Shadow Ticket Part II

 " . . . some rare authors, such as Dante and Chaucer, share Virgil's comprehensive vision and arrive at the richest idea of the development of the labyrinth by blending labyrinthine fact and fiction, structure and story, objective pattern and subjective fact." – The Idea of the Labyrinth, by Penelope Reed Doob

Thomas Pynchon's works form a maze or labyrinth for the reader to solve, some more labyrinthine than others; not a new idea in his secondary literature. David Seed wrote The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon (1988) that apparently explores the subject (I haven't read it). Others have made the same comparison of his writings to a labyrinth. Gravity's Rainbow seems inordinately puzzling just trying understand what goes on in the various scenes. Writers that have strongly influenced TP wrote labyrinthine classics: Joyce, Burroughs, Borges, Wilson, for instance. Nietzsche wrote about the inner life and deep self as a labyrinth with its various complex layers and depths to be explored. The prototype for the labyrinth model comes from the Greek myth of Theseus and the minotaur. The solution in this myth lies in following Ariadne's thread through it. Some interpretations of Nietzsche suggest that his concept, "will to power" can serve as thread through the maze of life. This doesn't mean a will to have power over anything else other than yourself; it means the will to do, to act rather than react; closely related, perhaps synonymous with Big Al's "do what thou wilt."

Shadow Ticket has many puzzling, maze-like aspects, but also a clear thread in Hicks McTaggert whose initials in Gematria = 54 = Thelema = Will. Attempting to thread the labyrinth of this text reflexively puts the interested reader in a proactive position of having to fully engage with solving the puzzle.

Every detective story seems like a puzzle to solve. The last post suggests that the reader play the part of a detective, with the assignment or ticket being the Shadow. When Hicks is given his ticket to locate Daphne Airmont his boss asks him "what's this expression on your face?" and he answers "Close attention, I think" (p. 4); perhaps a clue to pay close attention to the information given. The idea this book may be coded gets alluded to with a twist on a real historical character, Gleb Bokii portrayed here as Stalin's "chief cryptology genius" (p. 167). The real Gleb Bokii (1879 - 1937) was a Soviet revolutionary and a paranormal investigator. 

The subject of Death recurs in Shadow Ticket. Investigating the shadow appears synonymous with attempting to solve the maze of the underworld. "An underworld where the dead live in shadow was common to beliefs in the ancient Near East" (Wikipedia). The most well known example from the Bible appears in the 4th line of Psalm 23: "Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me." Pynchon's twist on this comes with the character of Daphne Airmont, the cheez princess. Daphne = 145 = "The Staff of GOD." The simplest way to describe the plot of Shadow Ticket: rescue the princess. The rod and staff suggests the phallic magick wand = WILL. Blending a phallic image with a principle female character appears suggestive of a solution to the unbalanced male energy spoken of earlier.  

The Divine Comedy by Dante provides a foundational pillar in the canon of Western and Near Eastern literature. It poetically describes a journey through death and the underworld. The influence of this opus on modern and postmodern writers has been profound. You'll find it in James Joyce (Finnegans Wake), Ezra Pound (The Cantos), Robert Anton Wilson (Illuminatus! and others), Malcolm Lowery (Under the Volcano) to name a few. 

Shadow Ticket shows some parallels with The Divine Comedy. In the final chapter Hicks realizes he's not going back to Milwaukee, his girlfriend has married a gangster, Don Peppino Infernacci. This suggests Inferno, the first book of The Divine Comedy. Hicks laments that he doesn't know the language here, but then "Terike zooms in," a new romantic interest, offering to teach him starting with the Hungarian word for tomato, paradicsom, recalling the third book of The Divine Comedy, Paradisio, with Terike playing the role of Beatrice, Dante's former love and guide there. Analysis of "tomato" supports that: to + ma + to; ma = the Mother archetype; the first "to" could mean he's going to her as Dante did with Beatrice; the second "to" = 79 = "Conjunction, meeting, union" Dante's Paradisio culminates with the union of the human will with Divine will; one interpretation of Crowley's "Do what thou wilt."

Shadow Ticket begins with imagery reminiscent of a contemporary Inferno.  A loud explosion occurs on page 1. Flashing back to Hicks's time as a strikebreaker we find him regularly getting into violent skirmishes; in one instance he almost kills someone. We first hear about Don Peppino Infernacci described as "a lord of the underworld."  The transition from Inferno to Purgatorio occurs gradually in Shadow Ticket as it also does in The Divine Comedy. I would place the beginning of it when Hicks leaves April at Union Station in Chicago to take the train to New York. 

Purgatorio "Canto XII" has the lines:

"How different were these entryways from those 

of Hell! For here it is with song one enters;

down there, it is with savage lamentations."

On the train to New York, a porter, McKinley Gibbs, brings a stack of records for sale and a Victrola. Gibbs gives Hicks a disc without a label which turns out to have April singing. He heard April singing it live before but never on a record. Hicks listens to it a few times then falls asleep. The lyrics are in the book (p. 124 - 125). When he wakes up, he looks for the porter, but no one has ever heard of him. He seems to have been a phantom. I suggest that this song marks his entry into the Purgatory section which goes for most of the rest of the novel. In the first Canto of Purgatorio Dante conceives of it as a journey to freedom and liberty which I see as a subtext of Shadow Ticket. Another interpretation of this territory holds it to be partially an allegory for the training of the will in this life.

Shades is the term Dante calls the souls of the deceased. He also frequently refers to them as ombra, Italian for shadow. We see a reference to a dead Italian on the first page of Shadow Ticket. Chapter 2 has "IMOPIO job, no question." IMOPIO stands for "Infernal Machine Of Presumed Italian Origin."

  

Hicks gets confronted with death in his previous job as a strikebreaker when he gets so mad at someone that he reaches for the weapon in his pocket to throttle the guy and finds it inexplicably gone. He realizes he would have killed him had not some supernatural agency temporarily removed the weapon. This event profoundly changes his life leading him to change course and get a job as a detective. The shock of being confronted with death by nearly killing someone proves transformational. 

Last post I brought up the Death tarot card in chapter 13 when Bruno thinks about it. The implication is  that he's knocking off rivals in the cheez industry. Two chapters later, 15, starts with Hicks having a sense that he's targeted. This is the Christmas Day chapter where he gets a deadly gift. On the Stupendica ocean liner in chapter 20 it seems Hicks gets killed, but he doesn't, a trick on the reader. Later, when the action shifts to Hungary we see a short bit about "Death's penis" an image that ties in with the aggressively male energy  brought up last post with Fascism. There seems nothing more fascist than killing someone solely because the murderer has aggressive dick energy. Down the line, in Vladboy (fascist) territory in Hungary we see a sign on a club that translates to Wall of Death.

Stuffy Keegan is the fellow whose truck got bombed at the top of the story. It seems he escaped the blast, but it's left ambiguous.  "Maybe I'm a ghost now and I'm haunting you" (p. 57). He ends up going aboard an old WWI submarine that seems equally mysterious. The sub appears able to travel across parallel worlds at the end of the story. That sub is known as U-13. As mentioned earlier, 13 is the key number for Nun (Hebrew) and all its correspondences which include the Death card. U-13 = you dead. 

Nun means "fish." In Kabbalah, nun/fish symbolizes "heir to the throne" among other things. In medieval texts a final nun (last letter) was used as an abbreviation for "son of." The final phrase of the first paragraph in the book reads" "where it seldom gets more serious than somebody stole somebody's fish." Looking at it through the Kabbalah lens it becomes ". . . somebody stole somebody's heir." This encapsulates the plot though Pynchon has reversed the gender and made her an heiress. Vineland begins with Zoyd Wheeler, the son of Skeet Wheeler, having to reverse his gender by dressing in drag in order to collect his benefits.

* * * * * *

To be in the world but not of it describes a Sufi maxim that appears to apply to a subtextual directive proscribing a way of action in Shadow Ticket. I hazard to say that the hermetic/mystical coding found herein does not intend to teach a path toward personal enlightenment, but rather to a way of service intended to make the world a better place. In Qabalistic terms, in this instance we don't climb the Tree of Life to ascend to the lofty immaterial realm of Kether and hang out there, but rather to learn a transformational function that brings the life force and vitality of Kether down to the material world of Malkuth. We aren't "another one of those metaphysical detectives, out looking for Revelation" as Lew Basnight puts it in chapter 6.

Two names in the story serve to illustrate this  perspective. I'll discuss Bruno's formerly right hand man and fixer, Ace Lomax first. Ace naturally suggests the Aces in the tarot especially since we find tarot encounters in the book. Lomax = Low (Malkuth) + maximum. Lon Milo Duquette's Understanding Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot provides an excellent description of the aces. Crowley says the aces aren't the four elements themselves, but rather the seeds of the elements comparing that to Kether and its relationship to the manifestation of the rest of the Tree. Duquette writes that all the lesser arcana (Court and small cards) of the Tarot live inside each of the aces's respective suit. He connects the seed quality of aces with subatomic particles that "aren't matter at all, but can only be described as nonmaterial 'tendencies'" (UACTT, p, 163). I hope you enjoy the qabalistic pun with Malkuth-10. 

Crowley writes that the aces form a link between the Princesses and the small cards. The Princesses correspond with Earth. Bruno Airmont attempts to rehire Ace Lomax at the end of the novel offering him a top position in his enterprise. He also teases him with the prospect of becoming romantically involved with his daughter, Daphne, the cheez princess. Lomax turns him down. He gets many other job offers the last one being to escort Jews to safety from the fascists. Ace expresses guilt over antisemitic actions he's taken previously; this new job reverses that giving him a chance to expiate his past. This connects with the territory of Purgatory and the theme of Liberty for the Jews he rescues. Ace Lomax's initials = AL as in Big AL or Liber Al. 

The second name illustrating the idea of vitalizing the material world: Bela Lugosi.

Lugosi can break down to: low (Malkuth)  + go + see. Bela Lugosi was Hungarian. Much of the second part of the book occurs in Hungary. In old Hungarian Bela = heart or insides. Bela Lugosi =  heart low go see.

The nature of producing this elan vital (Bergson) or what Gilles Deleuze calls "sense" can be found in the Crowley material herein. Previously we saw Bruno pass on the inner secrets of the International Cheese Syndicate (= 78 = the Tarot = to initiate = Ra Hoor Khuit, etc. etc. see Sepher Sephiroth). Like elan vital we find that cheese is alive: "'Cheese, oh to be sure, cheese is alive. Self aware, actually, maybe not exactly the way we are, but still more than some clever simulation. We're at a pivot point here in the history of food science, a strange new form of life that was deliberately invented like Dr. Frankenstein or something –'" (ST p.83) 

Note the "c + s" combination which relates both to elan vital and food science. The story of Frankenstein can represent an alchemical allegory for self-actualization in the higher dimensions. Another contemporary iteration of that allegory comes in the form of Bob Dylan's "My Own Version of You" from Rough and Rowdy Ways:

"I'll take a Scarface Pacino and a Godfather Brando

Mix it up in a tank and get a robot commando

If I do it up right and put the head on straight

I'll be saved by the creature I create."

Bruno Airmont, the Al Capone of Cheez, passes on his esoteric secrets to his daughter Daphne in chapter 37. Another allusion to passing on Big Al's (Aleister Crowley) material comes from Skeet Wheeler. Skeet, who wishes to become an apprentice detective idolizes Al Capone. He carries a photo of him in his wallet with the inscription. "To my old goombah Skeet, who taught me everything I know, regards and tanti auguri (happy birthday in Italian), always, Al" (p. 7). Another reversal here with the teacher (Big Al) learning everything from the apprentice (Skeet). The book ends with a letter to Hicks telling him he's moving to California simply signed "Skeet," the last word in the book. 

Skeet = 99 = "The pangs of childbirth" (as in happy birthday);   

                      "The Vault of Heaven; an inner chamber; wedlock; nupital." 

We may assume that Skeet gets married to his new girl Zin as it seems their child is Zoyd Wheeler from Vineland - also connecting with childbirth.

Also 99 = "Clay of Death, Infernal Abode of Geburah;

                 Cognition, knowledge"

Skeet's name qabalistically connects with both Inferno and Paradisio.

Daphne's name also connects with Paradisio. In Greek mythology Daphne was pursued aggressively by Apollo. She prayed for help to her father, the river god Peneus who transformed her into a laurel tree to escape his erotic advances. Apollo designated the laurel his sacred tree. This myth is referred to twice in Paradisio Canto I. Daphne has since come to represent victory, honor, achievement and immortality. Victors were crowned with a laurel wreath in the ancient Olympics; see also poet laureate. 

