Chapter 5
Phoenix Fire

I. O Truly Blessed Night!

Figure 52. James Joyce (photograph, Switzerland, c. 1918)James Joyce develops the Tristan theme anew, with all its “equals of opposites,” throughout the ever-revolving labyrinth of his dream-book, Finnegans Wake. His paragraph opens with the words, “Sir Tristram, violer d’amores…,” and Chapelizod, the legendary birthplace of Isolt, on the bank of the river Liffey, beside Dublin’s Phoenix Park, is the chief scene of its dream events. The guilt-laden sleeper, through whose whiskey-soaked interior landscape we are following the lead and lectures of an erudite tourist guide, “of the every-tale-a-treat-in-itself variety”^{Note 1} (as Dante followed the lead and lectures of Virgil through his own sin-laden, visionary Purgatory), is a late-middle-aged burly Chapelizod tavernkeeper named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, about whom an embarrassing Peeping Tom scandal has recently been bruited, published abroad, and even balladized within the walls of his own hospitable premises. The incident — if there really was one, for we are never made quite sure — was rumored to have occurred in Phoenix Park (or was it Eden? was it Calvary?), possibly at night, and to have involved, besides the dreamer, two servant girls in the bushes and three drunken British-soldier witnesses. Four old tavern cronies, who are confused with the four Evangelists, four quarters of the world, and four posts of the bed, rehearse the legend variously, while a zodiac of inebriate customers toss it about, refreshed by more and more of their own confused elucidations. In his anguished, self-vindicatory yet -incriminating nightmare, the dreamer is identified with (among numerous other characters, including all Three-in-One of the Trinity) Sir Tristram, but at the same time King Mark. His wife, sleeping at his side, is the Isolt; his daughter, upstairs, the second; each confused with the other, and the two with the maids in the park. His pair of incompatible sons, who appear respectively as the popular and unpopular sides of his own uncertain image, bear his Tristan-dream into the future by pressing himself, as Mark, into the past, and running off with both Isolts, while his raucous tavern population are the gossip-mongers in King Mark’s troubled castle of Tintagel, or, as the name here appears, “Tintangle.”^{Note 2} In the murky midst of all of which, an unidentified harsh voice rasps out the following rude rann:

— Three quarks^* for Muster Mark ^* Three quarks for Muster Mark—This passage inspired physicist Murray Gell-Mann to name a newly discovered subatomic particle — the quark — in 1963. See M. Gell-Mann. The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex. (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1995) p. 180.—Eds

Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark

And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.

But O, Wreneagle Almighty, wouldn’t un be a sky of a lark

To see that old buzzard whooping about for uns shirt in the dark

And he hunting round for uns speckled trousers around by

Palmerstown Park?

Hohoho, moulty Mark!

You’re the rummest old rooster ever flopped out of a Noah’s ark

And you think you’re cock of the work.

Fowls, up! Tristy’s the spry young spark

That’ll tread her and wed her and bed her and red her

Without ever winking the tail of a feather

And that’s how that chap’s going to make his money and mark!^{Note 3}

The nightmare-language of this intentionally irritating, infinitely fascinating, wise yet imbecile Book of the Opening of the Eyes to Night — or, as we read, “Of the Two Ways of Opening the Mouth”^{Note 4} — where every character is its own opposite and all together make one, is as difficult to reduce to wake-a-day sense as is the phantasmagoria of dream; for as to meaning it is enigmatic, yet of many meanings at once. “The proteiform graph itself,” we are truly told, “is a polyhedron of scripture.” And yet, “under closed eyes,” we are advised, “the traits featuring the chiaroscuro coalesce, their contrarities eliminated, in one stable somebody.”^{Note 5} And that One is, of course, the troubled dreamer himself, whose initials, H.C.E., are to be read allegorically as “Here Comes Everybody”;^{Note 6} that is to say, as archetypal of us all: inasmuch as at the root of his anguish, as of our own, there lurks that dual image of the god in whose form mankind (according to the the Good Book) was created. For “God created man,” we are instructed, “in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”^{Note 7} So that neither he alone, “this upright one,” the dreamer in his bed of tares, nor that other alone, beside him in the bed, “that noughty besighed him zeroine,”^{Note 8} can be taken to represent the All in all of us; but the two are that All together: H.C.E. and his nightmare A.L.P., or, as Gottfried told:

A man, a woman; a woman, a man:

Tristan Isolt; Isolt Tristan.

“We read their life, we read their death, and to us it is sweet as bread.”

The moral of it all is signaled by Joyce in a tantalizing number clue that keeps turning up, throughout his work, in all sorts of transformations: as a date, 1132 a.d. a paragraph in a legal code, “Subsec. 32, section 11”; an interval of time, “from eleven thirty to two in the afternoon”; a musical composition, “Opus Elf, Thortytoe”; an address, 32 West 11 Street; the number of a patent, 1132;^{Note 9} and so forth. But now, 32 (as Leopold Bloom was given to musing in the course of his ramblings through Ulysses) is the number of feet things fall “per sec. per sec.,” the number, therefore, of the Fall; whereas 11 is the number of the renewal of the decade, and so, of Restoration.^{Note 10} Decoded thus, the number implies a mythic theme of the conjoined Tree of Eden and Tree of Calvary, Fall-Redemption, Death-Resurrection, Wake of the Dead and Wake of Awakening, which is the leading theme of the nightmare Finnegans Wake.

However, to find a clear and concise, unobfuscated verbalization of the moral theology of this number-theme, the reader must chance upon it in an Easter-egg cache outside the book altogether, namely in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, Chapter 11, Verse 32, which reads: “For God has consigned all men to disobedience that he may have mercy upon all.” And this, furthermore, is the good news proclaimed in Saint Augustine’s famous oxymoron, which is also echoed throughout the Wake: O felix culpa! “O happy fault!” — the phrase of hope that is annually repeated by the priestly celebrant of the Roman Catholic ritual of the blessing of the Paschal candle on Holy Saturday: the dark, dark night of Christ’s body lying in the tomb, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

The tabernacle of the church is open — empty — to symbolize the awesome mystery of God’s death and descent into Hell. “This,” prays the priestly celebrant, “is the night which at this time throughout the world restores to grace and unites in sanctity those that believe in Christ, and are separated from the vices of the world and the darkness of sinners. This is the night in which, destroying the bonds of death, Christ arose victorious from the grave. For it would have profited us nothing to have been born, unless redemption had also been bestowed upon us. O wonderful condescension of Thy mercy toward us! O inestimable affection of charity: that Thou mightest redeem a slave, Thou didst deliver up Thy Son! O truly needful sin of Adam, which was blotted out by the death of Christ! O happy fault [O felix culpa], which deserved to possess such and so great a Redeemer! O truly blessed night, which alone deserved to know the time and hour in which Christ rose again from the grave! This is the night of which it is written: And the night shall be as light as the day; and the night is my light in my enjoyments.”^{Note 11}

“Poor Felix Culapert!” comments a disembodied voice on one of the airwaves of the nightmare of the sinner of Phoenix Park.^{Note 12} As the Adam he falls and takes the world with him, but as the Second wakes with us all, and the two Adams are the same. They are the one multicolored soul-bird, namely, the Phoenix of “Felix Park” (Eden-Calvary), which resurrects of itself — “when the fiery bird disembers”^{Note 13} — from the ash of its self-immolation.

But between Joyce’s and the Roman Catholic clergy’s ways of interpreting Christian symbols there is a world of difference. The artist reads them in the universally known old Greco-Roman, Celto-Germanic, Hindu-Buddhist-Taoist, Neoplatonic way, as referring to an experience of the mystery beyond theology that is immanent in all things, including gods, demons, and flies. The priests, on the other hand, are insisting on the absolute finality of their Old Testament concept of a personal creator God “out there,” who, though omnipresent, omniscient, and omni-everything-else, is ontologically distinct from the living substance of his world — and a ponderously humorless, revengefully self-centered, cruel old Nobodaddy, to boot. When, in Ulysses, toward the end of the Walpurgis Night of the brothel scene (O felix culpa!), The end of the world arrives with a Scotch accent and The voice of Elijah with an American, the latter, in the manner of a helland-damnation revivalist, calls upon the trio of prostitutes (Three Graces in the Abyss) (compare Figure 20: Surda Thalia) and their trinity of companions, naming them “Florry Christ, Stephen Christ, Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch Christ,” and then hollers apocalyptically: “It’s up to you to sense that cosmic force.… You have something within, the higher self.… Are you all in this vibration? I say you are. You once nobble that, congregation, and a buck joy ride becomes a back number.”^{Note 14}

Let us recall at this point the words reported of Jesus in the Gnostic Thomas Gospel: “I am the All, the All came forth from Me and the All attained to Me. Cleave a piece of wood, I am there; lift up the stone and you will find Me there”;^{Note 15} and add to these the words of Kṛṣṇa in the Indian Bhagavad Gītā: “I am the origin of all; from me all things proceed.… I am the Self, established in the hearts of all beings, their beginning, middle, and end.… I am the gambling of cheats. I am the vigor of the strong. I am victory. I am effort. I am the principle of harmony in the good.”^{Note 16}

In the brothel scene of Ulysses, after Elijah has delivered his message and confessions have been heard, there appears in the cone of a searchlight the bearded figure of the old Irish sea-god Manannan Mac Lir — enjoyer of a good laugh (compare “O’Donnell's Kern.”) — slowly rising, chin on knees, from behind a coalscuttle. A cold seawind blows from his druid mantle. About his head writhe eels and elvers. He is encrusted with weeds and shells. His right hand holds a bicycle pump. (Think of pneuma, spiritus, air, the breath of life.) His left hand grasps a hugh crayfish by its two talons. (Cancer, “the Crab,” sign of the summer solstice, decline, disintegration, death.)

