Coincidance - Principia Discordia

166 COINCIDANCE
permutations of the genetic language—Joyce also has a second foursome, in
addition to his male A L and female H h- The second foursome is
symbolized in his notes as X.
X is one of Joyce's most interesting nonlocal functions. Most often it is
four judges, one presiding over each of the Four Courts on the river Anna
Liffey in Dublin—a building which literally does have four courts,
incidentally: one for Dublin city, one for Dublin county, one for the province
of Leinster and one for the nation. In many places X becomes the four
compass points, North East South West, and it is occasionally the four
provinces of Ireland (Leinster, Munster, Ulster and Connacht), the four
chambers of the human heart, the four kings of the Tarot or ordinary card
decks, etc. As the book moves on, X more and more becomes the four
archetypal figures whom Joyce gives the names Matt Gregory, Marcus
Lyons, Luke Tarpey and Johnny McDougal.
As Matt, Marcus, Luke and Johnny, X obviously echoes the childrens'
prayer, "Matt, Mark, Luke, John, bless the bed that 1 lie on." As Gregory,
Lyons, Tarpey and McDougal the X link to very deep archetypes, as follows:
Gregory includes ego and thereby suggests a man; Lyons suggests a lion;
Tarpey suggests Gaelic tarf, a bull (with a buried link to the Battle of
Clontarf again; Clontarf means bull field); and McDougal conceals an eagle.
We thus have the four angels in the vision of Ezekial—man, lion, bull,
eagle—who were, in fact, identified with the Four Evangelists in medieval
Catholic art. Matt being shown with a man, Mark with a lion, Luke with a
bull and John with an eagle. They appear this way, for instance, in the 8th
Century Irish Book of Kells, which Joyce uses as a source of archetypes
throughout FW, being especially concerned with the famous "Tunc" page
(because Tunc in Latin means both "now" and "then" and thus invokes the
Einsteinian Relativity theme, and also because Tunc makes an easily
deciphered permutation of what Earwicker was evidently peeking at in the
bushes of Phoenix Park.)
Of course, the Catholic Matt-man, Mark-lion, Luke-bull, John-eagle
symbolism contains an astrological code. The man is the union of opposites
and hence correlated with the water signs, the lion (Leo) symbolizes the fire
signs, the bull, Taurus, is the earth signs and the eagle, of course, the air
signs. The same symbolism appears repeatedly in alchemical texts and is
coded into the Tarot cards in which cups^water, wands=fire, pentacles-eartn
and swords=air. Bruno was one of the last of the great hermetic
philosophers who used this symbolism to express psychologicair'metaphysical"
propositions which nowadays are more familiar to us as Jung's system of the
four basic personality types which each create a different reality-tunnel as
they edit experience to fit their own models. The equation is: