The Bowl

Super Bowl 47 weaves together several disparate narrative threads that this blog has been following over the last seven months. The singing of "America the Beautiful" by Jennifer Hudson and a 26-member choir of Sandy Hook Elementary school children is the most obvious example. For many people of who were struck by the synchronistic connection of Dark Knight Rises and the horrific shooting on Dec. 14th, their first thought on hearing that the Sandy Hook students would perform was this:

Fortunately nothing of the sort happened. We were assured that Bane was nowhere to be found. While this demonstrates once again the probable inability to make accurate predictions with this material, the significance of this synchronicity should not be downplayed. While "Sandy Hook" flashes on screen for only a frame or two of DKR, the viral package map released before the movie clearly indicates that Sandy Hook is "Strike Zone 1" of Bane's campaign of terror. The stadium scene above happens in the fictional Sandy Hook of Gotham City.

Strike 1
It's a bad day to be a sports fan. Bane has Gotham Stadium set in his sights and it's his first "strike zone." What exactly will he do at each strike zone? We have no idea, but we're willing to bet the stadium is going to need some repairs once the foe is finished with the location. 

This was written in December of 2011. To have the Sandy Hook choir sing at a football stadium, and especially at the first Super Bowl following the tragedy, understandably triggered a wave of concern. And yet nothing occurred -- almost nothing.

Tales Told of Jim and John

At 13 minutes and 22 seconds into the third period, the power for at least half the stadium mysteriously went out. The blackout, unprecedented at the Super Bowl, occurred when the score was 6-28 with the Baltimore Ravens leading. The readers of my last post on James Joyce will understand why the fine hairs of my neck stood on end when I first heard of this.

22 is essentially Joyce's number -- he was born on 2/2, was 22 in 1904, etc. -- and Jan. 13th, also the 13th day of the year, was when Joyce died in 1941. 628 is the number of pages in the Wake. These three numbers in particular were key to my entire article.

William Klaus of iAhuasca has provided further connections. The San Fransisco 49ers coach is Jim Harbaugh. His brother, John, is the coach of the victorious Baltimore Ravens. Brother against brother. Jim, or James, against John.



James Joyce's own brother was John Stanislaus Joyce Jr., and Joyce used himself and his brother as partial models for Shem and Shaun in Finnegans Wake. The two brother coaches of the Super Bowl, then, are living manifestations of the warring brothers/Hero Twins archetype that are central figures in both the Wake and this blog.

Aside from the blackout, the other unprecedented event of Super Bowl 47 was the record 108-yard kickoff return by Jacoby Jones. Klaus points out Jones' initials -- J.J.! Joyce set the most famous of his books, Ulysses, published in 1922, in 1904. From 1904 is a 108-year cycle ending in 2012. And, symbolically with this return perhaps, a new cycle of revelation starts this year.

The last post revealed what I think concerns the deep structure of Finnegans Wake. I made the absurd claim at its conclusion that Joyce was an embodied expression of what Dick called "cosmic consciousness." Absurd, but then the next day, the day after Joyce's birthday, all of this happens. Did Joyce arrive to tip his hat for anyone who was paying attention?
The blackout lasted for 34 minutes and the Ravens ended up winning 34-31 over the 49ers. An interesting, if pessimistic, post on the GLP Forum identified the blackout of half the Superdome as an example of yin and yang polarity. This polarity extends, once again, to the Cain and Abel rivalry of the brother coaches. It also is reflected in the names of the two teams -- the Ravens are dark and the 49ers are golden and filled with light.

I also found it interesting that the Ravens are named after the famous poem by Edgar Allan Poe. Poe died in Baltimore in 1849 (a fact I'll be returning to). The 49ers, of course, are named after the California Gold Rush of 1849. 1 plus 8 plus 4 plus 9 equals 22. And to top it all off, James Joyce's father, John Stanislaus Sr., was born on the 4th of July, 1849.

 
 

An Evil Genius

The poster on GLP views the Super Bowl power outage as part of an occult conspiracy. This could certainly be the case. Those concerned with the connections between the Dark Knight shooting, Sandy Hook and Super Bowl 47 also hint at occult plots and sinister forces.

This is not to be sniggered away. Esoteric orders have always given tribute to Secret Chiefs. Hitler spoke of being afraid of a "new man." Gnostics have traditionally held that this world is under the sway of malevolent Archons. And even the so-called father of modern rationalism, René Descartes, hypothesized that is was quite possible that an evil genius -- essentially a Gnostic-type Demiurge -- has us all trapped in an illusion that we take as being real.



An occult conspiracy of this sort does not imply simply the use of esoteric rituals and symbols, etc. Such a conspiracy indicates a manipulation of reality, a willed molding of time and space, in a fashion that is just not possible for ordinary humans bound by the laws of physics as they are usually understood.  Occult powers are being employed. The siddhis are being wielded against us.