Mananaun Mac Lir^*

(With a voice of waves.) Aum! Hek! Wall Ak! Lub! Mor! Ma! White Yoghin of the gods. Occult pimander of Hermes Trismegistos. (With a voice of whistling seawind.) Punarjanam patsypunjaub! I won’t have my leg pulled. It has been said by one: beware the left, the cult of Shakti. {With a cry of stormbirds.) Shakti, Shiva! Dark hidden Father! ( He smites with his bicycle pump the crayfish in his left hand. On its cooperative dial glow the twelve signs of the zodiac. He wails with the vehemence of the ocean.) Aum! Baum! Pyjaum! I am the light of the homestead. I am the dreamery creamery butter.^{Note 17*}

^* The name of the sea-god Manannan Mac Lir is here transformed to suggest both the Sanskrit holy syllable AUM and the Irish word aun, meaning “one.” The seven exclamations imitate the mystic mantra syllables of Indo-Buddhist Tantric meditation. Aum is the holy sound supreme. Hek appears in Finnegans Wake (e.g. p. 420, lines 17 and 18) as a designation of H.C.E. Wal suggests the “Wall” of the Fall in Finnegans Wake and Ak the sound of its crash, God’s voice in thunder, the end of the show, and the beginning of rum or (ibid., p. 44, line 20; p. 65, line 34). Lub in Finnegans Wake is associated with “love, libido,” also, “lubber,” “lubricity,” etc. Mor, the Irish word meaning “old,” suggesting French mort and English “more,” is played upon throughout the Wake in numerous senses; and finally, Ma (Sanskrit mā, “to measure forth”) suggesting Ma, “Mother,” is the verbal root of the word māyā, which signifies the force that creates the world illusion. Punarjanam: Sanskrit punar-janman, means “rebirth, regeneration.” Shakti: Sanskrit Śakti, is the active spiritual power of a god or person, personified in his consort. For Śakti and for the “left-hand path,” see Oriental Mythology. For the sense of the last two sentences, i.e., “I am the fire of the altar and the oblation sacrificed in the fire,” see Bhagavad Gītā 9:16: “I am the ritual, I am the act of worship, I am the food to be offered, I am the sacred herbs, I am the chanted hymn, I am the melted butter, I am the fire, I am the pouring of the oblation.”

We are on the way here, full steam, to the vision of Finnegans Wake, where the dark hidden Father and his Śakti are indeed to come alive again by virtue of the magic of the left-hand way. We are on the dangerous path, that is to say, to the inward dark-forest sanctuary of the bed, la fossiure a la gent amant, the marriage and dream bed, which is in every home, every heart, and which Joyce, like Gottfried, represents as the altar and cross of the consummate initiation.

II. The Left-Hand Way

Figure 53. Solar King and Lunar Queen

Figure 53 is from an early sixteenth-century alchemical text, the Rosarium philosophorum, “Rose Garden of the Philosophers,” in which the art of distilling spirit from nature is taught in metaphorical terms that are intentionally misleading. For, as the text beneath the picture states, “Mark well: in the art of our magisterium nothing is concealed by the philosophers except the secret of the art, which may not be revealed to all and sundry. For were that to happen, that man would be accursed; he would incur the wrath of God and perish of the apoplexy. Wherefore all error in the art arises, namely, because men do not begin with the proper substance.” And on a later page: “So I have not declared all that appears and is necessary in this work, because there are things of which a man may not speak.… Such matters must be transmitted in mystical terms, like poetry employing fables and parables.”^{Note 18}

Now Christ himself, it can be recalled, issued a like warning to those who would speak of spiritual things: “Do not give dogs what is holy; and do not throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you.”^{Note 19} And again: “To you,” he said to his disciples, “it has been given to know the secrets of the kindgom of God; but for others they are in parables, so that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.”^{Note 20}

James Joyce’s way of covering while uncovering his tracks may not then, after all, have been, as many critics have held, symptomatic of some bizarre psychological malfunction; for he too, “forging in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race” (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, last lines), was at work in a zone to which tracks do not lead, only a spiritual leap. The old Arabian master alchemist Muhammad ibn Umail at-Tamimi (c. 900–960) — who was known in Europe as “Senior” and whose “Book of the Silvery Water and Starry Earth” was translated into Latin in the poet Gottfried’s lifetime — describes the end product of his mystic art as “that stone, which he that knoweth layeth upon his eyes, and he that knoweth it not, casteth upon a dunghill.”^{Note 21} Accordingly, in Finnegans Wake, it was from a dunghill that a certain “lookmelittle likemelong hen,” named Belinda of the Dorans, scratched up “a goodishsized sheet of letterpaper,” which on “exagmination” proved to be something, indeed, to lay upon the eyes. And the sixteenth-century Flemish alchemist Theobald de Hoghelande might have been describing Joyce’s handling of this arcanum when he wrote: “This science transmits its work by mixing the false with the true and the true with the false, sometimes very briefly, at other times in a most prolix manner, without order and quite often in the reverse order; and it endeavors to transmit the work obscurely, and to hide it as much as possible.”^{Note 22} For, as stated by another late sixteenth-century master, “secrets that are published become cheap.”^{Note 23}

And so, with sharpened eyes returning to our picture, we now note that the solar king and lunar queen have joined not their right hands but their left. The rose garden of the philosophers, then, is to be entered by the left-hand path.

“For this work,” the text to the figure explains, “you should employ venerable Nature, because from her and through her and in her is our art born and in naught else: and so our magisterium is the work of Nature and not of the worker.”

Now it was exactly this idea of an approach to spirit through nature that was the capital heresy of that bold young Dominican monk (contemporary approximately with the author of the Rosarium) whose name, in various transformations, appears, disappears, and reappears through every episode of Finnegans Wake: the same who, on the morning of February 16, 1600 a.d., in the Campo di Fiori in Rome, was burned alive at the stake, at the age of fifty-two, for having cast his pearls before Clement VIII and the learned doctors of the Roman Holy Office of the Inquisition.

“All of God is in all things (although not totally, but in some more abundantly and in others less),” Giordano Bruno of Nola had written, too clearly, in his reprobated work, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast. “Because just as Divinity descends, in a certain manner, to the extent that one communicates with Nature, so one ascends to Divinity through Nature, as by means of a life resplendent in natural things one rises to the life that presides over them.”^{Note 24}

An ordained Dominican, yet to the root of his being an incorrigible heretic, in flight from city to city before the various packs of God’s hounds — Naples, Rome, Venice, Padua, Brescia, Bergamo, Milan, Chambery, Geneva, Toulouse, Paris, Oxford, London, Paris again, then Marburg, Wittenberg, Prague, Helmstadt, Frankfurt-am-Main, Zurich, and (alas!) Venice again (Office of the Inquisition), on to Rome (dungeons of the Inquisition for eight years and finally, infallibly, the stake) — now in clerical, now in secular garb, now here, more often there, unwittingly insulting his friends, intentionally challenging his persecutors, believed by some to have become a Calvinist, yet driven by that pack from Geneva, he was himself an incarnation of that “coincidence of opposites” of which he eloquently wrote, and, in a truly Joycean way, his own worst enemy. “A Daedalus,” he called himself, “as regards the habits of the intellect.”^{Note 25} And when his condemnation was read to him, rising before the Triumphant Beast, “You pronounce sentence upon me perhaps with a greater fear,” he said, “than that with which I receive it.”^{Note 26} He was incinerated, and his books as well, but has reappeared in the Wake: as Bruno, Bruin, Mr. Brown, the Nolan, Nayman of Noland, the Dublin booksellers Browne and Nolan, Nolans Brumans, et cetera; and, as Professor William Tindall of Columbia University seems to have been the to have recognized, the names Tristopher and Hilary, which are attributed to the Chapelizod tavernkeeper’s two incompatible sons in one of the episodes of his dream,^{Note 27} derive from Giordano Bruno’s motto on the title page of his play Il Candelaio (“The Candle-Maker”), to wit: In tristitia hilaris hilaritate tristis, “In sorrow, cheer, in cheer, sorrow,” which is a perfect match to Gottfried’s designation of the noble heart.

