James Joyce and the Hermetic Tradition

William York Tindall

Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 15, No. 1. (Jan., 1954), pp. 23-39.

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JAMES JOYCE AND THE HERMETIC TRADITION

After furnishing late antiquity, the middle ages, and the renais- sance with information about the nature of things, the Hermetic tradition all but disappeared during the age of Newton and Locke, reappeared in the romantic period, and, separated from the idea of nature it had affirmed, once more gave men of letters method. Ex-amples from Baudelaire to Yeats come easily to mind. And Joyce, who arranged correspondences even more elaborately, is another of these denatured Hermetics.

Hermes Trismegistus, from whom this tradition takes its name, is the Egyptian god Thoth, somewhat Hellenized by assimilation with Hermes. Associated at first with the moon and the ibis, dog-headed Thoth became secretary to Osiris. In this capacity he invented speech and writing. Since magic depends upon words, he became magus-in- chief and, under Greek auspices, the Logos or creator of things. This god of words and original secretary, destined to become patron of writers, is thrice great not only because it was customary to hail the highest by three identical superlatives (megistos! megistos! megis- tos!), but because like the blessed Trinity itself he is three in one, a condition that helped him with Christians.

Of the forty or more works attributed to Hermes-Thoth, some are occult and some philosophical. The occult tracts, which date perhaps from the two centuries before Christ, deal with astrology and alchemy. The philosophical dialogues, which seem to have been written early in the Christian era, are known as the Corpus Hermeticum or the Pimander, after the title of the first.l Basically Pythagorean and Platonic, these dialogues are confused by additions from Zoroaster, the great magus. As Festugikre, the principal authority on both kinds of Hermetism, points out, there is nothing peculiar or original in either.2 Hermetism is one of many almost identical doctrines that pleased those in Alexandria or at the Mareotic Lake who, tiring of Greek dialectic, preferred to lose themselves in a mystery. In it the exotic and ancient appeal of the East was made respectable by the presence, almost equally remote, of Plato. The revelation of Hermes may have survived the rival claims of the magi and the oracles be- cause of Plato's ghost. But it is more likely to have survived because it has a convenient and suggestive name, which came to mean all the

A. D. Nock and A. J. Festugikre, editor and translator, Corpus Hermeticum (Paris, 1945). I owe Joseph Mazzeo and Paul Kristeller thanks for advice and cor- rection in the matter of Hermes.

Le R. P. Festugihre, O.P., La Re've'lation d'Herm8s Trisme'giste: Vol. I , L'Astrol-ogie et les sciences occultes (Paris, 1944) ; Vol. 11,Le Dieu cosmique (Paris, 1949).

24 WILLIAM YORK TINDALL

more useful wisdom of the past whether astrological, alchemical, magical, or philosophical, and whether strictly Hermetic or not.

To Hermes-Thoth the cosmos was a unity of interdependent parts, connected by sympathies or antipathies and arranged in curious para- digm. Things above, such as the planets or the signs of the zodiac, were connected with things below, such as man and his parts, by lines of influence, resemblances, and affinities. This correspondence be- tween macrocosm and microcosm and among all sublunary things is the essential of Hermetism and the part of it that was to fascinate men of letters. The Asclepius, a dialogue bet,ween Hermes and an innocent, named Asclepius, expresses this central idea. Between the one and the many, says Hermes, is "a reciprocal relation-all is de- pendent on the one and this One is All: they are so closely linked that one cannot be separated from the other. . . . All things are connected one to another, by mutual correspondences in a chain which extends from the lowest to the highest." This metaphor of the chain of being, supplied by the translator, depends upon a liberal but (in the light of A. Pope and A. 0.Lovejoy) judicious interpretation of adnexa and conexa in the Latin text.

Zosimus, a third-century alchemist of Alexandria, knew the Pi-mander and St. Augustine refers to the Asclepius, the only dialogue that existed in a Latin translation. But it was not until Marsilio Ficino translated the Corpus in 1463 that the philosophy of Hermes became generally available. Whether or not their wisdom came di- rectly from Hermes, however, alchemists and alchemical divines of the renaissance, such as Agrippa and Boehme, were labelled Hermetic. By this time the occult and philosophical branches of the tradition, always intermixed, were so thoroughly confused with one another that there is no point in trying to distinguish them. The publication in 1541 of the Tabula Smaragdina or T h e Emerald Tablet , another work attributed to Hermes, at once completed the confusion of kinds and expressed what they have in common with unforgettable neat- ness. "As above, so below," the heart of this brief document, is not only the summary of Hermetism but for many in later times became all that need be known of it.

Although the renaissance idea of nature: with its correspondences between macrocosm and microcosm and among all things was not altogether Hermetic, it was so much like the idea of Hermes that not

Corpus Hermeticum, 11, 319-20, 349-50. *See E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London, 1943) ; R. G.

Coliingwood, The Idea of Nature (Oxford, 1945) ; Marjorie Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle (Evanston, 1950).