                  

* * * * * * 

The clearest influence of James Joyce that I see comes from the circular nature of subjects at the end of the book matching those at the top. The book starts and ends with mention of the railroad which gets associated with trouble at the top; happiness and the promise of new life at the end. A phrase on page 2: "happiness twins are back on the train again" suggests the happy couple, Skeet and Zin about to board the train at the very end. The explosion on page 1 gets referenced on the last page.

Something else at both the end and beginning of the novel is the word "breeze" – "breeze machine" at the end, "comes breezing up here to Milwaukee" in the first paragraph.  Both are slang for traveling in these contexts. Breeze or a variation thereof easily appears one of the most frequently used verbs in the book coming with inordinate frequency. I don't know the significance of this, if any. It does remind me of his alternate spelling for cheese - cheez, which also sees frequent use. 

A cryptographer looking for patterns would notice that "breeze" and "cheez" have the letter sequence "eez" in common; eez = 17 = The Star (tarot). Perhaps this quote from Purgatorio Canto XVII appears mere coincidence:

"So said my guide; and toward a stairway, he 

and I together turned; and just as soon

as I was at the first step, I sensed something

  much like the motion of a wing, and wind

that beat against my face, and words 'Beati 

pacifica, those free of evil anger!'

    Above us now the final rays before

the fall of night were raised to such a height

that we could see the stars on every side."

This quote shows Dante feeling a breeze possibly from a bird or Angel just before the shadow of the Earth brings night with the stars becoming visible. Beati pacifica refers to the a Bible phrase" "Blessed are the peacemakers." Duquette writes: "Traditionally the Star is the card of hope – the promise of things unseen" (UACTT p. 145). 

Purgatorio Canto XXVIII connects breeze with hope:

 "A gentle breeze, which did not seem to vary

within itself, was striking at my brow

but with no greater force than a kind wind's,

    a wind that made the trembling boughs – they all

bent eagerly – incline in the direction

of morning shadows from the holy mountain;

   but they were not deflected with such force

as to disturb the little birds upon

the branches in the practice of their arts;

  for to the leaves, with song, birds welcomed those

first hours of the morning joyously,

and leaves supplied the burden to their rhymes –"

A gentle breeze, "which did not seem to vary within itself" suggests Will. Birds practicing their arts suggests Magick. It also recalls the Sufi classic, The Conference of the Birds. Joyce used "leaves" as a pun to symbolize death (as in leaves the body) in Finnegans Wake.

This breeze comes comes near the beginning of the Canto (line 7), a canto that marks an inflection point as Dante nears the end of his journey through Purgatorio and prepares to transition into Paradisio. This canto introduces the poet to the Garden Eden aka the Earthly Paradise.

I don't know if TP intended this association with the multiplicity of "breeze," but it does appear to fit with the project of attempting to make our world a little less inferno-like and more of a paradise. Or perhaps to focus and tune our perceptions in that direction. The postulate of Shadow Ticket as a magick grimoire, an agent of change, would have the Invocation go beyond the author's conscious intentions. In other words, this reading appears valid whether Pynchon meant it or not.

The next installment includes a Deleuzean perspective of Shadow Ticket. Stay tuned for Part III.

Magic Realism in Pynchon's Shadow Ticket

 "On the one hand, one would be a fool to think that reading a book about magical initiation is sufficient to constitute initiation. On the other hand, there are books where the text itself is the secret ... Texts can wind their import down twisted paths of verbal subterfuge such that to experience the course of their proceedings and the intensity and inner resonances of their content is to be brought to an experience on one's own terrain of what the author would lead one on to. " - Charles Stein, The Occult Harry Smith.

"Yet conscience must find ways to go on operating inside history." - Shadow Ticket, p. 279

This post will inevitably contain spoilers.

Common knowledge in the Pynchon universe holds that his historical novels include some subtext on the present time. Shadow Ticket is set mostly in 1932 when Fascism appeared in the ascendent around the world including the United States. Fascism plays a dominating role in the novel both in the macro geopolitical aspect and with the individual experiences and encounters by the characters. The story's timeline finishes around Christmas 1932. Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in January, 1933. The Hitler movement in the U. S. first comes into the picture at the start of chapter 4. Hitler gets blended with Charlie Chaplin's humorous caricature of him from The Dictator followed by a serious portrayal that seems accurate until he's described as someone who "says whatever comes into his head." The real Hitler did not have that trait, he never went off script in his meticulously crafted speeches. This kind of verbal diarrhea clearly fits a contemporary American politician. I see at least one other parallel to the same politician with an episode that flashes back on Bruno Airmont's sexual attraction to his then teenage daughter Daphne.

Magic realism appears self defining – elements of magic blending in with so-called "reality." Shadow Ticket constantly walks a fine line between the paranormal, events difficult to explain by the rules of known physics, and the "real." Pynchon articulates this fine line in the opening quote before the title page that's attributed to Bela Lugosi from The Black Cat (1934). "Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney . . . perhaps not." I recently saw this film and recommend it for getting into the mood of the book. The film is set in Hungary where a fair amount of Shadow Ticket takes place in the second half. Lugosi's character's name is Vitus Werdegast thus aligning to Pynchon's great propensity for using the letter V; done here with high frequency. Werdegast is a German name; the W has a V sound. I expand the sense of magic with a Hermetic definition: causing Change to occur in conformity with Will. 

Shadow Ticket (ST) starts out as a detective story then slowly morphs into something closer to espionage and spycraft. The protagonist, Hicks McTaggert, works for the Unamalgamated Ops detective agency. He gets the assignment to locate and bring back Daphne Airmont, the heiress to a cheese conglomerate owned by her father, Bruno, who has apparent ties to organized crime.  He's known as the Al Capone of Cheez (as it's frequently spelled). Assignments from the agency are known as tickets. When asked to go on other assignments by different people he invariable defers by saying Unamalgamated would have to open a ticket on that. Shadow Ticket can thus be seen as the reader's assignment to act as a detective in a particular way. In post modern offerings the idea of suggesting the reader put in the effort to decipher the literature like a detective turns up in novels by Robert Anton Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov with a reference to the archetypal detective Sherlock Holmes. Shadow Ticket gives the nod to Holmes on page 8 in the words of the young Skeet Wheeler who aspires to be a detective. 