The left-hand path is the way, then, of a passage by way of the senses — the eyes, the heart and spontaneity of the body — to a realization and manifestation “at the still point of the turning world,” in act and experience on earth, of the radiance, harmony, bounty, and joy of nature at the summit of Mount Helicon, where the lyre of Apollo sounds, the Graces dance in tripody, and the golden rose unfolds. In T. S. Eliot’s words in “Burnt Norton”:

.…Neither flesh nor fleshless; 

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, there is only the dance.

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.

And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.^{Note 28}

The way of nature to the garden is not, as followers of the god divorced from nature have supposed, of an incline ever downward, of a mere crude physicality. The right hands, we note, of the solar king and lunar queen tender flowers, at the crossing of the stems of which a third flower intersects, carried by a dove descending from a star. The star is of six points, joined by three intersecting lines: three pairs of opposites. So also is the order of the flower stems, joining south and north, west and east, below and above, all together at the center: “the still point,” here below in man’s and woman’s hands, as there above, celestially: as above, so below; as below, so above. Moreover, each flower stem has two blossoms: the one becomes two, and the two are one. We note, as well, that the entire composition is ordered to this theme: a line descending from the star bifurcates and continues in balanced parallels terminating at the sun and moon; the form as a whole suggests the seventh sign of the zodiac, Libra, which is entered by the sun at the autumnal equinox, the time of its downgoing into winter night. Astrologically defined, Libra is a masculine diurnal sign, movable, sanguine, equinoctial, cardinal, hot, and moist; western, of the airy triplicity, and the chief mansion of Venus. The dove is the symbolic bird of Venus-Aphrodite- Ishtar-Astarte-Isis-Minne-Amor; and we note that the artist, even with his clumsy hand, has contrived to suggest “the meeting of the eyes.”

The left-hand path, as here conceived, is obviously not of the type of the early Christian Agapē orgy or the Indian “bodice cult,” (See The Word Behind Words and Oriental Mythology.) nor of the Valentine Clubs of fashionable twelfth-century Provence. For the work of the alchemist was intimately personal, and where it involved the cooperation of an actual woman in the mythic role of regina, soror, filia mystica, the relationship was necessarily, because of its psychological dimension, deeply personal and exclusive. Dr. C. G. Jung, who devoted some forty-odd years to a study of alchemical symbology, has demonstrated beyond question that in all its authentic practitioners, whether in Europe and the Near East or in the Far East, alchemy was as much an unconsciously psychological as consciously physical proto- or pseudo-science. In a manner broadly comparable to the relationship of a painter to the colors and materials of his palette and studio, the alchemist projected psychological associations, of which he was neither fully conscious nor in full control, into the metals, retorts, and other materials of his laboratory. The empty retort, like an empty stretch of canvas, was a vacuum for the reception of whatever demon within was pressing for manifestation without, and the work progressed through an interaction of impulse (spontaneity) and judgment (consideration) in relation to the physical acts of mixing, heating, adding, subtracting, cooling, and observing metals. States Dr. Jung:

The alchemical opus deals in the main, not just with alchemical experiments as such, but with something resembling psychic processes expressed in pseudo-chemical language. The ancients knew more or less what chemical processes were; therefore they must have known that the thing they practiced was, to say the least of it, no ordinary chemistry. That they realized the difference is shown even in the title of a treatise by (Pseudo-) Democritus, ascribed to the century: τὰ φυσικὰ καὶ τὰ μυστικὰ (The Physical and the ‘Philosophical’). And soon afterwards a wealth of evidence accumulates to show that in alchemy there are two — in our eyes — heterogeneous currents flowing side by side, which we simply cannot conceive as being compatible. Alchemy’s "tam ethice quam physice” (ethical — i.e. psychological — as well as physical) is impenetrable to our logic. If the alchemist is admittedly using the chemical process only symbolically, then why does he work in a laboratory with crucibles and alembics? And if, as he constantly asserts, he is describing chemical processes, why distort them past recognition with his mythological symbolisms?^{Note 29}

In answering these questions, Dr. Jung quotes a number of texts describing in detail the actual work and meditations of seriously practicing alchemists, of which the latest in date is the following, from the Abtala Jurain, published 1732.

The Creation

Take of common water a good quantity, at least ten quarts; preserve it well sealed in glass vessels for at least ten days, then it will deposit matter and feces on the bottom. Pour off the clear liquid and place in a wooden vessel that is fashioned round like a ball; cut it in the middle and fill the vessel a third full, and set it in the sun about midday in a secret or secluded spot.

When this has been done, take a drop of the consecrated red wine and let it fall into the water, and you will instantly perceive a fog and thick darkness on top of the water, such as also was at the creation. Then put in two drops, and you will see the light coming forth from the darkness; whereupon little by little put in every half of each quarter hour three, then four, then five, then six, drops, and no more, and you will see with your own eyes one thing after another appearing by and by on top of the water, how God created all things in six days, and how it all came to pass, and such secrets as are not to be spoken aloud and I also have not power to reveal. Fall on your knees before you undertake this operation. Let your eyes judge of it; for thus was the world created. Let all stand as it is, and in half an hour after it began it will disappear.

By this you will see clearly the secrets of God, that are at present hidden from you as from a child. You will understand what Moses has written concerning the creation; you will see what manner of body Adam and Eve had before and after the Fall, what the serpent was, what the tree, and what manner of fruits they ate; where and what Paradise is, and in what bodies the righteous shall be resurrected; not in this body that we have received from Adam, but in that which we attain through the Holy Ghost, namely in such a body as our Savior brought from Heaven.

A second experiment by the same anonymous author, no less remarkable, is reported in the following terms:

The Heavens

You shall take seven pieces of metal, of each and every metal as they are named after the planets [These, are, Mercury (Mercury), Copper (Venus), Silver (Moon), Gold (Sun), Iron (Mars), Tin (Jupiter), and Lead (Saturn).], and shall stamp on each the character of the planet in the house of the same planet, and every piece shall be as large and thick as a rose noble [An English coin of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.]. But of Mercury only the fourth part of an ounce by weight and nothing stamped upon it.

Then put them after the order in which they stand in the heavens into a crucible, and make all windows fast in the chamber that it may be quite dark within; then melt them all together in the midst of the chamber and drop in seven drops of the blessed Stone; and forthwith a flame of fire will come out of the crucible and spread itself over the whole chamber (fear no harm ), and will light up the whole chamber more brightly than sun and moon, and over your heads you shall behold the whole firmament as it is in the starry heavens above, and the planets shall hold to their appointed courses, as in the sky. Let it cease of itself, in a quarter of an hour everything will be in its own place.^{Note 30}

And now, one more example: from the sixteenth-century Flemish master Theobald de Hoghelande.

They say also that different names are given to the Stone on account of the wonderful variety of figures that appear in the course of the work, inasmuch as colors often come forth at the same time, just as we sometimes imagine in the clouds or in the fire strange shapes of animals, reptiles, or trees. I found similar things in a fragment of a book ascribed to Moses: when the body is dissolved, it is there written, then will appear sometimes two branches, sometimes three or more, sometimes also the shapes of reptiles; on occasion it also seems as if a man with a head and all his limbs were seated upon a cathedra.^{Note 31}

“Hoghelande’s remarks prove,” comments Dr. Jung, “as do the two preceding texts, that during the practical work certain events of an hallucinatory or visionary nature were perceived, which cannot be anything but projections of unconscious contents. Hoghelande quotes Senior as saying that the ‘vision’ of the Hermetic vessel ‘is more to be sought’ than the ‘scripture,’” where again, however, “it is not clear whether by ‘scripture’ is meant the traditional description of the vessel in the treatises of the masters, or the Holy Scripture.”^{Note 32}

Figure 54. Alchemists at Their Furnace

Figure 54 shows a pair of alchemists kneeling by their furnace and praying for God’s blessing.^{Note 33} They are a man and a woman, and obviously actual persons, whereas the couple of Figure 53 are as obviously mythological. Between the two alchemists are the furnace, the vessels, and other materials of their ambiguous art, wherein the various transformations will occur to which the mythological names and interpretations are to be attached. That is to say, it will be in those vessels and materials that the solar king and lunar queen will be known to be reaching their left hands to each other, and the dove to be descending, as the metals and other materials — mercury, salt, sulphur, consecrated wine, rainwater, and what not — work upon each other, combine, separate, change color, et cetera. But, as we have seen, the alchemists will have to accompany these effects with appropriate sentiments and fantasizing meditations of their own, if the desired results are to be achieved. The fermentation, putrefaction, and sublimation of the metals will have to be matched by analogous motions in the conjoined, harmoniously cooperating hearts of the artifex and his soror mystica, the fundamental idea being that divinity is entrapped, as it were, in the gross physical matter of the bodies of men and women as well as in the elements of nature, and that in the laboratory of the alchemist the energies of this immanent spiritual presence are to be released. As Jung restates this basic idea:

For the alchemist the one primarily in need of redemption is not man, but the deity who is lost and sleeping in matter. Only as a secondary consideration does he hope that some benefit may accrue to himself from the transformed substance as the panacea, the medicina catholica, just as it may to the imperfect bodies, the base or “sick” metals, etc. His attention is not directed to his own salvation through God’s grace, but to the liberation of God from the darkness of matter. By applying himself to this miraculous work he benefits from its salutary effect, but only incidentally. He may approach the work as one in need of salvation, but he knows that his salvation depends on the success of the work, on whether he can free the divine soul. To this end he needs meditation, fasting, and prayer; more, he needs the help of the Holy Ghost as his πάρεδρος [ministering spirit]. Since it is not man but matter that must be redeemed, the spirit that manifests itself in the transformation is not the “Son of Man” but as Khunrath very properly puts it,^{Note 34} the filius macrocosmi. Therefore, what comes out of the transformation is not Christ but an ineffable material being named the “stone,” which displays the most paradoxical qualities apart from possessing corpus, anima, spiritus, and supernatural powers. One might be tempted to explain the symbolism of alchemical transformation as a parody of the Mass were it not pagan in origin and much older than the latter.

The substance that harbors the divine secret is everywhere, including the human body. It can be had for the asking and can be found anywhere, even in the most loathsome filth.^{Note 35}

Essentially, the idea is the same as that by which the obscene Love Feasts of the Phibionites and other deviant early Christian sects were inspired, against whom Paul, Tertullian, and numerous other preachers of the gospel were compelled to take corrective steps. There, however, the method by which the energy of the incarnate divine substance was to be released from its dual, male and female entrapment was as crassly physical as could be imagined, whereas here the main emphasis was to be — for the human participants — psychological. The physical aspect of the distillation and union of the male and female energies — the coniugium, matrimonium, coitus, or coniunctio oppositorum, as it was variously named — took place within the vas Hermeticum, the sealed hermetic retort, and whatever acts on the part of the artifex and his soror might have accompanied these developments were as between two intimately associated, emotionally interlocked, mutually respectful personalities — not comparable at all to the indiscriminate, anonymous Agapē-in-the-dark of the earlier Christian redeemers of the Redeemer.

Yet there is enough theology in common between the two religious orders to make it perfectly evident that they are basically related. In the later, alchemical context the counterpart to the “divine child” that was occasionally born to practitioners of the Agapē, and then ritually consumed (See The Word Behind Words here and here.), was the mysterious hermaphroditic lapis, rebis, or “philosophers’ stone,” also known as tincture, elixir, vinegar, water, urine, dragon, serpent, filius, puer, and a multitude of other names. The mystic vessel, vas Hermeticum, represented in the various retorts within which the transmutations came to pass, was regarded with the utmost religious awe as a virginal womb, fertilized by the spirit Mercurius, a veritable vas mirabile, and likened to (or even called) the Tree of the Fruit of Immortal Life and, in some of the later, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century texts, the Cross of Christ, or Mary’s womb. As summarized in the words of Dr. Jung:

It must be completely round, in imitation of the spherical cosmos, so that the influence of the stars may contribute to the success of the operation. It is a kind of matrix or uterus from which the filius philosophorum, the miraculous stone, is to be born. Hence it is required that the vessel be not only round but egg-shaped. One naturally thinks of this vessel as a sort of retort or flask; but one soon learns that this is an inadequate conception since the vessel is more a mystical idea, a true symbol like all the main ideas of alchemy. Thus we hear that the vas is the water or aqua permanens, which is none other than the Mercurius of the philosophers. But not only is it the water, it is also its opposite: fire.^{Note 36}

And finally, one complication more: since it is of the essence of this philosophy that divinity inheres in the lowliest as well as in the noblest things, one of the most striking traits of its literature is the frequent representation of its arcana in coarse and even revolting symbols. An eighth-century Arabic text of the Ommayad prince Kalid ibn Yazid, translated into Latin about the twelfth century as the Liber secretorum alchemiae, gives, for example, the following curious recipe: “Take a Corascene dog and an Armenian bitch, join them together, and they will beget a dog of celestial hue, and if ever he is thirsty, give him sea water to drink: for he will guard your friend, and he will guard you from your enemy, and he will help you wherever you may be, always being with you, in this world and the next.”^{Note 37}

Now in the Tristan legend there is a little dog of this very kind that was sent by Tristan as a present to Isolt during one of their terms of separation, he having himself received it from a Welsh prince in gratitude for his killing of a giant, and the prince, in turn, having been given it as a token of love by a goddess of the fairy isle of Avalon. In our poet Gottfried’s version:

On a table before Tristan a purple cloth, noble, rich, rare, and wonderful, was spread and a little dog set upon it: a fairy thing, as I have been told.… And its color was of such an amazingly cunning mixture that no one could rightly tell what the dog’s color actually was. Its hair was of so many hues that when you looked at its chest you would have said it was whiter than snow; yet its flanks were greener than clover, one side redder than scarlet and the other more yellow than saffron; beneath it was like azure, while above there was such a beautiful blend that none of the colors stood out: it was neither green nor red, white nor black, neither yellow nor blue, and yet all these played a part in a silky opalescent brown. And when this marvelous little product of the isle of Avalon was viewed against the grain, no one, no matter how clever, could possibly tell its hue; for it was then of so many colors, and all in such bewilderment, that it seemed to be of none at all.

And around its little neck there went a chain of gold, on which there hung a bell, so sweet and clear that when it began to tinkle, Tristan, sorrowful as he was, sat there emptied and relieved of all the cares and anguish of his destiny, forgetful even of the suffering he was enduring for Isolt.… He reached carefully and stroked the tiny dog with his palms, and when he was fondling it so, he seemed to be touching the finest silk, it was everywhere so smooth. It neither growled nor barked; nor did it show any sign of viciousness, no matter what tricks one played with it. Moreover, it neither ate nor drank — or so, at least, the tale declares. But when it was carried off again, Tristan’s sorrow and pain were back, as keen as ever.^{Note 38}

In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus claps eyes on some such dog — or at least so it appears for a time, to his imagination. He is seated on a rock on Sandymount shore, at about the point where Tristan must have touched foot to land; and he is gazing out beyond the white lines of the breakers to where a boat is rocking, waiting there for the body of a drowned man to rise. “Five fathoms out there,” Stephen broods. “Full fathom five thy father lies.” The problem he is bebrooding is the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son, whereby the Father is identified in his mind with the mystery of substance; the All in all of us: the same ubiquitous presence that in alchemical terms may be represented as the “pearl” or “treasure in the sea,” or as the solar king (the Father) in the dark depths of the sea, as though dead, who yet lives and calls from the deep: “Whosoever will free me from the waters and lead me to dry land, him will I prosper with everlasting riches.”^{Note 39}

“A corpse rising saltwhite from the undertow,” Stephen broods, “bobbing landward.… Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine. A quiver of minnows, fat of a spongy titbit, flash through the slits of his unbuttoned trouser-fly. God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead. Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun.”^{Note 40}

Thus sitting, watching the boat out there, brooding on death, disintegration, life living on death, and the one substance in all, Stephen next remarks, way down the beach, a point, a live dog, approaching, running. “Lord,” he thinks, “is he going to attack me?” Farther away, two figures, a man and woman, cocklepickers, are trudging with their wet bags.