25 JAMES JOYCE AND THE HERMETIC TRADITION

uncommonly his name, linked with that of Plato, was invoked to sup- port it. Sir Thomas Browne, who saw man in a kind of spherical vivarium as " that great and true Amphibium, whose nature is dis- posed to live not onely like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds . . . the one visible, the other in- visible," reveals authority for this vision a few pages away: " The severe Schools shall never laugh me out of the Philosophy of Hermes, that this visible World is but a Picture of the invisible " nor out of understanding a mystery " without a rigid definition, in an easie and Platonick description." Meanwhile in some high lonely tower Mil- ton's thinker was watching out the Bear "with thrice great Hermes " and "the spirit of Plato " by his side. Whether Platonic or Her- metic or more general than either, the doctrine of correspondences provided a poetic century with method.

So provided, Andrew hfarvell among melons, birds, and sundials in his garden of analogies could see the mind as " that ocean where each kind does straight its own resemblance find." The metaphors which he and John Donne consciously employed as literary method were also affirmations of organic unity and statements of fact. Equa-tions of compasses and lovers, of fleas and marriage beds did not seem so discordant to Donne's contemporaries as they did to Dr. Johnson, who inhabited another world entirely, a world more logical perhaps but mechanical. To Donne's contemporaries his analogies were happy examples of wit or the power of discovering existing correspondences among things or between them and ideas. Marvell's "Definition of Love," a poem composed of parallel analogies, taken by apparent vio- lence from geography, mathematics, and astrology, areas of knowl- edge which seem to have little connection with love, however des- perate, is not only an ambiguous commentary on the nature of love but by its form a symbol of the nature of things.

As Marjorie Nicolson points out, however, in her book on the breaking of circles and the isolation of compasses, this organically interconnected world, designed by Hermes and many others, was succeeded by a world in which love, fleas, and stars lost touch with one another. Under the impact of science the upper half of the chain of being came off and, losing most of its links, was lost to sight or mind while the remaining half became less chain than machine, part connected with part no longer by sympathy but by a kind of engi- neering. K i th the death of a world which had lasted from Plato's time, metaphor, by which men of letters had presented reality, be- came decorative and detachable. Analogy seemed-as indeed it is-

5 Religio k?edici, Part I, Sect. 34, 12, 10, 47.

26 WILLIAM YORK TINDALL

irrational; and Hermetic correspondence, both cosmic and literary, went underground for a hundred years.

To be sure the eighteenth century was not altogether rational, still less altogether mechanical. I t produced Methodists, an edition of Boehme, and Emanuel Swedenborg. Not Methodists but Boehme and Swedenborg, both Hermetics, preserved and helped bring ba,ck not the world of Hermes but his correspondences as literary method. Looking for a way to counteract Newton and Locke, William Blake found it or hints of i t in Boehme and Swedenborg. Blake was an- thropocentric on the whole and without love for "Nobodaddy," his god; but in analogy he discovered an agent of "vision " or imagina- t i ~ n . ~No longer presented in the limited equations of metaphor, an- alogy became concrete image (or symbol) with indefinite reference. Blake's Tiger is half a metaphor; unstated, the other half is evoked. But the difference between Marvell's analogy and Blake's is less a dif- ference of method than a difference of worlds. Metaphysical meta- phor is definite because it expressed knowledge of reality whereas the romantic symbol is indefinitely suggestive because it is more an ex- pression of desire than of certainty. We may think of the romantic movement, in one of its many aspects, as an effort to restore the upper half of the chain of being and, uniting i t with the lower, to recover meaning and value. The world of Hermes was dead, however, and no degree of nostalgia could bring it back. Although analogy became method again, i t was no longer a picture of fact-nor was it analogy alone or method for method's sake. The servant of a new reality, i t became a way of discovering, uniting, and even creating not a world perhaps but worlds.

I t was Coleridge who explained these uses of romantic analogy. The imagination, which works through analogy or symbol, he said, is not only the creative but the mediatory and unifying power. It can reconcile opposites, make worlds from chaos or having dissolved old worlds remake them, and by pointing "beyond" can-discover what discursive reason cannot penetrate or define.7 Those romantics who found themselves in a confusing and divided world could proceed, with the aid of Coleridge, to make it whole and almost comprehen- sible by symbol. Uniting the inner with the outer, the spiritual with the material, the conscious with the unconscious, the imaginary with the factual, they could create a coherent, if private, structure. The

For Blake's debt to Boehme and Swedenborg see Mark Schorer, William Blake (New York, 1946) ; for his idea of imagination or vision see Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry (Princeton, 1947).

Biographia Literaria and The Statesman's Manual.

27 JAMES JOYCE AND THE HERMETIC TRADITION

original followers of Hermes used analogy to celebrate a given unity; those romantics used i t to make one. Some, who saw sublunary things as a kind of organism, could use the symbol to discover what was there and to fix the relationship of parts. Although limited to the lower half of the chain of being, and aware of metaphor as meta- phor, these were not unlike the original Hermetics. Still other ro- mantics, transcendentally inclined and impatient with the limitations of science and reason, could use the symbol to unite the known with the unknown and to know what reason and science could not know. Since the symbol is part of what it points to and cannot be separated from it, syrnbol or unassigned analogy is a device for proceeding from the known to the unknown and a means of apprehending, however dimly, the quality of what Coleridge called " depth." The difference between this passage from matter to spirit and the old Hermetic cor- respondence between macrocosm and microcosm is this: the old Her- metics knew beforehand the nature of both parts of their chain whereas the new ones, in ignorance of the precise nature of the upper part, had to use analogy to feel it out, and, like mystics coming home, could not translate their extensions into prose.