Over the last decade or more, many conspiracy theorists have evolved towards the acceptance of this type of conspiracy -- whether they attribute it to space aliens, demons, fourth-dimensional entities, etc. -- because things do not seem to be explainable in any other way. Synchronicity, especially, is something that utterly baffles conspiracy theorists. Mere human conspirators would not have the ability to play with time in the way that synchronicity demonstrates.



So in order to remain within the conspiratorial paradigm, these theorists have to postulate an even greater non- or trans-human conspiracy. Obviously when this path of thinking is taken speculation (and paranoia) is endless.

In the case of the Super Bowl 47 synchronicities referred to above, however, we've got to ask -- what does Joyce have to do with the occult conspiracy? Why would such synchronicities be of use to any conspirators -- human, alien, demon or otherwise? How would occult conspiracy theory answer these questions? By suggesting that Joyce is a demonic source? By asserting that these particular synchronicities are actually meaningless?

If the last is true, how would such a theory confirm that any of the synchronicities and correspondences that it highlights and propagates -- like the Dark Knight/Sandy Hook connection -- do have meaning?  

To be consistent, to be really open to the truth in all of its utter weirdness, we must accept the possibility that it all  has meaning. But is it all conspiracy? This is also an open question.

Undermining The Very Fabric Of Reality

The last post discussed the idea that Joyce represents the Cauldron hexagram of the I Ching. The Caudron is an intrinsically positive symbol. Cauldrons can be used to cook food in, to make alchemical experiments with, or to brew medicines like ayahuasca within. They are chambers of creativity and nourishment. 

Cauldrons are vessels that contain liquid but are heated with fire. In this post, I'd like to explore the symbolism of a different type of vessel, one more exclusively associated with water. This is the bowl, like the Super Bowl, but more specifically it is the toilet bowl. Toilet bowls are also necessary because they take in waste. They assist in elimination instead of creation. In general, bowls hold liquid. The danger with bowls, though, is that occasionally what they hold cannot be contained.



Slavoj Žižek, in his excellent documentary, The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, discusses the difference -- and the horror -- of when a toilet works in its proper fashion and when it does not. 

In our most elementary experience, when we flush the toilet, excrements simply disappear out of our reality into another space, which we phenomenologically perceive as a kind of a netherworld, another reality - a chaotic, primordial reality. And the ultimate horror, of course, is if the flushing doesn’t work, if objects return, if remainders, excremental remainders, return from that dimension. The bathroom: Hitchcock is all the time playing with this threshold.

Žižek goes on to describe how in the movie Psycho, after committing his bloody crime in the shower, Norman Bates meticulously, carefully, scrubs and cleans ever inch of the bathroom. Not a trace of his evil-doing remains visible. But it is still there. The bath, the bowl, in a sense stills contains it. And it has the potential of letting it well up, once again, to the surface. The bowl can overflow.

The work of erasing the stains, keeping at bay this chaotic netherworld, which threatens to explode at any time and engulf us. I think this is the fine sentiment that Hitchcock’s films evoke. It’s not simply that something horrible happens in reality. Something worse can happen which undermines the very fabric of what we experience as reality.

This primordial, even excremental, fear that the toilets will overflow, that all of our fears -- every dark thing that we have repressed -- will somehow be revealed and mess up our comfortable lives, is the secret to good horror. Žižek points to just this scenario in Coppola's The Conversation. Unlike in Psycho, the toilet bowl refuses to let the blood and gore of the murdered victim be kept hidden within it.



Elsewhere in his documentary, Žižek applies this idea to film more generally:

When we spectators are sitting in a movie theatre, looking at the screen... You remember, at the very beginning, before the picture is on, it's a black, dark screen, and then light thrown on. Are we basically not staring into a toilet bowl and waiting for things to reappear out of the toilet? And is the entire magic of a spectacle shown on the screen not a kind of deceptive lure, trying to conceal the fact that we are basically watching shit, as it were?

Watching shit. Waiting for the dirty contents of our own unconscious minds to fill the screen, and secretly hoping they do not spill over into our real lives. If, as many people think Kubrick implied, the movie screen is a monolith then it is also a toilet bowl. The blackness comes from the same source. What comes out of it can disgust, enlighten or horrify.



I'd like to take this in a broader way than even Žižek or Kubrick want to go. All screens, all media, all spectacles, are potential cauldrons or toilet bowls. The archetypal substance that wells out of them is the same but we, in a sense, choose to view it from our own perspective. Occult conspiracy theorists view it all as being shit. Perhaps us lovers of synchronicity take it as a type of medicine. Is it both? Is it either? For now, let's sift through some shit.