Their dog [we read] ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on all sides. Looking for something lost in a past life. Suddenly he made off like a bounding hare, ears flung back, chasing the shadow of a lowskimming gull. The man’s shrieked whistle struck his limp ears. He turned, bounded back, came nearer, trotted on twinkling shanks. On a field tenney a buck, trippant, proper, unattired. At the lacefringe of the tide he halted with stiff forehoofs, seawardpointed ears. His snout lifted to bark at the wavenoise, herds of seamorse. They serpented toward his feet, curling, unfurling many crests, every ninth, breaking, plashing, from far, from farther out, waves and waves.

Cocklepickers. They waded a little way in the water and, stooping, soused their bags, and, lifting them again, waded out. The dog yelped running to them, reared up and pawed them, dropping on all fours, again reared up at them with mute bearish fawning. Unheeded he kept by them as they came towards the drier sand, a rag of wolf’s tongue redpanting from his jaws. His speckled body ambled ahead of them and then loped off at a calf’s gallop. The carcass [of a drowned dog] lay on his path. He stopped, sniffed, stalked round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffing rapidly like a dog all over the dead dog’s bedraggled fell. Dogskull, dogsniff, eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal. Ah, poor dogsbody. Here lies poor dogsbody’s body [“Dogsbody” is one of Stephen’s names for him self, his own unhealthy body.].

— Tatters! Out of that, you mongrel.

The cry brought him skulking back to his master and a blunt bootless kick sent him unscathed across a spit of sand, crouched in flight. He slunk back in a curve. Doesn’t see me. Along by the edge of the mole he lolloped, dawdled, smelt a rock and from under a cocked hindleg pissed against it. He trotted forward and, lifting his hindleg, pissed quickly short at an unsmelt rock. The simple pleasures of the poor. His hindpaws then scattered sand: then his forepaws dabbled and delved. Something he buried there, his grandmother. He rooted in the sand, dabbled, delving and stopped to listen to the air, scraped up the sand again with a fury of his claws, soon ceasing, a pard, a panther, got in spousebreach, vulturing the dead.^{Note 41}

T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land asks:

“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,

“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!”^{Note 42}

It is amazing with what consistency the images return. The fairy dog from Avalon beyond the waves, where the wounded king reposes who will appear again, may not immediately suggest Tatters racing along the edge of a tide wherein a drowned man rests among fish and a fishing boat floats beyond the surge, waiting (compare Figure 8); however, the shape-shifting of this mongrel — now a bounding hare, now a twinkling buck, bearish, fawning, with a speckled body, a wolf’s tongue, at a calf s gallop, and so on — is as various as the coloration of the other. His approach frightens Stephen, whereas Tristan, at the sight of the dog, is relieved of all sorrow and pain. These are opposite effects. However, a glance again at the dog Cerberus of Figure 20 will explain them. Joyce, on a later page,^{Note 43} holding his devil’s mirror to nature, reveals the word “Dog” in reverse to be “God”; and the same secret is suggested in Eliot’s capitalization of the word. The downcoming and the upgoing are of the same dogsbody, God’s Body; and whereas Stephen, holding to his ego at the bottom, is confronted by the face of mortal terror, Tristan, lost in Isolt, the Muses’ care, is carried to the top.

“Full fathom five thy father lies,” Stephen thinks, quoting Ariel’s song in The Tempest; and Eliot, in The Waste Land, continues the quotation, commencing with a line from the “Sad Shepherd’s Tune” of the last act of Wagner’s Tristan:

Öd’ und leer das Meer.

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,

Had a bad cold, nevertheless

Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,

With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,

Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,

(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)^{Note 44}

The wisest woman in Europe is Wagner’s Earth Spirit of The Ring of the Nibelungs: the Eddic prophetess of the Völuspó. In Eliot’s poem, she continues:

Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,

The lady of situations.

Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,

And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,

Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,

Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find

The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.

I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.^{Note 45}

The man with three staves we have met in O’Donnell’s kern. The one-eyed merchant is Wotan — Hermes — the lord of initiations, roads, and merchants; the god self-crucified on the Cosmic Tree (Figure 11), which is what he carries on his back. “The Man with Three Staves,” writes Eliot in a footnote, “I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself,”^{Note 46} pointing thus to the legend of the Grail, where indeed we are to encounter all these figures, again transformed.

III. Puer Aeternus

Figure 55. Hounculus in the Alchemical Vas

Figure 55, from an undated manuscript in the British Museum, the “Cabala mineralis” of Rabbi Simeon ben Cantara,^{Note 47} shows a functioning assemblage of alchemical vessels. At the right is a perfectly spherical flask with a long phalloid neck, containing a substance labeled Sophaium (if I read aright), from which the fire beneath the flask is distilling a spiritual vapor called Mercurius vivus, symbolized by the caduceus of Mercury-Hermes. At the left is a womb-shaped vessel, containing a winged dragon labeled Hermafroditum, which is eating its own tail. It is bathed by a rain called Mercury’s Sperm (Mercurii Germen), descending from three clouds, which as the name indicates, is a transformation into “living water” of the energy of the “living fire” flaming from the open mouth of the phalloid flask: three tongues of Mercurial fire there, three clouds of Mercurial water here. The biological reference, obviously, is to the fertilization of the womb.

The alchemical reference, however, is to a process known as nigredo (blackness) or melanosis (blackening), which is characterized by the decay or disintegration (putrefactio, solutio) of the materials in the retort and their reduction thus to the condition of elementary matter (prima materia); which is to say, the undifferentiated state of the primal energies or waters out of which the world came into being (compare, the rainwater experiment). For at the end of each cosmic aeon, the forms of all things must disintegrate and dissolve into this primal state before a new universe can arise; and analogously, when the womb is fertilized, the substance within it (which, according to archaic science, consists of undischarged menstrual blood) breaks down to be re-formed into the new life.

During the period between the end of one cycle and beginning of the next, this undifferentiated primal matter is a chaos, or massa confusa, in which the pairs of opposites — hot-cold, moistdry, up-down, north-south, east-west, past-future, male-female, subject-object, et-cetera — are not distinguished from each other. Hence the beast in the womb-shaped retort symbolic of this condition is a bird-serpent eating itself. “Before the sea was, and the lands, and the sky that hangs over all,” states Ovid at the opening of the Metamorphoses, “the face of Nature showed alike in her whole round, which state have men called chaos: a rough, unordered mass of things, nothing at all save lifeless bulk and warring seeds of ill-matched elements heaped in one…. All objects were at odds, for within one body cold things strove with hot, and moist with dry, soft things with hard, things having weight with weightless things.”^{Note 48} Presently, however, the rain of Mercurial Sperm starts in this massa conjusa a process of separating out (divisio, separatio) of the pairs of opposites. “God,” as Ovid tells, “God — or kindlier Nature — composed this strife; for he rent asunder land from sky, and sea from land, and separated the ethereal heavens from the dense atmosphere. When thus he had released these elements and freed them from the blind heap of things, he set them each in its own place and bound them fast in harmony. The fiery weightless element that forms heaven’s vault leaped up and made place for itself upon the topmost height. Next came the air in lightness and in place. The earth was heavier than these, and, drawing with it the grosser elements, sank to the bottom by its own weight. The streaming water took the last place of all, and held the solid land confined in its embrace." (Compare Genesis I)^{Note 49}

In the vas at the left we see the beginning of this process. It is suggested by, on one hand, the black spots — “matter and feces” (compare beginning of the rainwater experiment) — scattered around the dragon and, on the other hand, the vapor coursing rightward through the orifice of the vas, to play upon the eggshaped vertical vessel in the center. And within this central vessel is a boy, Mercurius Homunculus, in the attitude of the famous “Pissing Manikin” fountain of the city of Brussels.

For belief in the medicinal and other virtues of the urine, particularly of chaste boys, was an old, old story in archaic medicine. This wine is already recommended in the influential Historia naturalis of Pliny the Elder (23–79 a.d.)^{Note 50} A Byzantine physician, Alexander of Tralles, in the period of Justinian recommends it specifically against epilepsy and gout.^{Note 51} The Benedictine monk Theophilus (fl. 1100 a.d.), in his Schedula diversarum artium, suggests for the tempering of iron the use of the urine of a small redheaded boy,^{Note 52} while the Portuguese physician who became Pope John XXI (r. 1276–1277) asks, in a commentary on diet, why it is that human urine enriches vines.