Coleridge was almost as familiar with Boehme as with Kant, and the early romantics were more or less familiar with Coleridge or his German sources. Poets were ready for the revelation from Hermes and his disciples that commenced about the middle of the century and continued to direct literary method until the first World War and in some cases after. This revelation came from the revival of the occult, which, having stored away the teachings of Hermes through an age of cool reason, handed them to poets who were waiting to re- ceive them.

Baudelaire, who vaguely knew the work of Coleridge, was the first of such poets. To him as to the ancients the universe seemed a maze of correspondences. Kot magic, however, but poetry enabled him to explore and report the nature of things. In his essay on Thko- phile Gautier, Baudelaire speaks of " universal correspondence and symbolism, that repertory of all metaphor." To use words cunningly, he continues, is " t o practice a kind of evocative magic. I t is then that color speaks . . . that odor provokes corresponding thought and memory." This, of course, is the substance of his famous sonnet " Correspondances," in which a " profound unity j' is discovered by analogies which, although vertical a t times, are often horizontal. In his hands " as above, so below " increasingly became as here, so there. The essay on Victor Hugo, however, is closer to the tradition: (( Swe-denborg . . . taught us that t he heavens are a great m a n ; that all

28 WILLIAM YORK TINDALL

(form, movement, number, color, odor, in the spiritual as in the natu-ral) is significant, reciprocal, . . . corresponding." Of this "magnifi-cent repertory of human and divine analogies " the poet, whose " com-parisons, metaphors, and epithets are drawn from the inexhaustible depths of universal analogy," is translator and decipherer. That this archaic yet romantic notion has a source more authentic than Swe- denborg is suggested by the address to the reader with which Bau- delaire introduces his poems. Here, in the third stanza, he refers to the Satanic enchantments of " Trisme'giste . . . ce savant chimiste." I t seems not unlikely from this that the images of swan, city, voyage, and the like, with which Baudelaire's poems abound, are Hermetic correspondences not only of above and below but, by romantic ex- tension, of here and there.

These poems appeared in 1857. Two years earlier lip has LBvi, the most eminent magus of the nineteenth century, had published his Dogme de la Haute Magie, the work above all others that disclosed Hermes to poets. No evidence that I know of connects LBvi with Baudelaire, but it is difficult to see from what likelier source the poet could have obtained his prefatory label and some passages of his later essays. Attempting to improve his denuded and truncated time by restoring what had been lost, LBvi ransacked the Cabala, T h e ChaE- dean Oracles, the works of Pythagoreans, Paracelsus, Agrippa, Boehme, Swedenborg, and, most of all, those of Hermes, whose name he gives to the whole tradition. The Hermetic tablets, says LBvi, especially the Emerald, which contains the heart of true doctrine and the only dogma, reveal that equilibrium of above and below which makes the visible " the proportional measure of the invisible." En-lightened by the " lanip of Trismegistus," he continues, the magus can proceed up and down the scale of being to discover by " analogi-cal correspondence between the sign and the thing signified" the secrets of nature. "To pronounce a name is to create or evoke a being or a thought.'' I t is not odd that poets, substituting poet for magus, adopted LBvi's Hermetism as symbolic method.

Typical of nothing else, Rimbaud is typical of these. After read- ing L b ~ i , ~ he called himself " voyant " or seer and re-created or maybe created visions in his Illuminations. These poems, composed of sym- bols, are symbols or correspondences for feeling and idea. I t is not without Hermetic significance that the important part of his Season in Hell is called "Alchemy of the Word." Here, when he says of his poems " I put down the inexpressible " and " I reserved the rights of translation," he is noting the non-discursive nature of the symbol.

8Enid Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud (London, 1938), 88-106.

29 JAMES JOYCE AND THE HERMETIC TRADITION

That ~ ~ a l l a r m d , the principal symbolist, read Ldvi is made probable by references to " grimoires " in his poetry and by his essay "Magie," in which, after discussing alchemy and black magic, he says: "There is a secret connection between poetry and the ancient methods of magic. To evoke the hidden object by allusive words, never direct " is the way of both arts. But by the time of iVallarmd, the work of Ldvi had inspired many similar works. Societies of Rosicrucians, Cabalists, and Theosophists, flourishing in both France and England, enchanted many men of letters.

The world of Hermes may have been dead in fact and forgotten by society, but to these poets, exiles from society and enemies of matter and machine, the world of Hermes was a symbol of their rebellion. That they desired this world is plain, but it is hard to determine the degree of their belief in it. There can be no doubt, however, about their belief in the theory of knowledge and the literary method be- longing to a cosmic system less actual perhaps than convenient. Nor can we doubt that Hermes provided plans for replacing the incom- plete world of science by complete aesthetic worlds. As organic as the Hermetic universe, the work of art need not hold a mirror to nature (as the aesthetes said), but may replace it by something more like a world. It was no accident that Virginia MToolf called the work of art (( a globed compacted thing."

