Coincidance - Principia Discordia

20 COINCIDANCE
we have seen that Stephen was a magic name to Joyce. St. Stephen is called
Stephen Protomartyr because he was the first Christian martyr; his feast
day is December 26 (the day after Christmas) and in Ireland and England,
rural folk still celebrate the day curiously, by capturing a wren and carrying
it through town singing, "The wren, the wren, the king of all birds / St.
Stephen's day was caught in a furze." The wren is nowadays kept in a cage
and released after the festivity; as recently as the first edition of the Golden
Bough, Frazer reported that the Stone Age custom of killing the wren still
prevailed. When all Dublin turns out to sing a song denouncing Earwicker in
Chapter Two, it is called "the rann, the rann, the king of all verse," with a
pun on the wren sacrifice. (A rann is an ancient Celtic verse-form.)
In Joyce's early short story "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," one of the
characters compares Parnell to the Phoenix, the Egyptian bird of resurrection,
which is said to rise reborn from its own ashes. The equation has become
Phoenix Park = phoenix as symbol of resurrection = Parnell as Crucified
Saviour. What rose from Parnell's martyrdom was the bloody holocaust of
Easter Week 1916, as Irish nationalism reasserted itself more violently than
was the case with Parnell's passive resistance tactics three decades before.
Earwicker was seen by three British soldiers, who are popularly called
"Tommy Atkinses." (This links back to the Tim-Tom-Atum system, of
course.) One of the witnesses against Wilde was a male prostitute named
Fred Atkins. Naturally, FW combines both Tommy and Fred into a
composite Atkins who accuses everybody, and merges with the threatening
figure of the brunette cad, or tramp, or thief, in Phoenix Park. That sinister
composite figure also includes the ancient Celtic bear-god. "What a quhare
soort of a mahan," Earwicker mutters at one point; mahon is Gaelic for bear.
Sometimes this figure becomes Norse playwright Bjorn Bjornssen (whose
works Joyce admired) because Bjorn Bjornssen means "bear bear-son." Puns
on the Latin ursa, bear, also abound, and Glasheen in her Third Census to
Finnegans Wake concludes that the bear-god is one of the major figures in FW.
Weston Lebarre, the anthropologist, in his classic The Ghost Dance: Origins of
Religion (published over 20 years after FW) describes the bear-god as one of
the earliest human divinities and says that if you draw a swath a thousand
miles wide, starting from the Cro-Magnon caves in Southern France and
running up over the North Pole and down through North and South
America, you will find traces of the bear-god cult, at various levels of
persistence, within that whole area. Many of the Eskimo and Amerindian
tribes still celebrate this divinity in ritual, as the Cro-Magnon paintings
suggest our ancestors did; throughout modern Europe remnants of the cult
are found in folk-lore—the talking bears of Norse legend, Goldilocks and the
Three Bears, the children's Teddy Bear totem, etc. The reader will begin to