So let's begin to unlock this occult transmission. I have previously outlined some of the elements and sources Pynchon's uses in his lexicon of symbolism and allusions in the recent Vineland reading group held over at rawillumination.net. Themes and characters from Pynchon's novels connect and bleed into each other, perhaps none more so than Shadow Ticket.  The two most obvious, blatantly obvious examples in this novel being Vineland (Vin) and Against the Day (AtD). I also see less obvious allusions to Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon. It turns out the aforementioned Skeet Wheeler appears the father of Zoyd Wheeler from Vineland.  Looking for something else in a Reddit group I came across this from user sylvester_stencil:

"He is 100% Zoyd's father. At the end of the novel Skeet tells Hicks he's moving to California with a girl he's fallen for named Zin. Skeet's real name is Floyd. Zin + Floyd = Zoyd." 

Skeet, appears an adolescent somewhere in his mid to late teens, I believe, so the timeline matches up. ST ends with the young Wheeler writing a letter to Hicks. Skeet is the last word in the novel. Zoyd Wheeler enters in the second phrase of Vin. Like DL Chastain in Vin, Hicks goes through some Oriental training that changes his mindset. ST mentions the word "prairie" in its usual sense maybe four times; the first time it's directly connected with "winter surf" (opposite of Vin's summer surf) and a booming foghorn. Fog appears a number of times in both novels. Fog seems a kind of shadow. Horn = the Hierophant who communicates the secrets so a booming foghorn indicates a strong communication from the Temple which I consider Vineland to be.   

 The theme of freedom v fascism occurs in both books though the balance appears reversed; more explicit freedom in Vin; far more fascism in ST, very little, if any explicit freedom though we'll see an allusion to a path toward life, love liberty and light.    

Lew Basnight works as a detective in both ST and AtD. The ocean liner Stupendica also shows up in both novels. A main theme, resistance to the invocation, evident in the title Against the Day, finds ample expression in ST beginning with the first sentence: "When trouble comes to town, it usually takes the North Shore Line." AtD has some strong parallels with the spiritual crisis known as Crossing the Abyss. Represented on the Tree of Life, it doesn't seem too far out to describe this crossing as a north shore line since it can traverse from Tiphareth to the Supernal Triad. 

Speaking of Qabalah, like many of his novels Pynchon gives some obvious correspondences as if to say look in that direction. ST = 69 which often indicates a reversal of some kind. Both the freedom v fascism theme and the Skeet/Zoyd connection fits this. The obvious example comes in chapter 6 when Basnight shows Hicks a gunhand maneuver that involves handing over your gun to your adversary butt first then:  ". . . you can spin the sucker around and shoot whoever's trying to take it away from you." Chapter 6 might be the shortest in the book and consists mostly of this trick though we do find another reversal. Basnight tells Hicks: "Just so long as you ain't another one of those metaphysical detectives out looking for Revelation." In AtD Lew Basnight operates as a psychical detective. Of course, any reader trying to figure out this or any other multilevel, multifaceted piece of literature works as a metaphysical detective if only because I consider language itself as metaphysical. I suspect most people do not because language appears so ingrained as a representation of physical reality. The notion of language as metaphysical gets greatly elaborated in Gilles Deleuze's Logic of Sense – where I started looking at language in this way. However, the point of the hermetic, esoteric data given in this book appears decidedly NOT to be personal enlightenment or revelation, but that my occur as a side effect. Lew qualifies it when he poo poos working as a metaphysical detective. 

Another blatant correspondence occurs in chapter 13 which has a lot of back story on Bruno Airmont  and his Cheese empire. In an interesting encounter a drunk or stoned Bruno, introduces himself as the Al Capone of Cheez to the real Al Capone. I won't spoil the rest of the joke. Al Capone is the first human in the novel, introduced as "Big Al" in the second sentence. Here, TP calls him "Big Fella." Both monikers were really nicknames for Capone. "Big" seems a significant indicator of esoteric functioning elaborated upon not too far ahead. Al calls Bruno a card. Bruno on his road of excess with a likely psychoactive drink thinks of the card numbered XIII, the Death card in the Tarot. That tells us that the chapter number, 13 in this case, may hold some Qabalah. I would argue that the page number can too. The theme of Death plays throughout most if not all of TP's ouevre. I'll get to more references later. One interpretation of the title Shadow Ticket: a detective assignment to piece together an experiential model of Death given that shadow connects with the Bardo. This connection gets made explicit at the bottom of page 60. The connection with the bardo, shadow and fog has precedence in Dante's Inferno Canto XXXI. 

* * * * * *     

In the early 90's after questioning Robert Anton Wilson he suggested I go to E. J. Gold's School, "but get out before it's too late." At a dinner with Bill Laswell in NY Peter Lamborn Wilson told me he thought Gold was the only one giving genuine Sufi instruction; he put down both Idries Shah and Gurdjieff for putting too much of their own thing into Sufi teachings which I disagreed with. Thomas Pynchon worked with Gold some time in the late 60's or early 70's in LA. Unfortunately, I don't know any details. But it really stands out to me in his work, especially Shadow Ticket. I suggest that a strong connection and transmission from an inner School can be seen here. I would argue TP's entire body of work constitutes an inner mystery school in itself if seen, decoded, assimilated and acted upon.

I suspect Pynchon refers to Gold here: "Kelly flips one switch and it's all lit up like Dearborn and Randolph. More dazzling as the night advances" p. 113. This is an intersection in downtown in Chicago. Randolph suggests Randolph St. Cosmo, the leader of the Chums of Chance from Against the Day a character obviously based on Gold. He manages to repeat this intersection at the top of chapter 25 referring to its quality of brightness at night while comparing it to an intersection in Budapest.

More importantly, Pynchon alludes, multiple times, to one of Gold's foundational disciplines known as the Popcorn Exercise. It's the initial exercise from his book Practical Work On Self. The kernel of corn to be popped becomes a metaphor for activating the emotional centrum; turning on and opening up the heart chakra. It's an operation in Tiphareth-6, thus showing a parallel to Crowley's Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. This initially occurs in ST when Hicks takes his girlfriend April to see the film Dracula starring Bela Lugosi on Valentine's Day in Chicago. By the time the film finishes "she'd eaten six cubic feet of popcorn." A cube has 6 sides; the two 6s side suggests 6 x 6 = 36 – coming up later.  Seventeen pages ahead we see the phrase "popcorn by the bucketful." By Notarikon (adding the initials of a sentence or phrase), p + b + t + b = 93. Then, on page 93, "sack of movie popcorn." The Notarikon appears relevant there as well, but I'm not going that deep into it. 93 represents the Thelemic current because 93 corresponds to both Love and Will. In chapter 28 after the story has shifted to Eastern Europe, Bruno and Daphne go see a film and have a brief discussion about the way they serve popcorn there that easily applies to the metaphor of Gold's exercise: "... through a mouthful of giant exploded kernels fiery with erös paprika ..."