When a t the end of his life William Butler Yeats said: "Man can embody truth but he cannot know it," he not only defined ro- mantic symbolism but distinguished himself from true believers. Yet he spent his days in occult pursuits and called himself a Hermetist. In the 1880's he joined the Theosophists under Mme Blavatsky, a second but more copious Ldvi, and a Rosicrucian society, The Order of the Golden Dawn, which in his Autobiography he calls the Her- metic Students. He dabbled in alchemy and astrology, and, like Mallarmd, he wrote an essay on magic. He read Eliphas Ldvi, Para- celsus, Agrippa, Swedenborg, Boehme, parts of the Cabala, Thomas Vaughan, and Henry More, the Platonist. While editing Blake and while rising to the highest degree in his Rosicrucian society, he read all the occult literature he could put his hands on and there was a lot of it around. His friend and fellow occultist W.MTynn T.TTestcott, for example, edited the Collectanea Hermetica in 1895. "Rosa Al- chemica," a story Yeats wrote in 1896, and his many poems on the rose, typify the result of these interests. The rose is a correspondence or symbol (most poets equated these terms) for something unstated though more or less adumbrated by context. I t differs from the me-

9 In a letter of 1939, quoted by A. N. Jeffares,W. B. Yeats (New Haven, 1949), 297.

30 WILLIAM YORK TINDALL

diaeval rose by remaining romantically indefinite. However general such analogies, Yeats found his method in the occult tradition. That he was aware of his ultimate source is made probable by references to Hermes in his essays; and in one of his last poems, a ('super-natural song," made, according to him, in the "metaphysical " man-ner, he says: (( things below are copies, the Great Smaragdine Tablet said." l1

Yeats is the conspicuous Hermetist of our time, but several others belong in their degree to the tradition. Thomas Mann, for example, one of those who applied the method of analogy to the novel, made Settembrini, the champion of liberal humanism in The Magic Moun- tain, commend Hermes. Defending the word, he speaks of " the Egyptian god Thoth, identical with the thrice renowned Hermes of Hellenism; who was honoured as the inventor of writing, protector of libraries, and inciter to all literary efforts." Naphta, his absolutist opponent, seeing only the occult side of Hermes-Thoth, condemns him as an ape and moon god " of whom late antiquity made an arch- enchanter, and the cabalistic Middle Ages the Father of hermetic alchemy." l2 In view of the functional character of Mann's materials, this debate on Hermes seems there in part as clue to Literary method.

James Joyce shares with Mann, Yeats, and one or two others the highest eminence in contemporary letters. I chose Joyce rather than Yeats as my principal example for several reasons. The effect of Hermes upon Yeats is obvious and well documented by Yeats. Some years ago I opened up the subject of Yeats' occult interests, and others have followed with greater detail.13 Joyce on the other hand is not generally associated with the occult although the matter of his possible concern has not been altogether ignored.14 In the light of his humor and his apparent worldliness, Joyce on a familiar footing with Hermes would be news. But Joyce used analogy even more consistently than most writers of a time when important literature is symbolist; and if it is true that Hermes, whether directly or indirectly, is partly responsible for symbolic method during the romantic period,

loE.g., Essays (New York, 1924), 180, 267. l1Collected Poems (New York, 1951), 283. Cf. Jeffares, op. cit., 284.

New York, 1927; 660. 13LLTranscendentali~min Contemporary Literature," The Asian Legacy and

American Life (New York, 1945) ; " The Symbolism of W. B. Yeaits," Accent (Sum-mer, 1945) ; cf. Richard Ellmann, Yea t s the M a n and the Masks (New York, 1948).

l4 Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce's Ulysses (London, 1930), devotes Chapter I11 to a very genera1 study of Joyce's occult background.

JAMES JOYCE AND THE HERMETIC TRADITION 31

some connection between Hermes and Joyce would seem the most natural thing in the world. I t can be shown, I think, that he found hints for his art in the tradition of Hermes and that he thought his art Hermetic. This is not to claim Hermes as Joyce's sole original. But one among several of similar tendency, Hermes provided the label for all. That he did so proves again the potency of name.

Joyce drew analogical method from sources both literary and occult. As for the first of these, it is enough to mention a few of his favorites. He liked Joachim of Flora, the twelfth-century abbot, who not only explained the symbols of the Apocalypse but in his comparison of texts pursued correspondences, parallels, and levels of allegory beyond the limits of earlier ingenuity.15 He loved Dante, whose fourfold method, as described in the Convivio and displayed in the Comedy, accounts for much in Ulysses. That book and Finne- guns Wake are filled with allusions to Blake and quotations from him. According to Mary Colum, Joyce had Baudelaire's " Correspond-ances " by heart.lB In his early years, says Oliver Gogarty, who may be trusted perhaps for this, Joyce modeled his life and work upon those of Rimbaud.17 And he knew the poems of Mallarm6 well enough to parody them in Finnegans Wake.18 In short he knew and admired the principal symbolists. His work is not only a renewal of mediaeval allegory, often another name for what we call symbolism, but the climax of romantic symbolism, which, as we have seen, is not without Hermetic significance.