Joyce, throughout both Finnegans Wake and Ulysses, plays repeatedly on this theme. We have had it already in the dog pissing on a rock. Together with his repeated references to dung, dung-heaps, and the like, these allusions have won him the reputation, among clean-fingernailed Freudian critics, of having been afflicted with an infantile scatological fixation. However, his usage seems to me to accord perfectly with the alchemical inspiration and purpose of his art, which was to present — from the page of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, through Ulysses, to Finnegans Wake, and on to the work that was never written — the process of a total transmutation of the whole world of human experience, from its earliest infant stage of “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo…,”^{Note 53} through the broadening and deepening, progressively clarified stages of a young male intellect in prime growth, until, in the episodes of the half of Ulysses, it has reached the impasse of one who “so loves his life” that he is in imminent danger of losing it.

Whereupon a prodigious crack of thunder resounds: — “A black crack of noise in the street, here, alack, bawled, back. Loud on left Thor thundered: in anger awful the hammerhurler”^{Note 54} — and the arrogant Stephen, who in spite of his flint-hard exterior is actually an interior jelly of phobias, sits frozen with unreasoned fear. “Came now the storm,” we read, “that hist his heart.” Immediately after which, the alchemical process commenced of a nigredo and separatio that was to culminate in the pandemonium of the night-scene of the brothel — beyond which the reader himself was to be sublimed in the vas mirabile of Finnegans Wake, to a state where all the foul “matter” of Ulysses would be seen undergoing transubstantiation, with Stephen’s self-defensive ego reduced to the mere shadow of one of the two incompatible dreamsons of H.C.E.

In alchemy, not only were feces and urine commonly utilized in the vas, but the technical term urina puerorum was one of the usual appellations of the aqua permanens, the “water of life that ever endures.” Here, in this vial, it is proceeding from the puer aeternus himself, who is an anthropomorphic counterpart of the lapis by which all things are turned into gold: however, as the old masters ever insisted, not the common gold, aurum vulgi, of the markets of this world, but the “gold of philosophy,” aurum philosophicum, aurum mercurialis, aurum nostrum, aurum volatile, aurum non vulgi: gold, in other words, such as only art bestows on the mind through its transubstantiation of the matter of this world. Beneath the vial containing Homunculus there is a flame by which the Mercurial urine is vaporized; and in a special retort above, this vapor is condensed and carried off to the flask at the right, from which our course began; so that there is a closed circuit here indicated, of the transformations of Mercurius: which again brings Finnegans Wake to mind; for there the last sentence of the book breaks off abruptly in a void — “A way a lone a last a loved a long the ” — leaving the reader the alternative either of resting there, with the ring broken, or of returning to the start of the book, where the rest of the sentence awaits, to pick us up and bear us on again, along the riverrun of this dream of Phoenix Park, for another round.

IV. Chaos

It is clear, then, that the solar king and lunar queen of Figure 53 are not the artifex and his soror mystica, but symbols of a process occurring (or supposed to be occurring) in the retorts. The alchemists themselves, meanwhile, as in Figure 54, are resting on the earth. Yet in their subtle spiritual parts they are indeed that royal pair, suspended celestially and precariously on the wings of a dove descending from a star. What star? Both of Venus and of Bethlehem. What dove? Mercurius Vivus and the Holy Ghost.

Figure 56. The Mercurial Bath

Figure 56 is again from the Rosarium philosophorum, continuing the left-hand-path adventure of the sulphur, salt, mercury, and other matters in the retort. This corresponds to a stage of the nigredo, the beginning of a dissolution, moving toward the primal state of chaos where all pairs of opposites coalesce; and in the human, psychological sphere it corresponds to the beginning of a regression — backward of civilization to the idyll of Paradise and, beyond that, the primal abyss.

In Oriental Mythology we have encountered a number of such disciplines of intentional regression; in India in Yoga and in China in the Taoist idea of a “return to the uncarved block”:

Blank as a piece of uncarved wood;

Yet receptive as a hollow in the hills.

Murky as a troubled stream —

Which of you can assume such murkiness, to become in the end still and clear?

Which of you can make yourself inert, to become in the end full of life and stir?^{Note 55}

We also recall the old Sumerian myth, and associated rites, of Inanna’s descent to the netherworld to join her departed kingly brother-spouse: of how she passed the seven gates and at each was divested of a portion of her raiment, until

Upon her entering the seventh gate,

All the garments of her body were removed.

She was turned into a corpse:

And the corpse was hung on a stake.

However:

After three days and three nights had passed,

Her messenger Ninshubur,

Her messenger of favorable winds,

Her carrier of supporting words,

Filled the heaven with complaints for her,

Cried for her in the assembly shrine,

Rushed about for her in the house of the gods.

And Enki, the “Lord of the Waters of the Abyss,” fashioned of dirt two sexless creatures, to one of which he gave the food of life, to the other the water of life; and to both he issued his commands:

“Upon the corpse hung from a stake direct the fear of the rays of fire,

Sixty times the food of life, sixty times the water of life, sprinkle upon it,

Verily Inanna will arise.”

And indeed Inanna ascended, alive again, from the netherworld.^{Note 56}

The Royal Tombs of Ur, with their impressive awesome evidences of entire courts following their kings and queens to the netherworld,^{Note 57} and in Egypt the terrible mansions of the dead, beneath desert sands, of literally hundreds who departed with their kings;^{Note 58} in China, the Shang tombs; the “death following” of Japan;^{Note 59} and finally the suttee rites of India and Vedic ritual of the queen’s descent into the pit of the sacrificed solar stallion:^{Note 60} all these bear testimony to the antiquity of the idea of the two that in the pit of darkness become again one, for the renewal of the flow of the forms of time, which in their separateness hold fixed the life that in flow is the substance of all.

We have to this point the words of Christ: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”^{Note 61}

Joyce, in the pages of Ulysses. depicts a world of rock-hard, separate men, moving dryly among and around each other. There is a drought in the land; the cattle are diseased; women are unable to give birth. Then, however, exactly in the middle of the book, that thunderclap resounds and a change begins. In Eliot’s Waste Land the same thunder and promise of renewed life resounds in the last section: Part V, “What the Thunder Said.” And remarkably, just as in Ulysses the Indian god and goddess Śiva and his Śakti, of the left, are announced, so here it is again from India the message comes:

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves

Waited for rain, while the black clouds

Gathered far distant, over Himavant.

The jungle crouched, humped in silence.

Then spoke the thunder

DA

Datta: what have we given?^{Note 62}

The poet, in his interpretative notes, refers to a passage in the Bṛhadāraṇya Upaniṣad^{Note 63} where the god Prajapati, the “Father of Creatures,” having been asked by his offspring, gods, men, and anti-gods, to communicate his ultimate word, spoke: "Da.” And in this sound the gods heard the word damyata,, “restrain yourselves”; but the men heard datta, “give”; and the anti-gods, dayadhvam, “be compassionate.” The passage of the Upaniṣad concludes: “And this same thing is repeated by the divine voice here, as thunder: Da! Da! Da! restrain yourselves, give, be compassionate. These three are what one should practice: self-control, giving, compassion.”

And so, returning to the poem:

DA

Datta: what have we given?

My friend, blood shaking my heart

The awful daring of a moment’s surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract

By this, and this only, we have existed

Which is not to be found in our obituaries

Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider

Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor

In our empty rooms

DA

Dayadhvam: I have heard the key

Turn in the door once and turn once only^{* *} Eliot gives as reference here, Dante's Inferno XXXIII. 46: the horrible story of the Guelph Count Ugolino della Gherardesca, who with his sons and grandsons was by his pretended friend, the Ghibelline Archbishop Ruggieri degli Ubaldini, treacherously locked in a tower and left there to starve to death: “And I heard the door of the horrible tower being locked.” Eliot here adds the quotation from F. H. Bradley

We think of the key, each in his prison

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours

Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus

DA

Damyata: The boat responded

Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar

The sea was calm, your heart would have responded

Gaily, when invited, beating obedient

To controlling hands.^{Note 64}

In the light of all these documents, the meaning of the narrative change from Figure 53 to 56 is manifest. The meeting of the eyes of Figure 53 having communicated its import to the noble, ready hearts (nobility being the import of the crowns), the left hands — of the heart side — reached spontaneously forward, and the right — of the spirit — crossed flowery tokens of the shared ideal to be realized: not the common, of desire, but the noble, of the selfloss of each in the identity that was theirs beyond space, beyond time, beyond what Joyce in Ulysses terms “the modality of the visible” and “modality of the audible,” or again, “the diaphane.”^{Note 65}

Having at appeared to be separate from each other — strangers, “poles apart” (to continue with Joyce’s terms)^{Note 66} — the two recognized their “consubstantiality” (again Joyce),^{Note 67} whereupon all artifice fell away. For as we have read in the Rosarium: in this art the substance to be employed is “not of the worker,” i.e. of artifice, learning, civilization, but “venerable Nature: because from her and through her and in her is our art born and in naught else.”

