djed Pillar or World Tree that grew out of Osiris’s coffin.

Early adulthood is when people have children and work toward their own spiritual destiny. Joyce’s Adam and Eve story (Finnegan’s Wake) tells us the original Adam and Eve story from the bible took place after a death and resurrection. Joyce is helping us reconstruct some very old mythology. Finnegan's Wake is a modern Adam and Eve story written by an authentic bard. Adam and Eve in this story are HCE and his wife ALP. They have two sons Shem and Shaun and a daughter Issy.

Through inheritance HCE and his descendants are going to be like HCE’s predecessor; the Cosmos Finnegan. What do we know about Finnegan? From his friends and work we know he was a hard drinking, hard working, rowdy and fun loving man. Are there other clues about what Joyce thinks about the nature of the Cosmos? Yes! They are in his previous book, Ulysses. Ulysses ends with a similar sort of cosmological death and resurrection.

Forgive me everyone for I’m going to try and explain what this madman was thinking. Children please leave the room. The world tree at the end of Ulysses was the fireworks that entertained Leopold Bloom in his flirting with Gerty McDowell. A sexual climax is known as a “petite morte.” After this little death below the world tree, the resurrection is at the hospital in the next scene with the babies. There’s an old Egyptian myth about Atum, masturbating the world into existence. Joyce is telling us that his way of viewing this old Egyptian myth is like the episode with Leopold and Gerty in the park. Joyce places this variation of cosmology in the old bardic scheme. Again he is helping us to reconstruct some very old mythology while telling a bizarre and entertaining story. Joyce is implying that our (or perhaps HIS) cosmological ancestor is like a Finnegan or a Leopold Bloom!


Earlier I wrote: “The essence of the work is to grasp a relatively small number of motifs and how they relate to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses“ and classic literature in general.” The placing of the Adam and Eve story in the 3rd quarter of the sky and placing the cosmology just described at Pisces/Aquarius are examples of this. Joyce’s ideas are madly humorous and very profound.

A Second Example

The river constellation Eridanus is Ishtar’s path down into the underworld to visit her sister. When the spiritual time of the year, winter, was over (around Easter) Ishtar entered a cave to visit her sister. The Auriga constellation looks like a cave. There were gatekeepers within the cave and each time she went to a lower level, the gatekeeper demanded that Ishtar remove an article of clothing. When she finally got to her sister, her sister killed her and Ishtar became “naked earth.”

In the Odyssey, Odysseus has an adventure where he encounters the sirens. The sirens are usually portrayed as being naked. Here is Ulysses and the Sirens by Herbert James Draper.

The Odyssey was from old bardic times when the constellations were still used to help remember stories. Here a plate that shows the way it was remembered.



My point is that there is a nakedness motif identified with Pisces/Aquarius that goes back to the ancient world. The Jesus story also goes back into the ancient world. The path Jesus took when carrying his cross was also Eridanus, “The River.” This path ends at Pisces/Aquarius where he was crucified. He is today usually portrayed as having a cloth covering himself but this was changed in modern times to fit our modern moral ideas about nudity.

A significant part of Finnegan’s Wake is that early in the story HCE was rumored to have exposed himself in a park to two young women. The name of the place was called Phoenix Park. The exposure after the death and resurrection is an unmistakable bardic reference. By including this James Joyce is in harmony with the ancient stories like The Odyssey and the Ishtar story.

Earlier I wrote: “The essence of the work is to grasp a relatively small number of motifs and how they relate to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and classic literature in general.” The nakedness reference is one of these motifs included by Joyce because he was aware of very ancient cosmology.