Yeats, his immediate predecessor, seems to have been Joyce's great example and not infrequently his theme. Several of the poems of Chamber Music echo Yeats, especially the last poem of the collec- tion, " I hear an army," which is obviously inspired by Yeats' " I hear the Shadowy Horses." Allusions to Yeats and quotations from him in A Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake show a continuing interest. In The Day of the Rabblement, an early pamph- let, Joyce praises Yeats' occult short story " The Adoration of the Magi," which Joyce's brother Stanislaus tells us James once read to

l5Joyce tells us in Ulysses (p. 40) that Stephen read " Joachim AbbasJJ in Marsh's library, Dublin. In A Portrait of the Artist (487) he mentions Gherardo da Borgo San Donnino, a follower of Joachim. Joyce learned of Joachim from YeatsJ "The Tables of the Law," a short story that fascinated him; see Stephen Hero (New York, 1944), 176-78. Henceforth page references to Joyce's works will be made in parentheses in the text. The editions referred to (as above) are the fol- lowing: Ulysses, Modern Library edition; A Portrait of the Artist, Viking Press Portable Joyce; Finnegans Wake, Viking Press edition.

Is Life and the Dream (New York, 1947), 392. l7" James Joyce, a Portrait," Tomorrow (Jan., 1947). Is E.g., 561-2.

32 WILLIAM YORK TINDALL

a Capuchin.lg In this story, which must have pleased Joyce more than his auditor, Hermes presides over the Second Coming. This is not the only reference to Hermes which Yeats afforded the younger poet; for Joyce owned a copy of W. T. Horton's A Book of Images (1898). In his introduction to this symbolic work by a friend and fellow Rosicrucian, Yeats maintains that the symbol is defined by that famous phrase from T h e Emerald Tablet: " ' Things below are as the things above.' "

As for a more immediate acquaintance with the occult than Bau- delaire and Yeats could supply: we know from Stanislaus Joyce that his brother, like many other Dubliners around the turn of the century, dabbled in Theosophy, attended meetings a t the home of A.E., and read occult literatui-e.20 Two Theosophical works, with Joyce's sig- nature on the fly-leaves, are now in the Slocum Collection at Yale:21 A Buddhist Catechism by Henry S. Olcott, hlme Blavatsky's disciple (signed Jas A Joyce, May, 7, 1901); and Walter Marsham Adams' T h e House o f the Hidden Places. A Clue t o the Creed of Early Egypt from Egyptian Sources (signed Jas A Joyce, 1902). The sec- ond of these books from Joyce's library concerns the " correspond-ences " or " secret analogies " between the Great Pyramid and the rituals of T h e Book o f t he Dead.22 With the masonic secret of the monument, says Adams, we must compare the " doctrinal secret con- tained in the mysterious books of Thoth, to whom the origin of Egyptian wisdom is attributed." Thoth's function, as Lord of Wis- dom, is to direct the process of initiation. By his power he brings the adept to the House of Osiris and the forty-two judges, who corre- spond to the forty-two provinces of E g y p t a n d perhaps, though Adams does not say this, to the forty-two works that occultists com- monly attribute to Thoth.

Joyce also read Isis Unveiled by Mme Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society, and probably her Secret Doctrine. These enormous compendia of occult information are filled with references to Hermes and quotations from his works, especially T h e Emerald Tablet.23 References to Mme Blavatsky and the Theosophists in

19 Recollections of James Joyce (New York, 19501, S-9. 20 Ibid., 11-12. 21 I am indebted to John Slocum, the collector, and Herbert

Cahoon, the bibliographer, of Joyce for information about these volumes from Joyce's library. His copy of Horton's Book o f Images is now in the library of Princeton University.

22 London, 1895; 6, 62, 67, 68, 77. 23 E.g., Isis Unveiled (New York, 1891)) I, 306, 507, 550; Secret Doctrine (Los

Angeles, 1925), I, 285-88; 11, 92, 267, 294. In Finnegam W a k e (536) Joyce refers to Theosophy as " indiejestings."

JAMES JOYCE AND THE HERMETIC TRADITION 33

Ulysses are invariably cynical; for by the time Joyce composed that book he had long abandoned the occult as a possible way to divinity. I t is notable, however, that in two of these references the Theo- sophists are described as Hermetic, as if under that label their teach- ing could be subsumed-as indeed it can. In the Aeolus chapter of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus, a projection of the young Joyce of 1904, mentions " that hermetic crowd, the opal hush poets: A.E. the mas- ter mystic? That Blavatsky woman started it." (139) Thinking of her Isis Unveiled in the library scene, Stephen remarks: "The faith- ful hermetists await the light." (189) That Joyce, like other ama- teurs in this attenuated Hermetism, also investigated some of Mme Blavatsky's sources is made plain by this passage from A Portrait of t he Artist: " A phrase of Cornelius Agrippa flew through his mind and then . . . shapeless thoughts from Swedenborg on the corre-spondence of birds to things of the intellect . . ." (492) At the com- mencement of this rumination Stephen is thinking of augury and at the end of symbol. At the beginning of the third chapter of Ulysses, the Proteus or Egyptian episode, the phrase "Signatures of all things " (38) implies Stephen's acquaintance with Jacob Boehme, who used these words as the title of his most famous work.

