Coincidance - Principia Discordia

18 COINCIDANCE
Finn is coincidentally-linguisticaUy tied to Finnegan, Phoenix Park, Huck
Finn and the cad's greeting to Earwicker, "ouzel fin."Tristan is coincidentallylinguisticaUy
tied to Sir Tristram, Howth Castle and the tree-stone
combination we shall soon encounter. King Arthur, whose name means
"bear" is tied to the ancient Celtic bear-god we will meet often, and to
Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, and Sir Arthur Guiness, the brewer,
who plays a large role in FW. Hamlet brings us back to the Ham-Bacon-pig
cycle.
In the "Tavern" chapter, almost the geometrical center of FW, this
struggle becomes identified with the ancient rituals of bride-capture, in
which the husband ( ) seizes the bride ( ) and is pursued by her father
( ) until captured, whereupon he pays the bride-fee and the union is
blessed; see Frazer's Golden Bough again. Gershon Legman, curiously, has
found this pattern surviving in the risque jokes about the honeymoon
couple ( ) whose love-making is interrupted by the rude man in the
lower berth ( ); see his amazing and hilarious Anatomy of the Dirty joke.
Before the end of the "Tavern" chapter, Joyce links the peril involved in the
relationship with the ancient rituals (see Frazer again) in which a
handsome stranger ( .) is invited to copulate with a temple priestess ( )
and is then killed, his body being scattered over the fields to make the crops
fertile. In this "knot," then, we have both Hierogamy (sex magick or the
alchemical marriage) and Human Sacrifice, on the Jungian level ( ) of
psycho-archeology, while on the Freudian level ( ) Earwicker is again
suffering symbolic punishment for his real or fantasized sexual "sins."
But Finn Mac Cool's last name sounds like cul, which is French (and Latin)
for ass-hole, the part of Earwicker evidently most visible to the three
soldiers in the Phoenix Park incident. When Joyce writes "how culious an
epiphany," he puns on cul and cool, caricatures his own doctrine that
anything can be an ephiphany or revelation to the artistic mind, includes
again the initials, HCE, of the dreamer and has a buried hint of the
misspelled "hecitancy" in the Pigott forgeries.
Cul is also part of O felix culpa, a phrase from the Mass for Holy
Saturday, meaning "Oh happy sin." This refers to the Fall of Adam and Eve,
which is paradoxically happy because it provoked the Incarnation and
Redemption. Thus, fall and resurrection (a la Tim Finnegan) is again
invoked: Holy Saturday preceeds the Easter Uprising.
When Joyce addresses Earwicker as "foenix culprit" on page 23, we have
the sin in Phoenix Park, the Invincibles killing English officials in the same
park, the sin of Adam and Eve (felix culpa) and the cul-cool semantic system.
When Earwicker addresses the jury later as "fellows culpows," he is implying
that all men are sinners or fellow culprits (as in the hymn, "In Adam's fail