 

Passage Through Water

Jennifer Hudson sang "America the Beautiful" with the Sandy Hook kids at the Super Bowl, but almost exactly a year before she was also at the centre of a major media spectacle. On Feb. 10th, 2012 Hudson appeared on CNN with music producer, Clive Davis. Davis claimed in this interview that Hudson had the potential to rival his famous protégé, Whitney Houston. The next day, Feb. 11th, Whitney was found dead in her bathtub. The day after that, Jennifer Hudson gave an emotional tribute to Whitney at the 54th Grammy Awards by singing "I Will Always Love You."



The idea that Whitney Houston was sacrificed by the Illuminati spread like wildfire throughout the web, with the usual sources providing occult conspiracy analysis. Although this may seem like old news, as the anniversary has just passed it is worth examining some of these anomalous details and especially how these details fit into the series of "mega-rituals" conducted over the last year.

The coroner was asked not to remove Whitney Houston's body from the Beverly Hilton Hotel until after Clive Davis' celebrity pre-Grammy party, held in the same hotel where Whitney died just hours before. It later emerged that Whitney's daughter, Bobbi Kristina, herself almost drowned in a bathtub on the same floor of the same hotel just a day before her mother was found dead in the bathtub. 



Reportedly just hours before her death Whitney had been quoting verses from the Gospel of Matthew  (3:13-17) about the water baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist (coincidentally, this event was originally celebrated on Jan. 13th, the day Joyce died.)

Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptized by John. But John tried to deter him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?”

 Jesus replied, “Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness.” Then John consented.

 As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.

Did Whitney have a premonition of her own watery death? Such speculation only increased after people viewed what was to have been Whitney's last appearance in the media. Two days before her death she and her daughter appeared suddenly, with her hair still wet from swimming in a pool, at a TV interview with Clive Davis and singers Monica and Brandy. Whitney handed Brandy a still mysterious note and told her daughter to kiss Davis. Brandy celebrated her 33rd birthday on the 11th, the day Whitney died.

Another popular singer, Lady Gaga, also has an important connection with Feb. 11th and Whitney Houston. During the 2011 Grammy Awards, Lady Gaga revealed that she when she was writing her hit song, "Born This Way," she imagined Whitney was singing it in order to boost her own confidence. "Born This Way" was released on Feb. 11th, 2011.

At the 2012 Grammy Awards, on Feb. 12th, aside from Jennifer Hudson's moving tribute to Whitney, the biggest stir was caused by a performance by Nicki Minaj. Her debut of "Roman Holiday," which featured the attempted exorcism of her male alter-ego, "Roman Zolanski," was immediately pegged as a Satanic Illuminati ritual. The connection of Roman and his exorcism with Roman Polanski and Rosemary's Baby was undoubtedly intentional. And with this, Minaj or her publicists cleverly linked this show with a sync rabbit hole that has no discernible bottom.

Minaj had just the week before performed with Madonna at the hafltime show of Super Bowl 46. This blog has extensively examined certain ritual aspects of this show, especially the possibility that it represented a ceremony to mark the collective passage through the Abyss. Once again, the M-letter standards held aloft during the performance may have symbolized the 13th path, also indicated by the Hebrew letter Gimel and identified with the High Priestess, of the central pillar of the Tree of Life which passes through the Abyss.


It's interesting that Minaj was about the only performer during the show to not bear the letter M. Instead she wore the letter N. In the present reckoning, this would identify her with the 14th path (also Daleth) joining Chokmah and Binah, which the 13th path intersects after passing through Da'at. This is the N of Madonna's MDNA. If Madonna is the Priestess, is Minaj the Empress? Is this why she arrived with the Pope at the Grammy's a week later? 

Madonna's Super Bowl performance last year recalled a similar performance in 2008 at the grand opening of the Atlantis, The Palm resort hotel in Dubai. This performance/mega-ritual also featured a comparably clad High Priestess declaring "Behold, Atlantis Rising!" while massive scenes of the collapse of civilization and the resurfacing of the sunken continent were projected onto the resort's walls. I first learned of this from Christopher Knowles' excellent analysis back in 2008.   



For William Blake, as noted in an earlier post, the rising of Atlantis also signified the upward movement of a kind of third pillar reuniting the Old and New Worlds and identified with the coming of the New Jerusalem. The symbolism of the two rituals, in Dubai and at the Super Bowl, are thus the same.

It's fairly easy, then, to make the assumption that there is an occult narrative tying together the mass spectacles of recent years, and especially of 2012. Many also make the link between the Madonna/Whitney/Grammy ritual sequence with the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, beginning on Feb. 6th, the day after the Super Bowl, and continuing on into the Torch Relay of the London 2012 Olympics. The whole of last year can be read as a non-stop ceremony to aid in the passage between Ages.