However ironic about Theosophy, Stephen is plainly impressed if not with the metaphysics of Hermes at least with his applicability to literature. Since there is nothing in Joyce that is casual, nothing that serves no purpose in the total structure, and since a principal theme of Joyce's books is his development as an artist, i t is likely that the following passages on Hermes-Thoth as the god of writers, put into the mind of a hero who is an incipient artist and surrogate of Joyce himself, have the profoundest significance as a clue to the nature of Stephen's future method, when as mature Joyce he composed A Por-trait of the Artist and Ulysses. As Stephen in the Portrait, standing suitably on the steps of the National Library, thinks of Agrippa, Swedenborg, and symbols, he thinks " of Thoth, the god of writers, writing with a reed upon a tablet and bearing on his narrow ibis head the cusped moon." (493) In this description, which shows consider- able acquaintance with the person and habits of Hermes, bird and moon appear to function as traditional signs of the imagination, in the service of which Stephen has declared himself priest; the reed seems to indicate music and poetry; and the tablet, of course, is green. In-side the same library, in Ulysses, Stephen ruminates: "Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words. Thoth, god of libraries, a birdgod, moony-crowned. And I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest. I n painted chambers loaded w i th

34 WILLIAM YORK TINDALL

tilebooks." That Stephen, going beyond the emerald tilebook, had some knowledge of the Corpus Hermeticum is suggested by the fol- lowing passage from the Circe episode in which A.E., the Theosophist, appearing in the guise of Mananaan Maclir, says: " Occult pimander of Hermes Trismegistos," and continues, " I am the light of the home- stead, I am the dreamery creamery butter," (499) cynical references to the magazine he edited ( T h e Irish Homestead, to which Joyce had contributed) and to his life-long interest in cream-separators.

This allusion to the Pimander, the only one as far as I have been able to discover, is supplemented by several to Hermes in Finnegans Wake which testify to Joyce's continued interest. "The tasks above are as the flasks below, saith the emerald canticle of Hermes " (262) ; " the belowing things above " (154), which combines Hermes as the context demands with bulls and eggs; and in a passage on the Egyp- tian Book of the Dead the Ondt '* is (( thothfolly " making " chilly spaces.'' (415) The Book o f the Dead, which serves Joyce throughout Finnegans Wake in the motifs of conflict and of death and resurrec- tion, contains the earliest news of Thoth. A moon god, he assists Osiris by mediating between conflicting opposites and reconciling them, evidently by "words of power." 25 Thoth lives a t Heliopolis, which combined with the name of Healy, an Irish politician, figures in Finnegans Wake as a name for Dublin. (24) There are several references to alchemy in Finnegans Wake, several to Zosimus, who may be the first alchemist to make use of her me^,^^ and one to a " herm " [herma] or statue of Hermes as " a pillarbox filled with lit- terish fragments." (66)

Supposing Hermes-Thoth the god of romantic symbolists and Joyce's patron in particular, we may expect to find correspondences or analogies in the "litterish fragments " posted in that hollow im- age. For Yeats and a few other transcendentalists who believed or wanted to believe in a macrocosm they did not know but which cor- respondences might reveal, such analogies are sometimes vertical as Hermes recommends. But for writers like Joyce, who had lost belief

24 I t may be difficult to see why the Ondt rather than the Gracehoper is identified with Hermes, since the Ondt (or Shaun) is Joyce's opposite. But cf. p. 485: "Thot's never the postal cleric." Here Thoth is never Shaun. In Finnegans Wake opposites change places. On p. 468 Shem and Shaun or Nick and Mick become the " nikro-kosmikon " or the microcosm.

25 See Peter Renouf, editor and translator, The Book of the Dead (Paris, 1907), passim; Finnegans Wake, 134, 237, 395, 418.

26 For alchemy (especially salt, sulphur, mercury) see Finnegans Wake, 261, 286, 484. For Zosimus see 63, 154, 186, 232. I owe two of these references to Nathan Halper.

35 JAMES JOYCE AND THE HERMETIC TRADITION

in the upper half of Hermetic reality, except in so far as it could be equated with the poetic imagination or the unconscious, correspond- ences were generally horizontal, and T h e Emerald Tablet was modi- fied, as we have noticed, to mean as here, so there. The method of Hermes, separated from his world and adapted to what was left, still seemed a way of exploring, unifying, or revealing the relationship of part with part. Joyce used correspondences to show the connection between man and man, man and society, man and nature, and, as if to prove himself a romantic, between past and present. The sub- lunary reality so revealed seemed, as a result perhaps of nineteenth- century biology, an organic and changing whole. To provide an im- age of this world, to present the feeling of it, and, if we may change the metaphor, to note the harmony of parts the modified correspond- ence seemed eminently suitable. Since, moreover, the correspondence puts things together, it might connect the individual more closely with what surrounds him by making him aware of i t and serve, however indirectly, a moral purpose-such as the commendation of charity. But Hermes was most useful to Joyce in showing him not how to represent a world but how to create one. Before we get to that, how- ever, let us consider the kinds of analogy out of which he was to create it.

