Coincidance - Principia Discordia

8 COINCIDANCE
Lefanu's novel is coincidentally linked to Joyce's by the earwig theme, the
Chapelizod-Phoenix Park locale and the resurrection motif.
Hyacinth O'Flaherty has another link with the resurrection theme; one
of the hundreds of dead-and-resurrected gods discussed in Frazer's classic
Golden Bough was named Hyacinth.
But "Hyacinth" was also the code-name for Lord Alfred Douglas in a
homosexual poem by Dubliner Oscar Wilde; Earwicker's dream partially
concerns repressed homosexuality. And the house by the churchyard in
LeFanu's novel suggests Kierkegaard, whose name means "churchyard" in
Danish. Kierkegaard was a compulsive masturbator and suffered chronic
fears that this would lead to insanity. When the protagonist of FW is "on the
edge of selfabyss" on page 40, this refers to both "self-abuse" (a nasty
Victorian term for masturbation, which should more properly be called
self-enjoyment) and Kirkegaard's favorite metaphor of the Abyss. But biss
in German is to bite, and this brings us back to "agenbite of inwit," the
medieval term for bad conscience which Stephen Dedalus uses to describe
his own Catholic super-ego in Ulysses.
Earwicker (whose full name is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, and
whose initials appeared in Howth Castle and Environs, by the way) is not
only a Dubliner but etymologically-punningly linked to the earliest Gaelic
name of Dublin, Baile atha Cliath, which means town of the hurdles.
Hurdles are wicker bridges. But the early Celts practised human sacrifice by
burning prisoners of war in large wicker structures and, by a commodius
vicus of recirculation, we seem to be close to the roots of Anglo-Saxon
wicce, which means turning (like one of Vico's historical cycles) or dancing,
and thus we also approach wicca-craft or witchcraft.
In the course of the dream, H.C. Earwicker is repeatedly attacked by
neighbors intent on lynching him for his (real or fantasized) sexual "sins."
These nightmarish sequences always refer, through puns, to the ancient
Celtic rituals of human sacrifice in wicker baskets. Thus, on the level of the
Freudian unconscious (one meaning of Joyce's ), these sequences reflect
personal sexual guilt, while on the level of the Jungian collective unconscious
(Joyce's ), these are genetic memories of ancient Celtic religion. That
wicker is etymologically related to manger (see your etymological dictionary)
links Earwicker to Christ, who"died for our sins"—the best known scapegoatgod
in our Western civilization. It is moderately curious that the anthropological
link between Christ and the ancient Celtic human sacrifice is the theme
of a film, made nearly 30 years after Finnegans Wake was published, called The
Wicker Man,
Earwig in French is perse-orielle. Joyce sometimes calls Earwicker Pearse
O'Reilly, punning on this, but Pearse and O'Reilly were two of the Irishmen