Four

Super Bowl 47 appears to be a continuation of this narrative. This time it was Beyoncé who performed at halftime, and while the esoteric symbolism of her show was perhaps not as in-your-face as Madonna's, it is clearly there. Like Jennifer Hudson, Beyoncé has also performed in other recent mass spectacles. The most notable was her lip-synching of the US national anthem at Obama's second inauguration.

Obama swore his oath of office on two Bibles -- one owned by Abraham Lincoln and the second by Martin Luther King. Both of these men were of course assassinated, and so it is interesting to consider the deeper significance of Obama's choice of Bibles. The public inauguration also happened to occur on Martin Luther King Day.



The conjunction of Bible, Lincoln and Obama also takes us back to the tenth anniversary ceremony for 9/11.  On this occasion Obama read from Psalm 46 (foreshadowing Super Bowl 46), Bloomberg read from Macbeth, and Bush read a letter by Lincoln. All of these are connected.

Obama also has a curious contact with Whitney Houston's last place of residence. Just days after the singer was found dead on the fourth floor of the Beverly Hilton, the president spent time at the same hotel before attending a fundraising event. A coincidence? Occult conspiracy theorists obviously think otherwise.

In a similarly dubious connection, the secrecy and strange rumours surrounding the birth of Beyoncé's daughter, Blue Ivy, also provoked speculation concerning Whitney's passing. Such secretive circumstances, after the child was born on Jan. 7th, 2012, brought immediate comparisons with Rosemary's Baby (which again recalls Minaj's Grammy performance). A bizarre rumour that even more bizarrely went viral claimed that Blue Ivy spelled backwards, Eulb Yvi, is the daughter of Lucifer.



To put any credence into the Eulb Yvi rumour, or to further suggest that Whitney was a sacrifice for the child, is clearly ridiculous, but certain uncanny coincidences remain. Ivy is the equivalent of IV or four in Roman numerals. The obsession of Beyoncé and Jay-Z, both born on the fourth of different months, with the number four is well known. This number appears to play a large role in this narrative.

Blue Ivy was born on the fourth floor of a hospital entirely rented out by her parents. Whitney Houston died on the fourth floor of the Hilton. Obama, the 44th president, stayed briefly at the Hilton four days later and arrived at around 4:40 p.m. Madonna's MDNA concerts had four parts, Transgression, Prophecy, Masculine/Feminine, and Redemption, which are are reminiscent of the four-part Fall and Redemption cycle in both Finnegans Wake and the four ceremonies of London 2012.

Gushing

All this is shit, not necessarily bullshit, but shit nonetheless. It gushes out of our screens. It sticks to us. Like junk food, we begin to crave ever more of it. Is there a significance to any of this? Are we uncovering a vast and nefarious esoteric occult agenda, or has the Spectacle itself found an even subtler means to attract an audience -- "occult conspiracy" as viral marketing? Have we mistaken the backed-up effluent of a broken toilet bowl for the nourishment and wisdom flowing out from a cauldron of plenty? 




Or could these two be the same thing? Anyone who has been paying attention over the last year might also be thinking that this is all old news. Sophisticated conspiracy theorists and sync heads could dismiss this as celebrity gossip and unoriginal pop theorizing. This is true. None of this is particularly new or original. Regurgitated shit never is. Pop always wells up from the toilet. So why dwell on it? 

Perhaps it's not meaningless. Perhaps it's something far stranger than even occult conspiracy. Perhaps it all does involve James Joyce. It is a narrative that needs to be reexamined, recontextualized, in order to fully grasp what is occurring at this moment.

These events mainly took place around the festival season of Imbolc in early February of last year. A year has now passed since this time, and on the first anniversary things appear to be culminating. Brigid is once again offering inspiration. The chaotic netherworld can no longer be kept at bay.

The Cauldron

James Augusta Aloysius Joyce turns 131 today. His most well-known book, Ulysses, is now 91 years old. I've discussed before in this blog Joyce's obsession with his birthday on 2/2, coinciding with Imbolc, St. Brigid's Day, Candlemas and Groundhog Day, and the number 22.

He was 22 in 1904 on June 16th, a day he later immortalized in Ulysses and now celebrated as Bloomsday. 6+16 equals 22, and, as Robert Anton Wilson pointed out, the first sentence in Ulysses has 22 words:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. 

Into the Pot

Joyce turned 40 years old on the day Ulysses was published, and he would have been very aware of both the connection of 22 with the Kabbalah as well as the taboo, whether accurate or not, of studying the Kabbalah before the age of 40. We can assume that Finnegans Wake, which he began almost immediately after publishing Ulysses, is a profound study, undoubtedly in a playful way, of his own version of the Kabbalah.

Joyce, in a more detached than egoistic way, made himself a central symbol of the Wake. He was very aware of his own occult significance. This is what I want to explore in this post.

