Coincidance - Principia Discordia

162 COINCIDANCE
appears as a "Grant, old gardner" in one part of FW—blending with Adam
whom Tennyson called "the grand old gardner"—and whose name is also
cunningly hidden in "grand uproar style" {emphasis added) and several other
Joycean arabesques you might enjoy discovering for yourself. The Blue and
the Grey of the Civil War also appear frequently, but ultimately appear part
of the Glues and the Gravys—two odd family names Joyce noted in the
graveyard at Sidlesham where he found the Earwicker tombstone.
If Abhe life is identified with Eve in the opening clause of FW ("riverrun,
past Eve and Adam's...") this is also fortunate, since Eve in Hebrew means
life (as Adam means earth.)
The "Anna" got into "Anna Liffey" because the English did not
understand the Gaelic abhe (pronounced more like awa) but is quite
appropriate for Joyce's purposes. Anna, in the New Testament, was the
grandmother of Jesus and thus, in Catholic theology, the grandmother of
God, which makes her a good symbol of that which is most ancient and
primordial. The Tuatha de Danaan, early inhabitants of Ireland, worshipped
a goddess named Danu, seemingly cognate with Diane-Artemis (the bear
goddess who was a bare goddess) and also with the ancient Near Eastern
goddess Anu and the Egyptian Nuit. Considering these and other etymologies,
Robert Graves in The White Goddess concluded that "Anna" is the best of all
alternative names for the ancient Moon Goddess, who combines virgin,
mother and crone.
The "Anna" root also appears in the Russian, Anastasia, which means
"resurrection" and fits perfectly into the symbolism of FW. As usual, when
you look for synchronicity, synchronicity looks for you. While Joyce was
writing FW in Paris a woman surfaced there who claimed to be the lost
Grand Duchess Anastasia. She appears on page 28 Gaelicized as Anna
Stacey, but then Anna Liffey becomes Judaized on page 253 as Hannah
Levy. Each of Joyce's "characters" is a local example of a non-local function,
as all women are aspects of the non-local
A and B in Norse, meanwhile, are Ask and Embla, which mean Ash and
Elm and are also the names of the Adam and Eve of Norse mythology. They
appear on FW page 4 in the lovely Freudian/Jungian cluster,
elms leap where askes lay. Phall if you hut will, rise you must (emphasis added)
Although Joyce has given it a detumescense/retumescense reference, the
second line echoes McPherson's Fingal, a Scots version of the Finn MacCool
epic: "If I must fall, my tomb shall rise."
ABC or Hebrew Aleph-beth-gimmel recurs constantly in FW, usually
symbolizing the "three quarks" of page 383 (
) who later got
incorporated into quantum mechanics by Nobel laureate Dr. Murray Gell-
Mann. "Alfred, Bertie, Charlie" and similar disguises usually conceal these