Thoroughly aware of what he was about, Joyce saw analogy as analogy and not as occult affinity. But among his comparisolis are some that would have made Hermes feel almost at home. As Joyce told his friend Stuart Gilbert, each chapter of Ulysses, except the first three, suggests an organ of the body.27 The fourth chapter, for ex- ample, presents the kidney, and the sixth the heart, while Mrs. Bloom's monologue a t the end gives us the idea and feeling of flesh. Each of these chapters concerns an aspect of Dublin. Joyce suggests by this a correspondence between man's organs and what Elizabethans would have called the body politic. That the chapter devoted to the heart on the organic level concerns the cemetery on the political level is far from accidental; for it was Joyce's contention, as he proves in Dubliners, that Dublin is dead. This analogy between heart and cem- etery shows another extension of correspondence. Few of the earlier followers of Hermes used it for purposes of irony or humor although some of them found in his system the possibility of wit. Joyce's rec- ognition of a once conventional analogy not only as revealing but as grotesque and funny marks the difference between Joyce and his predecessors.

To Frank Budgen, his friend, who asked the source of this archaic

27 James Joyce's Ulysses, 40.

36 WILLIAM YORK TINDALL

correspondence, Joyce suggested a comparison of Ulysses with Phineas Fletcher's Purple Island, or the Isle of iWan (1633).28 This tedious poem, perhaps the most elaborate analogy ever attempted between the organs of man, what Miss Nicolson calls the " geocosm " or the earth," the body politic, and beyond these between microcosm and macrocosm, is Joyce's model. That he should have found i t congenial seems further evidence of Hermetic conditioning. But although Ulysses abounds in references to the Isle of Man, Joyce did not fol- low his seventeenth-century example beyond the organs and their municipal organization. The macrocosm as the final term of the cor- respondence had disappeared. Maybe the following lines from Flet- cher's poem carried an appeal which made that metaphysical disagree- ment negligible :

And thou, choice wit, Loves scholar, and Loves master, Art linown to all, wliere Love himself is known: Whether thou bidd'st Ulysses hie him faster, Or dost thy fault and distant exile moan. (I.12)

The Homeric exile may have reduced Fletcher's world in one way but he expanded it in another by finding correspondences between the or- gans and the arts. Each chapter but the last suggests an intellectual or aesthetic di~cipline.~' The second chapter, for example, embodies history and the ninth literature. That the cemetery corresponds to religion may explain the disappearance of the macrocosm.

But the macrocosm was not forgotten. Stephen sees himself in Ulysses as ('a conscious rational animal proceeding syllogistically from the known to the unknown and a conscious rational reagent between a micro- and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void." (682) He may seem another great and true Amphibium, but the words " syllogistically " and " incertitude " separate him from Sir Thomas Browne. Although Stephen plays with astrology, seeing the sixteenth-century nova in Cassiopeia as the " signature " of Shakespeare's initial among the stars (207, 685) and seeing the pat- tern of his own career in the course of a meteor from Vega to the sign of Leo (688) he is indulging his imagination and finding in mem- ories of astrology a metaphor perhaps for his artistic method. When he and Bloom look up a t the sky in the Ithaca chapter, Bloom, an

28 James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (New York, 1934), 13-14. 29 The Breaking o f the Circle, 27-29. This passage on The Purple Island concerns

relationships between microcosm and geocosm. Tillyard, in The Elizabethan World Picture, 77-78, failing to find any trace a£ correspondences in recent literature, con- cludes that thinking in terms of correspondences is extinct.

30 Gilbert, op. cit., 40.

37 JAMES J O Y C E A N D THE HERMETIC TRADITION

amateur of astronomy, concludes that Stephen's description of the stars as " a heaventree, a heavenman " is poetic, " there being no known method from the known to the unknown." (686) Poets, he continues, are always " invoking ardent sympathetic constellations." As for " the theory of astrological influences upon sublunary disas- ters ": although he finds affinities between the moon and woman, he thinks on the whole that they are founded upon a " fallacious anal- ogy." But those heroes, still looking upward, see hlrs. Bloom's lighted window as a " luminous sign." (687) Since Mrs. Bloom corresponds to Dante's heavenly rose 31 and to the earth, this application of as-trology would strike a Hermetist as confusing if not frivolous. But the point of the correspondence is that she is to Bloom and Stephen what the heavens used to be to every man, and we are left with earth in place of heaven as that expanding heroine becomes the virtual macrocosm. As for the stars, scientific Mr. Bloom, preparing for bed, is impressed with their " apathy." (719)

But even stars so up-to-date as these provided Joyce with anal- ogies. When Mr. Bloom visits the museum to inspect the back side of a statue of Venus, Mulligan, who has noticed him, says: "His pale Galilean eyes were upon her mesial groove. Venus Kallipyge." (198) Galilean is the important word. I t means, of course, that Bloom cor- responds to Swinburne's Jesus, but it also means that he is like Gali- leo, who observed Venus through his telescope." When Galileopold Bloom gets into bed with Mrs. Bloom that night he kisses her back side, establishing by that action a correspondence between Venus, both goddess and planet, and Mrs. Bloom. Analogies such as this, seeming at first no more than indecent or comic, complicate the mean- ing of Joyce's characters and help to establish a vision of our world. As the correspondence between organs and metropolis is a metaphor for the interdependence of man and society, so the correspondences among planet, goddess, and woman are a metaphor for the interde- pendence of past and present.