As noted previously, the initials JAAJ also equal 22 (10+1+1+10). This can also be expressed as 101110. As a binary number this equals 46 in decimal notation. This will take on significance in a subsequent post.

The six digits of 101110 also convert nicely to the six lines in a hexagram of the I Ching. Conventionally, ones represent yang lines and zeroes represent yin lines. In this way, the number 101110 converts to Hexagon 50, Ting, the Cauldron.

The Richard Wilhelm translation of the I Ching explains the image of this hexagram:

...at the bottom are the legs, over them the belly, then come the ears (handles), and at the top the carrying rings.

The hexagram is made up of the trigram for fire above and the trigram for wood below. The bottom yin line can therefore also represent the logs, or bundles of wood, placed under the cauldron as fuel for the fire that heats both the cauldron and its contents. The "ears" or handles of the cauldron can be visualized in the upper yin line.

The original Chinese cauldrons were cast of bronze, but in shape and function they are very similar to the usual image of the black iron cauldron of the West.

The judgment of this hexagram is extremely positive. It indicates "Supreme good fortune. Success." Wilhelm's I Ching also explains,

Here it is the wood that serves as nourishment for the flame, the spirit. All that is visible must grow beyond itself, extend into the realm of the invisible. Thereby it receives its true consecration and clarity and takes firm root in the cosmic order.

Magnum Opus

Joyce's work, and especially Finnegans Wake, does exactly this. It takes all that is mundane and visible and extends it into a realm or perspective which is eternal and invisible. Leopold Bloom is also Ulysses. Dublin is also the New Jerusalem. Joyce is the master alchemist behind this transmutation.

The cauldron can also be translated as the crucible and its place in Chinese tradition has the same alchemical connotation. Like all legitimate alchemists, it is his own self that Joyce is really transforming.



But does this connection with the I Ching really have anything to do with Joyce or the Wake? Perhaps it does in a way. Respected Joyce scholar, John Bishop, writes that Joyce intended to have Finnegans Wake be taken as a sort of Western I Ching:

I have only been practicing on Finnegans Wake a kind of textually self-endorsed "Sortes Virginianae" (281.R2 [Wake page and line]), where the phrase refers to a traditionally long-standing, if odd kind of reading procedure called "Sortes Virgilianae" (L. "Virgilian fortune-telling"). A Western version of the I Ching, Virgilian sortilege licenses the eager reader who seeks light in personal affairs to open his Virgil "at random" and "volve the virgil page" (270.25) -- begin interpreting whatever line he hits upon "ad lib" (583.6, 302.22-23). Joyce's Book of the Dark p. 305

Along with the poetry of Virgil, this type of "sortilege" was also practiced by randomly opening pages of the Bible and blindly pointing to particular verses. A synonym would be bibliomancy. To be really the Western equivalent to the I Ching, though, Joyce would need to mirror the complex structure of the Book of Changes. Any book can be randomly flipped through for bits of wisdom. A genuine oracle, however, is structured to resonate with the higher order of the cosmos.

Does the Wake have this type of structure? It can be argued that it does. All of the original, non-"restored", versions of Finnegans Wake have 628 pages. I believe, but haven't confirmed, that Joyce intentionally set 628 as precisely the amount of pages he wanted the Wake to be.

There should be no surprise in this. For 17 years, Joyce meticulously planned every detail in the 17 chapters of Finnegans Wake. Would he overlook the number of pages? Bishop called it "the single most intentionally crafted literary artefact that our culture has produced." Would Joyce not also intentionally craft his masterwork's length?

Even if he hasn't done this, remarkable synchronicities emerge by assuming that there is a significance to the number of pages in the Wake. Perhaps these synchronicities have their origins in the playful, flowing ALP rather than the scrupulously designed work of the "masterbilker," HCE.

The Earwicker Man

In this blog, we've already seen the remarkable link of Robert Anton Wilson's Wake-based obsession with the number 111 to his death on 1/11, and to the apparent references to RAW on p. 111 of Finnegans Wake. Did the Wake somehow predict Wilson's death? 

At first this sounds completely absurd. But by deeply looking into the Wake this becomes increasingly plausible. Joyce's birthday on 2/2 is also the 33rd day of the year. On leap years, and both 1882 when Joyce was born and 2012 were leap years, there are also 333 days left to end of the year from 2/2. Joyce would have been highly aware of both of these facts.

33 is a number most deeply associated with Christ, who was crucified and resurrected at the age of 33. In the very centre of p. 33, then, is a capital "T" which also symbolizes the Tau cross. To emphasize this connection, Joyce on this page first identifies his hero HCE -- who on one level is Joyce himself -- and compares him directly to Christ.