Hicks has a hatmaker named Vito Cubanelli. Vito = vital; Cube = 6; hat+maker, hat = Kether thus maker of Kether through the vital cube; pretty strong clue there. There's mention made of "mercury fumes." Mercury corresponds with Hod-8. Thus we see Tiphareth-6 along with Hod-8 giving us the magic number 68 of which I've talked so much about previously. 68 seems most usually represented with the SC letter combination; we see that combo here in the hatmaker bit. Elsewhere, we find another connection with Vineland where Prairie makes her special "Spinach Casserole." Page 28 has Hick's uncle making a "Surprise Casserole."

On the way to Dracula Hicks recalls the infamous St. Valentine's Day Massacre that happened 4 years before in Chicago in which 7 mobsters were brutally murdered by another gang. It's also mentioned one time before that alluding to the idea of strong resistance to the invocation of opening the heart. A historical character, Max Valentiner, comes into the picture in chapter 37 in relation to the backstory of the skipper of the freelance liberty submarine (resonant with Illuminatus!) that runs throughout the plot. Max Valentiner's name suggests maximum heart but something corrupted him as he torpedoed a boat full of civilians in WWI  – another example showing resistance to the day. Valentiner is also mentioned in Against the Day. Yet another image of trying to block Tiphareth occurs with the attempted murder of Hicks on Christmas Day.

* * * * * * *

Pynchon not only illustrates the rise of Fascism in this era, both political and personal, he suggests an underlying energetic cause for it, i.e. unbalanced and out of control male or yang energy. This theme carries over from Vineland. One moment of brilliance in Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, loosely based on Vineland, blatantly connects this raw, male, destructive energy with the Brock Vond-like character the first time we see him. ST begins to emphasize the letter O in the paragraph before the section break on page 2 that bring's up Otto's Oasis and Oriental Drugs. Page 6 has the head of the detective agency, Boynt Crosstown giving the "O-O" to Skeet. That comes up again a little later. O-O stands for observation operation though we're not told that in the book. The letter O corresponds to The Devil in the Tarot, a symbol, in a less favorable aspect, for unbalanced male energy. Later, we hear about the real historical fact that immigrants were given a welcoming gift of Jell-O when being processed through Ellis Island. Pynchon adds something about a Jell-O mold in the shape of the Statue of Liberty and Hicks wonders where you would start eating it, the head? Head corresponds to the Sun therefore also with Tiphareth so eating the head of the symbol of immigration suggests eating the heart of immigrants which seems precisely aligned with the brutal mass deportation of immigrants currently going on.

The problem of Fascism is given, but we also find solutions for dealing with it on a personal level. How to cope when the world goes to Hell. Humor provides a solution. Like any TP book, ST has an abundance of jokes, some quite obvious, others very subtle. Charlie Chaplin gets mentioned the two times Hitler makes an appearance. W.C. Fields comes through a phone line in a non-sequitur on page 128. We find at least a couple of sly references to the Marx Brothers and the old vaudeville comedy team of Gallagher and Shean is mentioned. Al Shean was the uncle of the Marx Brothers and an early mentor and supporter. Music appears as another way to live through times of Fascism. We find an abundance of musical references and a few songs in the novel. The jazz band with Daphne's boyfriend lands in the camp of the fascist group known as the Vladboys and survive by playing music and entertaining them. The publishers even went so far as to release a playlist for ST – thank-you Bobby Campbell for that.

An initiated hermetic solution reveals itself in the central character's name,

Hicks McTaggart. H + M + T =54

54 = Thelema (Book of Lies ch. 54) = Will and love under Will.

Looking at his last name: Mc + Tag + g + art.

Mc = master of ceremonies; also = 48 = work hard (ch. 48 Book of Lies).

tag = to tag someone with a responsibility or get tagged with a responsibility. The example given in ST occurs when Hicks inadvertently gives Daphne a lift on his boat helping her escape from a psychiatric hospital. He delivers her to some Objibwe Native Americans. Daphne feels that Hicks saved her and mentions the Objibwe belief that if you interfere with someone's life you'll be responsible for them forever. Hicks has been tagged with saving the cheez princesses life when he's later given the ticket to find her and bring her home.

g = gimel = the path that runs across the abyss from Tiphareth to Kether; corresponds to the High Priestess (tarot). There's a joke made by Daphne to Hicks about "Abyssinia."

art = art in the normal sense of the word. Many artists feel tagged with the responsibility to create things. Playing music, painting, writing etc., doing anything creative as a way of coping and counteracting fascism.

art also = 210, a very significant number for mystical work. The two becomes one then the opposite polarities cancel to become nothing. We find this in Latin at the climax of the Star Sapphire ritual (Book of Lies ch. 36): "OMNIA IN DUOS: DUO IN UNUM: UNUS IN NIHIL.

Another Thelemic word or formula relating to art = 210 is ABRAHADABRA said to be the key to the new Aeon; it also represents the "Great Work completed. Abrahadabra has 11 letters. That number holds much significance in this School since 11 = Magick - energy tending to change. Also from The Book of the Law: "My number is 11, as all their numbers who are of us" (I:60), spoken by Nuit, who represents the goddess archetype. The first phrase of chapter 11 in ST: "On days of low winter light . . ." = 210 affirming the connection between art = 210 and 11 and Abrahadadbra = the key to the new Aeon. In this cosmology the new Aeon is ruled by Horus, a god of war. Like the two in one idea, Horus has two aspects, Ra Hoor Kuit (male; energy projected out) and Hoor Pa Kraat (female; silence). Integrating the two provides balance and prepares for the next aeon that of Maat (female; Justice and hopefully peace).

The influence of Herman Melville on Pynchon has been established elsewhere. McTaggart sounds close to Claggart a character from Billy Budd, Sailor a novella by Melville. Billy Budd, the character, appears a model of the Rosicrucian ideal. In fact, the novella was found on Melville's desk after he died along with some poem fragments one of which was "The New Rosicrucians." Billy Budd was hired on as a foretopman on the ship the H.M.S. Indomitable where some of his fellow crew members called him Baby Budd because of his youth. Billy (William) Budd reversed = bud Will, a concept Crowley elaborated as part of the Initiate's development. John Claggart was the master of arms, i.e. chief law enforcement on the Indomitable. He falsely accused Billy Budd of fomenting mutiny; metaphorically illustrating resistance to the invocation or initiation. When confronted by this accusation in front of the Captain, Billy made the mistake of punching Claggart. The blow killed him leaving the Captain no choice but to have him executed. In that case, the resistance worked to stop the invocation as it does in many instances.