Signs of the zodiac, an invention of Hermes, abound. Just after A.E. invokes the "pimander," the " cooperative dial " of his crayfish- watch glows with the twelve signs of the zodiac. (499) Elsewhere the Goat, the Crab, and most of the other signs appear; and Mr. Bloom is called a "watercarrier." But promising as this looks, no systematic correspondence between sign and action or character seems intended. Most of the zodiacal concentrations, moreover, occur in the ironic passages about Theosophy. Example: when Mr. Bloom

31 Tindall, "Dante and Mrs. Bloom," Accent (Spring, 1951). 32 I am indebted to Charles Burgess for detecting Galileo in the pun.

38 WILLIAM YORK TINDALL

in the maternity hospital is lost in contemplation of bhe red triangle on a bottle of Bass, he is suitably surrounded by Virgo, Taurus, and a " zodiacal host." Asked by Mulligan how he knows this, "Theo-sophos told me so, Stephen answered, whom in a previous existence Egyptian priests initiated into the mysteries of karma." (409) And in the Cyclops episode Joyce parodies a seance with Theosophical and astrological accompaniments. (296) Such vestiges of the zodiac are there (and also in Fiqznegans Wake) not only as reminders of the past but as reminders of the method that Joyce rescued from it and adapted to the present.

The circle, that image of the closed and unified world of the past, is one of Joyce's principal Not a gyre, as in the system of Yeats, but a "RTheel of Fortune," as i t is called in Finnegans Wake, (405) Joyce's Viconian circle is an image of time and destiny, which impartially distribute " the seim anew." (215) But what appeared to men of the renaissance an image of perfection now seems the image of temporal recurrence, to be made the best of with gaiety and sym- pathy. That the image of the compass, once associated with the per- fect circle, should recur in Finnegans Wake is not surprising. " The Goat and Compasses " (275) is not only the name of a pub but an image of the family that creates the circle in which i t revolves. The Goat is both God and H. C. Earwicker; the compasses he wields are his twin sons, who describe themselves a few pages later in the man- ner of Donne as " a daintical pair of accomplasses." (295) "A dainti- cal " means identical, and the twins are confused with compasses, ac- complices, and the two dainty lasses whom the Goat also uses to cir- cumscribe his destiny.

The major parallels or analogies upon which Ulysses is founded are familiar. Kothing more need be said about the correspondences between Bloom and Odysseus, Bloom and Christ or about Mrs. Bloom and the Blessed Virgin. Although some of the minor analogies such as those of Bloom and &/loses 34 or of the Egyptian " fleshpot," an im- age that connects many of the central themes, remain to be explored in detail, it should be plain that analogy is not only the method of

33See Wicolson, The Breaking of the Circle; Tindall, James Joyce (New York, 1950), Chapter 111.

34 The themes of BIoses in Egypt and the Plsgah Sight of Palestine (Ulysses, 140- 41, 145-48) are connected by allusion with the theme of Hermes (191). As Moses, Bloom will lead Stephen to the Promised Land of art without getting there himself. Since Moses is associated with Egyptian Hermetism by Blavatsky and moat other occultists, it is clear that the Rlosaic parallel 1s not without Hermetic significance. As Moses, leading Stephen to art, Bloom corresponds to Hermes, Stephen's god of writers.

39 JAMES JOYCE AND THE HERMETIC TRADITION

Ulysses but its substance. Out of a maze of correspondences Joyce created a world, complete and self-subsistent, but not without refer- ence to external things nor without power to organize our feelings about them. Unable or unwilling to revive the world that died in the seventeenth century, he made another world in its image. That this world is an aesthetic rather than a cosmic structure is what we might expect; for poets today, seeking unity, find it in art alone.

But they have this advantage over their predecessors who in- herited a world already made. As creators, they crtn enjoy the sensa- tions of God and like Him they can retire into what they have made or sit upon it. Stephen concludes his discussion of art in the Portrait with these words: " The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, re-mains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails." (481-82) His aesthetic substitute for the actual world, Stephen has just ob- served, must have wholeness, harmony, and radiance. In other words this world, unlike our own, must resemble the complete, harmonious, and significant world of Hermes, whom Stephen discusses a few pages later. (493) I t is not unlikely that Hermes, the " god of writers " and the creative Logos, gave Joyce not only hints of method but lessons in composition which proved useful when, as he expresses it in Finne- guns Wake, (416) he "made mundballs of the ephemerids."

Columbia University