To anyone who knew and loved the christlikeness of the big clearminded giant H.C. Earwicker...

Joyce was born on the 33rd day of the year, but died on the 13th day -- the thirteenth of January, 1941. If we look on p. 13 of the Wake we can find some clues of Joyce's death -- "With a grand funferall" -- but a clearer sync is with page 131, or 13/1 (the thirteenth of January) in the common European date format of day/month.

On page 131 the first word is "life;" -- the semicolon perhaps indicating that all of the items which follow are events and concerns in the life of, apparently, Finn MacCool, but it's easy to imagine that Joyce is also referring to his own life, and maybe death as well.



He seems to identify himself as the subject of this page by including "the joy of shells" in the body of the text. He writes about being married,  about being buried -- "till he was buried how-happy he was" -- and he even hints about how he was to die. Joyce died of a perforated ulcer which could not be treated even with multiple blood transfusions. There are some suggestions that he died due to a type of blood infection. On page 131 we read:

...we strike hands over his bloodied warsheet but we are pledged entirely to his green mantle;

At the Cross

By far the biggest clue, however, that Joyce intended this page to refer to his own life and perhaps act as a sort of obituary after his death is found in a couple of acrostics in the last three lines of the page. Joyce was well aware of the cryptic use of acrostics in classical, medieval and Renaissance texts. That he used acrostics and acronyms in the Wake is widely accepted by scholars. A common example is the first line of Chapter 3 of Part 2:

It may not or maybe a no concern of the Guinesses but.

This awkward construction includes the acronym "noman," which is significant if we remember that a key episode in the Odyssey is when Odysseus/Ulysses tells the Cyclops that he is "Noman." This blog has already discussed the emphasis by magicians and other seekers on the need to shed the ego and become "no man" in order to successfully cross the Abyss. It is likely that Joyce also had this in mind.

The acrostics on page 131, though, are of a distinctly personal character. They are directly related to Joyce as the Cauldron. They also are only possible as intentional acrostics if Joyce purposely set the number of pages at 628. Here is an online version of p. 131 as it appears in the text.

The first letters of the last three lines on the left-hand side of the page spell out "fag." It is likely, if it has any meaning at all, that this refers to a bundle of wooden sticks used for burning, a "faggot," or a cigarette in British/Irish English, rather than the North American slang for homosexual. Knowing Joyce, though, it could mean both at once.

The first meaning appears to be intended, though, as opposite the acrostic on the last line of page 130 is written "smoking fags." This in turn recalls the smoking logs or faggots represented by the bottom yin line of the Cauldron hexagram.

This could all be sheer coincidence, but the chances of this lessen when we look at the acrostic of the last letters of the same three lines. On the right side of page 131, in the bottom three lines, we find the word "ear." Here is the image of the Cauldron spelled out in front of us! The "fags" burn at the bottom while the cauldron is later raised by its "ears."



This is amazing confirmation of the sync of the initials JAAJ with the lines of the Cauldron hexagram. If this is not intentional the synchronicity surrounding this is mind-blowing. Either way, it is almost too much to contemplate.

As far as I know, this has never been pointed about by either scholars or "casual" readers of the Wake. This may be the first time this has come out, but it goes to show that many such nuggets still lie buried in the pages of the Wake. I decided, though, that this day, the 131st birthday of Joyce, was the perfect day to reveal the possible mysteries of page 131.

The Biggest Secret

There is an even deeper mystery to unveil involving the bottomless 628-page structure of Finnegans Wake. This also is concerned with Joyce's birthday on 2/2, but it may point to something far greater as well, something that may be unfolding right now.

The Wake has 628 pages with a possibility of 36 lines on each page. Not all of these pages and lines are filled with text, and in one chapter the format is altered, but there is the space for 628 pages with 36 lines each. This is the spatial limit of the universe of Finnegans Wake.

If we multiply 628 by 36 we get 22,608. This is quickly recognized as a potential precessional number. Researchers will know that the length of a precessional Great Year is traditionally 25,920 years. It takes approximately 72 years for the fixed stars of the zodiac to appear to move one degree along the precessional circle. Science now provides more accurate figures, but Joyce was always more interested in traditional, and thus more symbolic, accounts.



I wondered, what date do we get if we determine the equivalent date of 22,608 on the wheel of the solar year instead of that of the Great Year? The math is easy, but first we need to know the starting point. Traditionally, the astrological year begins on the Spring Equinox, the first day of Aries, or March 21st. Aries also begins the precession cycle (although as this is precession and not procession the two circle in opposite directions -- I'll address this point later).

If we take March 21st, then, as the starting point then the calculation is straightforward. 25,920 years is the equivalent of the 365 days of the solar year. 22,608 is to 25,920 what x is to 365. But what is the value of x? 318.36. This means that the equivalent date is just over 318 days from March 21st. What date is this? If we plug this into an online date calculator we instantly find the result.

