Coincidance - Principia Discordia

COINCIDANCE 167
Matt Gregory = man = water = cups - Jung's feeling person. The Tarot
cups are full of water in most decks; water correlates with the feeling faculty
because of its flowing and unstable nature.
Marcus Lyons = Leo = fire = wands = Jung's intuitive person. Some Tarot
decks actually show fire spouting out of the wands; fire correlates with
intuition because it is an ancient symbol of illumination.
Luke Tarpey = bull = earth = pentacles = Jung's sensational person. Earth
correlates with the sensational faculty because the sensational/sensual
person is, in vulgar jargon, "earthy" and "materialistic."
johnny MacDougal = eagle = air = swords = Jung's rational person. The
swords = reason because they cut things up as reason dissects things in
analysis. Air symbolizes reason because the Rationalist notoriously lives in
the clouds and doesn't "have his feet on the ground."
Bruno and the hermeticists generally believed, like Jung, that most people
are over-developed in one of these areas and under-developed in the others,
and that the path to integration was to learn to balance all four. It has by
now become commonplace in Joyce exegesis to recognize that the warring
twins, A and Q, are two aspects of the nonlocal , roughly isomorphic to
Jung's Persona and Shadow or Freud's ego and id. It seems likely to me that
the four X are also aspects of the one or psychic functions of the dreamer
that have been separated and need to be reunified.
To Bruno and the hermeticists, of course, the four were metaphysical
as well as psychological. The cosmology of earth-air-fire-water has such a
long history in alchemical-hermetic literature that it hardly needs to be
insisted on; Jung has tried to find modern translations for this somewhat
archaic system in his Psychology and Alchemy. The traditional system
meanwhile lives on and is used by many occult groups still surviving; the
reader will find it expounded in most of the works of Aleister Crowley,
especially The Book of Tholh.
In researching secret societies for my Illuminatus trilogy, I was repeatedly
amazed that some analog of Joyce's function appears in almost all of them,
in one way or another. For instance, Freemasonry, the largest and most
powerful secret society of all, has four Worshipful Masters who stand at the
four corners of the lodge during initiations, just as Joyce's are sometimes
North, East, South and West. (The three quarks, , curiously, also
appear in Freemasonry as Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum in the death of the
Widow's Son.) The most influential of all modern magick societies, the
Golden Dawn, uses four quasi-Freemasonic officers at the four corners of
the temple. Witches have their four guardians at the four "quarters" who go
by various names—modern witchcraft is an improvised reconstruction of
the medieval cult—but usually they are half male and half female. In the