* * * * * *

A main theme of ST can be summed up as Pass It On. Skeet Wheeler, the kid who enters near the beginning and closes the story wants to be Hicks's apprentice. Lew Basnight mentors Hicks. Page 26 has a paragraph about musicians that ends with a hopeful kid waiting in back of the veteran musicians for his turn in the spotlight. In chapter 10 at the Nazi bowling alley, Hicks runs into Ooly Shaufel, a guard there. Ooly was Hicks's mentor when they both were strikebreakers. Page 69 has an exchange where Hicks asks his Uncle Lefty if what he's saying has anything to do with Al Capone, called the "Big Guy" here. Lefty replies, "I hear things. Sometimes I pass it on, sometimes I don't." This foreshadows the ending where Bruno wishes to pass on the secrets of the International Cheese Syndicate to Daphne; we're getting to that. Passing it on definitely seems like something an elderly author who has a great deal of arcane and esoteric information would hope to do.

* * * * * *

In 2007 E.J. Gold asked me to make a copy of a cd featuring old recordings of Aleister Crowley's voice. He told me not label it with Crowleys name, but rather use the name "Big Al" so it wouldn't be obvious who it featured. Then he gave me an enigmatic look. At the time, this seemed ridiculous, to me. Upon first reading Shadow Ticket I was stunned to see "Big Al" in the second sentence and immediately remembered the "Big Al" cd. I thought Gold could have remote viewed across time and that Pynchon connected Big Al with Crowley. Apart from using Capone's initials, AC once, I saw nothing to support this supposition until nearly the end of the book in chapter 37 when Bruno Airmont, the Al Capone of Cheez, wishes to pass on his fortune and other things to his daughter and heir Daphne Airmont. Daphne says she doesn't want his money but he says he wants to pass on everything he knows about the International Cheese Syndicate which he abbreviates InChSyn. I + Ch + S = 78 which corresponds to many things in the Sepher Sephiroth including: the Tarot; the Angel of Ra Hoor Khuit; and "to initiate." 78 is prefigured much earlier in the book on page 26 with the name checking of "Count" Basie. Pynchon puts those quotation marks around Count like usually never done except when referring to his full name, William James "Count" Basie. When a Qabalah teacher emphasizes the word "count" it can mean to add up and pay attention to Gematria ahead. Adding "Basie" gives us 78. Basie suggests base.

 

I postulate that Thelema provides a solution to Fascism with its projection of love under will facilitated by an activated emotional centrum and connected to 210 and Abrahadabra.  Whether one goes all mystical or not Thelema on its most basic level appears a philosophy and practice that advocates personal liberty.

InChSyn suggests inches and syn an allusion to the male problem. It can also be seen as IC (I see) Syndicate (sin + dick + ate = eating up the problem). And I + CS. CS indicates an active function connected to 210 and Abrahadabra. Practicing this function expands one's more subtle morphology, one's being, as it were. So the idea of calling Crowley Big Al has some veracity. Capone is called Large Alphonse on p. 93.

It also occurred to me that Big Al could refer to Liber Al vel Legis, The Book of the Law. Chapter 3 starts with: "Abrahadabra; the reward of Ra Hoor Khut" (3:1). The short sequence with Hicks and his new girlfriend Terike near the end reminds me of verse I:62: "I am uplifted in they heart and the kisses of the stars rain hard upon the body." I was also reminded of the Abbey of Thelema with a couple of references to Palermo near the beginning, the name of the closest city to the Abbey in Sicily located in the village of Cefalu. In chapter 38 following the reveal in 37, a character named Chazz gets recruited into an "anti-Fascist guerilla force" in Sicily. Thelema could also be called an anti-Fascist force.

Back in chapter 37 (37 = Jechidah, the highest unity of the soul) Bruno Airmont (Bruno suggests Giordano Bruno, a spiritual predecessor of Aleister Crowley) tells Daphne that he has enough dirt on InChSyn "to send the whole business up in one giant fondoozical cataclysm."

fondoozical = fondo (found) + oz + ic (I see) + al (Crowley or Liber Al vel Legis).

oz likely refers to Liber Oz, a one page document aka the "Declaration of the Rights of Man" or as Robert Anton Wilson and I put it, the Rights of WoMan, after Leary. In Britain's darkest hour during WWII when it looked like the Nazis might take the island Crowley wrote Liber Oz and sent it to every dignitary he had an address for as a magical gesture against Facism. Coincidentally, 10 days after he sent them out the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor bringing the U.S. into the war eventually turning the tide. Shea and Wilson put Liber Oz in Illuminatus!

To be continued . . .

The Book of the Law Chapter 3 Fighting Cancer

It seems advantageous to keep one's mood and spirits up as one navigates through cancer treatment. This can often prove difficult depending on how much pain and discomfort the body experiences; harder too when it drags on for months or years. Everyone finds their own tools and methods to handle the possible depression, anxiety, downerness, fear and pain. I have found Aleister Crowley's The Book of the Law  (Liber Al) an excellent, non-chemical way to alleviate and banish debilitating thoughts and emotions. I will read a chapter a day for 3 days and have been doing this every week or two. If diagnosed as terminal (I'm not) or thought I may die in the near future (I don't) then I would be reading these chapters much more frequently. I suspect Liber Al shows, or can metaprogram one for life outside the body.

Chapter 3 in particular seems tailor made for anyone fighting something internal like cancer, an addiction or simple animal inertia. The second verse gives a problem then provides a solution. "There is division hither homeward;" made me think of cancer's rapidly dividing cells. The other division homeward comes between the cancer that wants to take over until death and the healthy cells that wish to remain growing and living.

The verses that follow immediately seems obvious for this model and should need no explanation. It goes on more or less in this vein (with exceptions) until verse 39 when the narrative switches direction.