In Figure 56 the protective, historically conditioned clothing of the couple has been removed. They have cast aside, that is to say, not only the social order of their time and place, but also all their personal, individually developed, self-protective artifices of decorum and disguise. And there is real danger here. For nature is not all beauty, nor all gentleness and goodness. Venus, the Moon, and Mercury, too, have their dark as well as luminous sides: so have we all. Protection gone, each is vulnerable to the whole dark, as well as to the luminous, aspect of the other. That is the meaning of the appearance here of the abyssal, watery element. “The earth-spirit Mercurius in his watery form,” states Dr. Jung in comment on this scene, “now begins to attack the royal pair from below, just as he had previously descended from above in the shape of the dove. The contact of the left hands in Figure 53 has evidently roused the spirit of the deep and called up a rush of water.”^{Note 68}

The scene suggests Tristan’s perilous moment in the bath, when Isolt tore his disguise away and exposed him as he was: at which instant her own dangerous, murderous “other side” also came to view. Agamemnon, we have remembered, was murdered in his bath. The danger illustrated is of death by drowning (“Fear death by water,” Eliot’s seeress warned in The Waste Land): drowning in the ocean storms of uncontrolled and uncontrollable crude emotion, or, in psychological terms, the engulfment of ego, the principle of individuality, in instinctual compulsions and associated fantasies welling from the couple’s own unconscious share in “venerable Nature.” For these can be aggressive, filthy, and cruel, as well as of love and erotic bliss. Jung compares the scene to the mythological “Night-Sea Journey” of the sun-god in the netherworld, where unknown powers are encountered and overcome.

All the adventures in the Tristan legend following its hero’s infection with the poison of Queen Isolt, and culminating in his sharing of the potion with her daughter, match the symbolism of this scene: the foul and stinking wound (putrefactio), night-sea journey in the coracle, encounter with the dangerous yet healing mother and daughter in the Land below Waves, and the engagement there with a dragon; infection with its poison and then, through the magic of the Queen, the purgation of this putrefaction (separatio, divisio elementorum); the adventure of the bath; and finally, wonderfully, the potion.… If we compare, furthermore, the place and function of the harp represented in Figure 36, with the role and placement of the star, the dove, and the flowers in Figure 53, and equate the force of the love potion with that of the rising abyss of Figure 56, it will be evident enough that a significant relationship existed between the lines of symbolism of medieval alchemy and romance.

In the words of the Rosarium, “this stinking water contains everything required.”^{Note 69} However, as the operations displayed in Figure 55 have already revealed, a clarification (diviso or separatio) must occur before the gold-producing lapis can be born; and this cannot be left to “venerable Nature,” but is the work and virtue of this art. In the text above the picture it is stated that “art is unable to establish the primary arrangements.” Art, that is to say, cannot begin its work ab initio, independently of nature. “Our stone is something,” the text continues, “midway between perfected and unperfected bodies; and what Nature herself initiates, is by art carried to perfection. If you set to work on that state of Mercurius where Nature has left imperfection, you will arrive at its perfection and rejoice. What is perfect does not alter, but is destroyed. However, what is imperfect does indeed alter. Hence, the destruction of the one is the generation of the other.”

We note in the picture that though the heavenly star has vanished, the dove and associated flowers still are present. However, the queen has passed her flower from her right hand to her left, thus breaking the circuit of the joined left palms; or rather, transforming it into a floral circuit. For the king is now, with his freed left hand, grasping the blossom of her stem, while she, conversely, with her freed right, is grasping the blossom of his. And each stem now bears but a single flower. That is to say, the queen herself has become the second flower on the king’s stem and he the second on hers. Initially the floral signs of the one-that-is-two and two-that-are-one had represented no tangible realization; they were dreams in air, ideas: hence, properly of the right side only, spirit. However, with the meeting of the eyes and joining of the heart-side hands, the dreams began to come true. For each, the idea of the other blossom had found embodiment. And simultaneously the dove’s second flower also vanished, to become the rising water of the abyss. The entire setting had dropped one degree: the star above was gone; the waters from beneath were in rising tide. The solar king and lunar queen were already on the left-hand path of descent, from the great above to the great below.

The left, the side of the heart, the shield side, has been symbolic, traditionally and everywhere, of feeling, mercy and love, vulnerability and defenselessness, the feminine virtues and dangers: mothering and seduction, the tidal powers of the moon and substances of the body, the rhythms of the seasons: gestation, birth, nourishment, and fosterage; yet equally malice and revenge, unreason, dark and terrible wrath, black magic, poisons, sorcery, and delusion; but also fair enchantment, beauty, rapture, and bliss. And the right, thereby, is of the male: action, weapons, hero-deeds, protection, brute force, and both cruel and benevolent justice; the masculine virtues and dangers: egoism and aggression, lucid luminous reason, sunlike creative power, but also cold unfeeling malice, abstract spirituality, blind courage, theoretical dedication, sober, unplayful moral force. “The body,” states the Rosarium, “is Venus and feminine, the spirit is Mercurius and masculine.”^{Note 70} But the soul is of the two: Anima est Sol et Luna. “The unrelated human being,” states Jung, “lacks wholeness, for he can achieve wholeness only through the soul, and the soul cannot exist without its other side, which is always found in a ‘You.’”^{Note 71}

The building of such a soul is what has here begun. From the queen’s left hand, along her flower stem, the lunar current is passing to the left hand of the king, sublimated by the stem into a spiritual, not directly physical force, while reciprocally the spiritual solar current is passing from the king’s right hand, along the stem of his flower, to the queen’s right. Direct physical contact has been broken — at least above the water line, though apparently not below, where their feet seem to be touching — and the presence of the dove assures us still of the spiritual character of the relationship. The water presently will engulf the two, and the dove and flowers then will disappear; for they are indeed descending into the element of the left, the tides, the sea, and ultimately chaos. Yet for the present, and for a season of uncertain length, they are to remain, as here, in balanced “Platonic” interchange, each integrating reciprocally the spiritual force of the other.

And so it was too in the twelfth-century springtime of the chatelaines and their troubadours. Merci was not to be granted the cavaliér servénte until a sufficient season had prepared him for an experience of his lady’s love, not as “vulgar” but as “noble gold.” In relation to suitors of low degree, cultivated merely for their flattery, the ultimate boon granted, after a course even of some years, might be nothing more than the allowance of a kiss, once, upon the lady’s neck; and there were also, as we have seen, stylish burlesques of the mysteries of amor, as well as cheatings, this way and that. When, however, the knight was of high degree, and his love, as represented in the paradigm of Lancelot and Guinevere, legitimate, full, and true, the quality of his lady’s grace was in accord.

Figure 57. The Maternal Sea

In Figure 57 the descent toward primal chaos has proceeded one stage further. Dove and flowers have disappeared. Even the manmade curbing of the well is gone. The scene suggests strongly the start of Finnegans Wake: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s…” where the word “riverrun” refers not only to Dublin’s river Anna Liffey, forever running through Phoenix Park to join her father and lover, the sea, while she and her sinning spouse, the city itself, support and feed the lives and dreams of their sinning progeny; but also the river of the energy of life that is ever pouring through us all and all things, on into the void from which it simultaneously rises: both of which streams are, in turn, identified by Joyce with the Indian concept of the energy of the world dream as Śakti-Māyā, the great Goddess Mother of the universe, who is the ultimate life and substance of us all, and whose womb, wherein we dwell, is both unbounded space, out there, and the innermost, deepest ground of gently streaming peace, in here — where all her quarreling children come to rest in dreamless sleep. There is a passage in the Indian Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad appropriate to this point:

As a hawk, or other great bird, soaring in space, becomes weary and, bending its wings, glides down to its place of rest, even so does Purusha, the human spirit, glide to that state in sleep where no desire whatsoever stirs and no dream is seen.… And when it there feels itself to be a god as it were, a king as it were, thinking “I am this, I am all,” that is its own best world. That, verily, is its form beyond desire, untroubled, and free of fear. As a man embraced fully by a loving woman knows no distinction of other and self, so too this human spirit, embraced fully by that wisdom of absolute being knows no distinction of other and self. That, verily, is its form wherein — desire attained, Self alone desired, desireless — sorrows end.^{Note 72}

O Luna, folded in my sweet embrace/

Be you as strong as I, as fair of face.

 

O Sol, brightest of all lights, known to men/

And yet you need me, as the cock the hen.