318 days after March 21st is February 2nd -- Joyce's birthday!

The very structure of Finnegans Wake, the number of its pages and the lines contained on them, encodes the day Joyce was born! If this was intentional it may seem like colossal egoism, but I think that Joyce was pointing to something far more profound then just his own birth. If, again, this is accidental it is a synchronicity of monumental proportions that surely appears to demonstrate a greater intelligence at play.

One may argue that as precession "moves" backwards through the zodiac, then we should calculate 318 days before March 21st. This argument does not really hold water, though, because as the solar year always moves forward such a calculation would not provide an exact equivalence of cycles. If, however, we did decide to bring the date forward we would come up with May 7th.

There is nothing significant I could find that happened in Joyce's life on May 7th, but the next day, May 8th in 1939, Joyce appeared on the cover of Time magazine following the publication of Finnegans Wake on the 4th of May, that same year.

This was only the second occasion Joyce had been featured on the cover of Time. The first was after his 1934 US publication of Ulysses, delayed for many years because of obscenity claims against it. While the May synchronicity is not as striking as the 2/2 date, and is very difficult to think how Joyce would have in any manner planned it, it does show that a vast amount of weirdness is involved in the life of James Joyce.

None of this, to my knowledge, has come out before. I do not know the full significance and implications of all of this. It is very probable that this would be laughed off and dismissed instantly by "serious" Joyce scholars. But for fanatics like me, this is pure gold.

Not Apart From 

Joyce is the Cauldron. He is the crucible. He is the master alchemist who turns the banal, quotidian shit of modern life into the purest ingots.

In a previous post on the Wake, I quoted an idea of Philip K. Dick, expressed in The Divine Invasion, that Finnegans Wake is a channel of "cosmic consciousness." It's worth quoting again:

Someday I'm going to get my article published; I'm going to prove that Finnegans Wake is an information pool based on computer memory systems that didn't exist until centuries after James Joyce's era; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousness from which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpus of work. I'll be famous forever.

This is a wild idea, but it's very easy to come up with even wilder scenarios. Perhaps Joyce was not simply "plugged into" and inspired by this, but that his life and work was a direct expression of this consciousness. It's easy to imagine that he was the real Krishnamurti-type World Teacher, made manifest by Yeats and other initiates of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Did Joyce, like Krishnamurti, rebel against this assumed role? This would be great fodder for a beyond-the-grave Dick novel, but we can only speculate.



The judgement of hexagram 50, the Cauldron, might best sum up Joyce and his incredible work:

The ting serves in offering sacrifice to God. The highest earthly values must be sacrificed to the divine. But the truly divine does not manifest itself apart from man. The supreme revelation of God appears in prophets and holy men. To venerate them is true veneration of God. The will of God, as revealed through them, should be accepted in humility; this brings inner enlightenment and true understanding of the world, and this leads to great good fortune and success.

HBD JAAJ.

What Moves the Sun and Other Stars

I must create a System or be enslaved by another Man's; I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create. 

Blake was entirely correct. We are trapped up and until we create a system of our own. We willingly lend our imaginative attention and power to those hidden architects of reality instead of using this power and attention to forge a realm completely of our own making.



The imagination is the universe. It is the infinite space of all possibilities. It makes no sense to characterize it as individual or collective. This distinction is merely one possible facet of the imagination. All such distinctions are similar facets.

The imagination can either build on previously imagined patterns, and this it usually does, or it can start from scratch. An entirely unique creation from absolute nothingness is extremely difficult and so does not happen as "frequently" -- as if time was something outside of the imagination, which it is not.

Smithy of the Soul

What we call the physical world, history, reality, is a vast lattice-work of perpetually moving overlaid patterns. These patterns persist because they are beautiful, effective, powerful, etc. Those who are able to imagine, and this cannot be clearly identified or defined although certainly individual humans seem to be able to do so, allow these patterns to continue. They allow this by not imagining anything differently. This is how reality remains more or less the same. This is why "evolution" progresses so slowly.

Those who imagine and create, to a relatively small yet not insignificant extent, are called "artists." Usually artists employ various media to convey their creative visions. These visions only by gradual dissemination may begin to alter reality, and by doing so these artists are said to be great, but they do not use reality itself as a medium for their art. This is largely because they are also convinced of the "laws" of this reality. But there are no laws, only the imagination.

 

Those who do use reality itself as a medium for creative expression are the "magicians." Magic is their means to alter reality according to their will. Magicians, of course, are of greater and lesser power and this is determined by to what degree they have discovered that the "laws of nature" are only manipulable illusions. A very powerful magician can alter reality entirely.