 

Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith

This excellent biography by John Szwed, published in 2023, documents the life of one of the XXth Century's most interesting, intelligent and unique eccentrics. Harry Smith (1923 - 1991) defies easy description. He's been called a polymath for his expert comprehension, experimentation and innovation into a plethora of both arcane and popular arts and sciences. The book's byline reads: "The Filmmaker, Folklorist and Mystic who transformed American Art." From the dust jacket description:

"He was an anthropologist, a filmmaker, a painter, a folkorist, a mystic, and a walking encyclopedia. He taught Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe about the occult, swapped drugs with Timothy Leary, had a front row seat to a young Thelonius Monk, lived with (and tortured) Allen Ginsberg, was admired by Susan Sontag, and was one of the first artists funded by the Guggenheim Foundation."

My interest in him, in part, stems from the fact that he was an early recording engineer who kept it up, on and off, for his whole life. Smith grew up in the Pacific Northwest and developed a strong interest in Native American culture early on.  At age 15 after discovering the writings of Franz Boas (1858 - 1942), the German-American pioneer of American anthropology, Smith began treks up and down the coast with portable recording equipment documenting indigenous tribal rituals through audio recordings, photography, water-color paintings, drawings and attempts to craft his own system of dance notation. 

Szwed writes that Smith pursued this activity for 8 years. "Harry's seriousness, persistence and, humility gained him the respect of tribal leaders, who allowed him to use technology they might otherwise have had good reason to fear to document their songs, narratives, customs, language and games." He brought a disc-cutting machine to capture higher quality audio  than the wire recorders which at that time comprised the standard. This fascinating period of Smith's life and career gets covered brilliantly in the book with much background and and intellectual context.

* * * * * * 

"I'm glad to say that my dreams came true. I saw America changed through music." 

– Harry Smith

Throughout his life Smith collected a wide variety of cultural artifacts including Seminole textiles, paper airplanes, Russian Easter Eggs, string figures like the Cat's Cradle, pop-up books, Tarot cards, etc., etc. some of these finding their way into museums like the Smithsonian. Szwed recounts how he got into string figures after reading a book by Kathleen Haddon, String Games for Beginners that demonstrated how to form a loop of string into various geometric shapes. He found out that these figures could be found everywhere on the planet and it became a lifelong area of research beginning with the Native American peoples he visited. He was interested in patterns that travelled across cultural boundaries. I suspect the influence of Franz Boas's aim to find out what it meant to be human.

Smith's collection of rare 78 recordings, beginning around 1940, eventually turned into the Anthology of American Folk Music. This had a profound influence on a wide range of musical artists including: Dylan, The Grateful Dead, Pete Seeger, Led Zeppelin, Springsteen, Sonic Youth, Elvis Costello, Beck, Wilco, Joan Baez, Taj Mahal, The Byrds, Canned Heat, Gordon Lightfoot, Harry Nilsson, Kris Kristofferson, Gillian Welch, Nick Cave, and Tom Waits to name a few. These recordings span from 1927 - 1932. Acquiring them became much more earnest in the early 1940's when the US government began melting them down to recycle their materials for the war effort.

In an essay by Luis Kemnitzer included in the Anthology's 1997 reissue he writes:

"In 1946 when I was shipping out of Seattle, Harry Smith was a legend among record collectors and jazz and country music enthusiasts that I met. People had been introduced to Lummi Midwinter Dances, which they called Spirit Dances, by Harry Smith. He had introduced blues record collectors to Jimmie Rodgers."

Moses Asche of Folkways Recordings commissioned Smith to assemble his favorite songs into a set that became the Anthology which included Harry's extensive anthropological descriptions and annotations. It was initially released in 1952, but took some years to catch on. 

* * * * * * 

Harry Smith first met the influential counter-cultural poet Ed Sanders in 1962 at a bar on Avenue A and 12th Street. Szwed writes: "He (Smith) was clutching a first edition of Aleister Crowley's Book of Lies and was declaring it a work of genius." A year or so later Sanders formed the Fugs with Tuli Kupferberg because they thought they could come up with better lyrics than the early Beatles songs which were becoming popular in underground (and not so underground) circles. Harry convinced Moe Asch to finance their first record and served as the Producer for it. Harry also came up with their name, the Fugs.  

One of my favorite stories in the book concerns the attempt, lead by the Yippies, to exorcise or levitate the Pentagon in 1967. I had always considered this pure absurdist humor, but we find out that Ed Sanders, given the task of organizing it, relied on Harry to structure the ritual. He served as their magickal consultant providing them with some basic principles to go by. I would have loved to hear more about Smith's Thelemic connections. He was friends with Bill Breeze, the current Outer Head of the O.T.O. and James Wasserman who worked as Weiser and later became well known for his book designs of Thelemic related titles among other things. Harry illustrated the paperback edition of The Holy Books of Thelema. Breeze made him a Bishop in the Ecclesia Gnostic Catholica, the religious branch of the O.T.O.

Illustration by Harry Smith

 

* * * * * * 

I feel a kindred spirit with Harry Smith through his interest in recording natural environmental sounds. The first time I did so happened at age 20 in the top floor of a hotel in Banff, Alberta when touring with a bar band called Relay. My friend, the lighting director Bob Gregory, had a reel to reel tape recorder. For a couple of days early in the morning I placed a pair of microphones outside the window of the penthouse suite where the band stayed and recorded the Dawn unfolding over Banff Avenue for about an hour each time. About 11 years later E. J. Gold made a comment to me that Bardo spaces could be navigated by sound. That set me on a path of recording ambient sounds in a variety of locations: sacred spaces, streets, museums, etc. I used a D.A.T. recorder and a Sony stereo condenser microphone to capture the sounds. Traveling and working throughout the planet with Bill Laswell in the late 80s and 1990s provided a wide variety of interesting locations. My first ambient recording of this nature occurred at the Basilica du Sacre Couer in Paris. Other recordings came from street sounds and temples in India (I recorded an elephant along with their sacred cows for the classical Indian violinist El Shankar), West Africa, the Australian Outback, Cairo and the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid, the temple wall in Jerusalem, Rio de Janerio, Morocco, China, Mongolia, Tashkent, Samarkand, New York and Paris subways among others. I've also recorded interesting sounds found in my own backyard in Northern California. Les Claypool incorporated some of these on the Primus album Antipop. Tom Waits spoke highly of a sample reel of these recordings I made for him when auditioning for the job of his recording and mix engineer. In 2004, with Bill Laswell's help, I released a compilation of these called All Around the World on the Belgian label, Sub Rosa. 

Cosmic Scholar recalls one phase of Smith's ambient recordings after moving to Boulder, Colorado in 1988 to stay and lecture at Naropa University, the school Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa founded over a decade earlier. Allen Ginsberg had arranged Harry's residence there. 

