Oz Fritz on Finnegans Wake and Aleister Crowley

 

Oz Fritz, who has been doing good work in the Lion of Light discussion group at Jechidah, put a post up last month on his own blog that I somehow missed, "Folds and Overlaps between Aleister Crowley and Finnegans Wake."

"This essay intends to point out some of the parallels between Finnegans Wake, Magick and Thelema alongside references to Mr. Crowley, himself," Oz explains. He then points out several apparent references to Crowley in Finnegans Wake. Oz says the essay will be continued. 

Here's an interesting bit: "Incidentally, Joyce used Cabala, a fundamental technology for the construction of higher bodies or brains. By Gematria, the Cabalistic transposition of letters into numbers, HCE adds to 18; Ulysses has 18 episodes."

Giordano Bruno wrote a book called The Curse of Cabala; the Yale University Press published a translation into English. The blurb says, "The Cabala of Pegasus consists of vernacular dialogues that turn on the identification of the noble Pegasus (the spirit of poetry) and the humble ass (the vehicle of divine revelation). In the interplay of these ideas, Bruno explores the nature of poetry, divine authority, secular learning, and Pythagorean metempsychosis, which had great influence on James Joyce and many other writers and artists from the Renaissance to the modern period."