Greater than magicians, though, are those who can create whole worlds, whole realities with the power of their imagination. These worlds are not merely something akin to literary creations, like Tolkien's Middle-earth, but are realms which these gods can exist within.

Each god can allow greater or lesser degrees of freedom to imagine to those entities which populate his world. In any case though, any entity, any pattern of imagination, is able to imagine to the highest degrees. A god can only try to limit this by deception and subterfuge -- thus the "laws of nature." The greatest gods, as indicated above, can create something entirely unique from nothing.

 

Even the greatest gods, however, are insignificant compared to those who have become unified and nullified in the imagination itself. These beings have the capacity to create and destroy all possible universes. There is no limitation to them and to even label them as a "being" is to be mistaken. They can take any form -- from a microbe to a galaxy -- and they can inhabit that form for an instant or an eon. Even the gods are playthings for these "Buddhas."

The Buddhas can be all compassionate or all destructive. Life and death, bliss and torture, are the same for them. But for them to have reached a stage beyond Godhead has meant that they have given up all last vestiges of the Self. Their actions, if they have any, are naturally compassionate because they have no self to benefit.

Everyone who is not an artist, magician, god or Buddha is being manipulated, to different degrees, by any and/or all of these. Our world continues as it does because we allow it to do so. There are multiple layers of control and manipulation -- work, family, tradition, religion, government, society, style, advertising, the laws of physics, God, culture, sex, identity, architecture, habits, reality, etc. -- but to break through all of these veils, layers and attachments is to become more free. There are even more -- our senses, our bodies, our notions of the possible -- all of these must be overcome.

Life Flows On

We condition ourselves, and are conditioned, to accept things as they seem. Even the spectrum of our consciousness is limited by social and legal dicta because those that control fully realize that the world begins to change when perspectives and perceptions are altered. The more radical the shift, the greater is the potential for change. Things remain more or less the same when boundaries are not crossed. Transcending categories and forming new ones is the way of Art and Magic.

Where are there any real limits? There is no origin of civilization. The cycles of development and decay are endless. There were countless unknown civilizations before our own. Space, as most concede, is infinite. There are innumerable galaxies teeming with every possible life form. Inside ourselves, in our own imagination, there are galaxies without number.
 

Our five senses limit us to a small spectrum of waves. There are many other senses. There are countless things that escape any detection system we have ever devised. Even now we are being interpenetrated by spirits who also dream...

Dreams are as real as anything experienced in waking consciousness. So are hallucinations and visions, so is myth, so is fiction. It is all occurring equally without start or end. Maya is the bubble film we live upon and take to be a world.

Lucid dreamers are those, true magicians, who have awoken inside of the dream and are thus able to play with its game rules. They have split open the matrix and are able to attain "powers" -- these are the "siddhis" of the yogis and shamans. Life is also such a dream requiring lucidity.

Lucid Vivid Fetid Avid David King

We live in a world dominated by competing and cooperating covens of magicians, of orders of great antiquity, who worship the gods (or God) of this world. Our belief in their reality reinforces its strength.

How to escape? Easy. Disobey, disengage and create. Break down more and more categories and knit a webwork of your own. The patterns, of different scale and frequency, run through everything. They are the ripples of the imagination. Learn to surf on them. Bring their influence into your consciousness by attracting them with sympathetic forms. This is the essence of magic -- to create resonances from the macrocosm to the microcosm. Synthesize don't analyze.



The Buddha is at the centre of the web. He is the spider. But as the web stretches out into infinity there can be no centre except at every point. The real centre is at our own hearts. The whole phenomenal multiverse, the kaleidocosm, has its roots in the heart. The imagination shines out from this point and all of the illusions of this world are ripplings of these waves of light. They are synonymous with love.

She

The path to the heart is the one path to Buddhahood. On it spans the treacherous rainbow bridge, the wormhole portal of Da'at, the sinister Lurker at the Threshold, the anima in her Durga form, our blackest shadows, hell worlds, the dark night of the soul, madness, identity dissolution...

It is the labyrinth and the mandala and the talisman. It is the way of the Hero. Every step towards the centre leads to union with the imagination. Every step away from it leads to further entrapment in somebody else's system. To reach to centre is to integrate all of the shadows into one's self, ultimately annihilating the Self. This is hierogamy with the Great Goddess, Imagination, also called Sophia, also called Prajñāpāramitā.

It is only her that fascinates. Creator and Destroyer and beyond both. We aim to entwine with her. We want to be devoured. She is the hairy minotaur of our hearts. She is the cosmic lingham in the yoni. She is where all opposites meet in ecstasy. She is all worlds, all lives, all deaths. All other gods and demons are but partial reflections of her temporarily acting, although many eons may have passed, as autonomous selves. They are also ripples, patterns. There is no actual creation from nothing as nothing is also She. And She, alone, is creation.