So, approximately, the little German poem beneath the scene of Figure 57.^{Note 73}

Dove, flowers, and the manmade curbing gone, enveloped in the ever-living waters of the timeless rapture of this wilderness, before heaven and earth were parted, and with the moon as well as sun shining full, the lunar queen, the solar king, and “venerable Nature” together have recomposed the image of the sixth day of Creation. However, the trend of their achievement is not forward in time, but back: they are riding the reversed stream, the leftward-running stream, and they have farther still to go. As the text of the Rosarium states in relation to this strange connubium: “Then Beya [the maternal sea] rose up over Gabricus and enclosed him in her womb, so that nothing more of him was to be seen. And she embraced Gabricus with so much love that she absorbed him completely into her own nature, and dissolved him into atoms.”^{Note 74} There is a less gentle version of this event from another, and older alchemical text known as “The Tumult of Philosophers,” the Turba Philosophorum,^{Note 75} as follows:

The Philosophers have put to the death the woman who slays her husbands, for the body of that woman is full of weapons and poison. Let a grave be dug for that dragon, and let that woman be buried with him, he being chained fast to that woman; and the more he winds and coils himself about her, the more will he be cut to pieces by the female weapons which are fashioned in the body of the woman. And when he sees that he is mingled with the limbs of the woman, he will be certain of death, and will be changed wholly into blood. But when the Philosophers see him changed into blood, they leave him a few days in the sun, until his softness is consumed, and the blood dries, and they find that poison. What then appears is the hidden wind.^{Note 76}

Obviously, the reference here is to events like those of the vas at the left of our Figure 55. However, according to the notions of the alchemists themselves, those events in the vas recapitulated the processes by which the universe not only comes into being but repeatedly destroys itself and is renewed. They were as aware as Dr. Jung, though in a different way, of the psychological, theological, mystical, and biological, chemical, historical, and erotic implications of their operations.

Figure 58. Mercurial Rain

In Figure 58, which is our last from this series, the two have indeed become one. Furthermore, that one is dead; the watery bed has become a sarcophagus.

Here King and Queen are lying dead/

In great distress the soul is sped.

So reads the of a series of rhymes characterizing the stages of the putrejactio of this strange dual being in whom the shape seen in the two-flowered stems of Figure 53 has become realized as of the king and queen themselves. The scene suggests the crystalline bed of the lovers’ grotto in the wilderness of great danger, of the two whose heart was one; but also the androgyne at Station 11 of the classical mystery illustrated in the golden sacramental bowl of Figure 5 — which series of initiations, viewed in the light of what we now have learned, shows how far we have come, and how far in this mystic round we have still to go.

Biologically this dual form can be compared to that stage in the fertilization of an egg cell when the nuclear contents of the egg and sperm commingle to constitute the new life. As separate units of being, the egg and sperm cell no longer exist. And if the image now be extended to include the begetting parents, they, in a sense, no longer exist either as independent units; for their generation has been surpassed, the new is now the living center, in relation to which they are to function as a protective husk, to be in due time cast away. And so, likewise, when a psychological-spiritual fertilization has occurred: this predicament is described in a second rhyme:

Here is the division of the four elements/

As from the lifeless corpse the soul ascends.

“The decomposition of the elements,” Jung comments to this text, “indicates dissociation and the collapse of the existing ego-consciousness. It is closely analogous to the schizophrenic state, and it should be taken very seriously because this is the moment when latent psychoses may become acute.… The ‘torments’ that form part of the alchemist’s procedure,” he continues, “belong to this stage of the iterum mori — the reiterated death.” And these are described in the Rosarium as follows: “cutting up the limbs, dividing them into smaller and smaller pieces, mortifying the parts, and changing them into the nature that is in the stone” Compare the visions of dismemberment, etc., of the sham an-crisis described in Primitive Mythology.). The Rosarium passage then goes on: “You must guard the water and fire dwelling in the arcane substance and contain those waters with the aqua permanens, even though this be no water, but the fiery form of the true water.”^{Note 77} Which is another way of describing that disintegration of the dragon illustrated in the wombshaped vas of Figure 55. The Mercurial water from clouds falls here as well — to which there is another rhyme:

Here falls the heavenly dew, to lave/

The soiled black body in the grave.

“The falling dew,” comments Dr. Jung, “is a portent of the divine birth now at hand.… The black or unconscious state that resulted from the union of opposites reaches the nadir and a change sets in. The falling dew signals resuscitation and a new light: the ever deeper descent into the unconscious suddenly becomes illumination from above.”^{Note 78}

“Whiten the lato (Lato, the “black substance,” a mixture of copper, cadmium, and orichal-cum. [Jung’s note.]) and rend the books,” the Rosarium advises, “lest your hearts be rent asunder. For this is the synthesis of the wise and the third part of the whole opus. Join, therefore, as is said in the Turba, the dry to the moist, the black earth with its water, and cook till it whitens. In this manner you will have the essence of water and earth, having whitened the earth with water: but that whiteness we call air.”^{Note 79}

Thus, the long way round, we have come back to the sense of Joyce’s reference, Romans 11:32; and thereby also to a fresh appreciation of the sense of the coarseness of his imagery.

Again and again we note [states Jung] that the alchemist proceeds like the unconscious in the choice of his symbols: every idea finds both a positive and a negative expression. Sometimes he speaks of a royal pair, sometimes of dog and bitch; and the water symbolism is likewise expressed in violent contrasts. We read that the royal diadem appears “in menstruo meretricis (in the menstruum of a whore),” or the following instructions are given: “Take the foul deposit [foecem] that remains in the cooking-vessel and preserve it, for it is the crown of the heart.” The deposit corresponds to the corpse in the sarcophagus, and the sarcophagus corresponds in turn to the mercurial fountain or the vas hermeticum.^{Note 80}

In the lewd brothels chapter of Ulysses, the length of which is approximately one-quarter of the book, the turbulent mixture, on one and the same plane, of hallucinated images and those of tangible life corresponds perfectly (as Joyce shows that he knew) to the condition of mind of the alchemist, who was himself undergoing a sort of transubstantiation along with the metals and filth in his retort. The nigredo and putrefactio of both Bloom and Stephen, “poles apart,” throughout this chapter, and the breaking down particularly of Stephen’s flint-hard defense system, led the latter, at the crisis of the book, to an experience that was for him absolutely new, namely, of sympathy, compassion, a moment of spontaneous identification — with Bloom, “poles apart.”^{Note 81} And the sense by which he was touched thereby actually resolved for him a certain problem that had been nagging him all day, to wit, the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son: of Stephen sitting on the beach and the drowned man in the sea. And it was very soon thereafter that the end of the world overtook him, Elijah brayed his message of Christ the One Being of All, and the figure of Manannan appeared from a scuttle of black coal, after which there occurred the following apotheosis of the dog — “dog of my enemy” — in the midst of a hallucinated Black Mass:

Father Malachi O'Flynn

Introibo ad altare diaboli.

The Reverend Mr. Haines Love

To the devil which hath made glad my young days.

Father Malachi O'Flynn

(Takes from the chalice and elevates a blood dripping host.) Corpus Meum.

The Reverend Mr. Haines Love

(Raises high behind the celebrant’s petticoats, revealing his grey bare hairy buttocks between which a carrot is stuck.) My body.

The voice of all the damned

Htengier Tnetopinmo Dog Drol eht rof, Aiulella!

(From on high the voice of Adonai calls.)

Adonai

Dooooooooooog!

The coice of all the blessed

Alleluia, for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth!

(From on high the voice of Adonai calls.)

Adonai

Goooooooooood!

(In strident discord peasants and townsmen of the Orange and Green factions sing Kick the Pope and Daily, daily sing to Mary.)^{Note 82}

In accord with which, “poles apart,” there is the following lesson to be read in The Vision of God of Nicolaus Cusanus (1401–1464):

For God, being the Absolute Ground of all formal natures, embraceth in Himself all natures. Whence, although we attribute to God sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, sense, reason and intellect, and so forth, according to the divers significations of each word, yet in Him sight is not other than hearing, or tasting, or smelling, or touching, or feeling, or understanding. And so all Theology is said to be stablished in a circle, because any one of His attributes is affirmed of another, and to have is with God to be, and to move is to stand, and to run is to rest, and so with the other attributes. Thus, although in one sense we attribute to Him movement and in another rest, yet because He is Himself the Absolute Ground, in which all otherness is unity, and all diversity is identity, that diversity which is not identity proper, to wit, diversity as we understand it, cannot exist in God.…

Whence I begin, Lord, to behold Thee in the door of the coincidence of opposites, which the angel guardeth that is set over the entrance into Paradise.^{Note 83}