"Within a few weeks of his arrival, he had recorded hundreds of hours of ambient sounds, 'pointing to the correlation between auto horns and birdcalls, and the intercommunication between machines and the animate world.' he could record the sounds of Boulder with a mic out the window, including crickets, cicadas, and squirrels at different times of the day. He told Beth Borrus, his assistant for his summer lectures, that he was looking for patterns: 'It was a long time before I realized that the squirrels were carrying on intelligent communication between each other, which reached a peak in the day when they were able to stop the birds from singing when the sun came up, which is why I was recording the thing anyhow. They evidently had some prior agreement, the Dawn Chorale.'" - Cosmic Scholar, p. 333.

A few years ago I was working in Portland at Flora Recording a studio owned and operated by the prolific Producer and Engineer Tucker Martine. Tucker and I have some tangential history together: I had worked alongside his brother Layng at Laswell's studio in Brooklyn and we both had received some form of mentorship from genius Engineer Jason Corsaro. Tucker told me a story that while taking a musique concrete course at Naropa he worked at a coffee place in Boulder, a spot Harry Smith frequented. His boss advised him to strike up a conversation with Smith. He took the advice and had several conversations with Harry. I feel something subtle and intangible may have been passed on to Tucker with those interactions. He also got into making ambient field recordings and has released a couple of albums one of being Broken Hearted Dragonflies (Insect Electronica from Southeast Asia).

* * * * * *

Szwed also documents the crazy, chaotic, contradictory, indigent side of Smith's life. He has several anecdotes and stories along those lines. Smith never met a drug he didn't like and had a long and extensive history of alcohol abuse. He never had anything resembling a conventional means of income mostly living off of the sometimes strained generosity of others. When he sometimes received large or moderate sums of money to finance the art projects, he would often spend it recklessly. Paying his hotel bills or rent was never a priority. Somehow he always found money to constantly acquire books and drugs.   

John Szwed questions his ability to write a good biography on such an elusive subject as Harry. He more than rises to the occasion with this definitive work. It's a fascinating read. I've left out whole areas of Smith's activities, most notably his filmmaking projects. It's a book that inspires creativity through Harry Smith's example. I give it 5 stars and highly recommend it.

The Scarlet Letter and Thelema

 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne appears an example of enlightened writing. Its vivid descriptions, powerful observations and attention to detail come from an illumined consciousness. It's been said that turned on mystics have a kind of beatific vision as if an interior light brightens everything they see. This describes the sense I get from much of Hawthorne's writing in this novel, even the darker, more tragic scenes. I get a similar sense reading Marcel Proust, William Blake or Arthur Rimbaud. This  illumination seems transmittable to some degree. When I read writing of this quality, Tolkien is another example, it changes how I see the world. It wakes me up a little bit to the beauty all around. I contend that reading thought provoking enlightened literature is a path to higher consciousness, as valid and potentially effective as any other. 

The Scarlet Letter and the scarlet letter – the book itself and the subject of the book have multiple levels with multiple meanings. On its surface, the novel appears a puritanical, Christian morality tale. The protagonist, Hester Prynne, has committed adultery and must pay the penalty of wearing a scarlet letter A on her chest for the rest of her life. Hawthorne writes like a trickster playing with the reader's perceptions, imagination and assumptions. Most people assume the A stands for adultery, but that's never explicitly stated in the book. This "A" comes to signify much, much more. It reverses itself as a symbol of punishment by transforming into an initiating symbol of strength and true will for Hester.

Hawthorne writes like an Adept with the first mention of the scarlet letter. The story has a long prelude called "The Custom-House" formulated as a memoir of when Hawthorne temporarily abandoned writing to make money and support his family as a customs inspector, something he did for 3 years. Like a true maker of illusions, he inserts the scarlet letter into what otherwise seems a truthful account making it appear that the subsequent story exists as genuine historical lore. He's also upfront and clear about its Hermetic nature and mystical depth. Upon first encountering the dusty letter A in the Custom-House some 200 years after the events told occurred, he calls the historical circumstances around it to be a riddle with little hope of solving. Then he writes:

"My eyes fastened themselves upon the old scarlet letter, and would not be turned aside. Certainly, there was some deep meaning in it, most worthy of interpretation, and which, as it were, streamed forth from the mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself to my sensibilities, but evading the analysis of my mind."

Again, this statement refers to the book as a whole and to the specific artifact that is the subject of the tale. He's speaking of art of psychometry – the psychic reading of impressions from artifacts – why I called him an Adept. Psychometry is allegedly how Gurdjieff received his ancient knowledge: traveling around  Central Asia, North Africa and the Middle East reading artifacts. These artifacts included ancient dances. Hawthorne also hints at the method of how he obtained this psychic reception: focused and fixated attention on the letter – his eyes "would not be turned aside." 

We see more Hermetic references and coding in The Scarlet Letter. The formidable antagonist, Roger Chillingworth, Hester Prynne's much older husband, was a scholar in Europe who became a doctor; he has his own devious agenda. He's described as an alchemist for the way he concocts his herbal healing potions and at one point is compared to Paracelsus. 

Cabala is introduced when Hester has an occasion to visit the Governor's mansion. The interior "had indeed a very cheery aspect; the walls being overspread with a kind of stucco, in which fragments of broken glass were plentifully intermixed; so that when the sunshine fell aslant-wise over the front of the edifice, it glittered and sparkled as if diamonds had been flung against it by the double handful. The brilliancy might have befitted Aladdin's palace, rather than the mansion of a grave old Puritan ruler. It was further decorated with strange and seemingly cabalistic figures and diagrams, suitable to the quaint taste of the age ..."

Hawthorne employs the technique of presenting an image ripe for cabalistic interpretation – sunshine on broken glass sparkling like diamonds – then explicitly refers to Cabala as if providing a hint for how one can look at the prior image. 

The comparison between the pagan Aladdin's palace and the Puritan mansion I find interesting. Setting his story in mid 17th Century Puritan Boston, Hawthorne frequently appears critical of dogmatic Puritan values and their lifestyle though not entirely of the Christian milieu. Many commentators connect Hester with the story of Esther, the Persian Queen in the Old Testament who courageously saved the Jews in her country. If you google, "What does the story of Esther teach us," the AI buddy will provide a number of answers that easily apply to The Scarlet Letter.

The book ends with the line engraved upon the one tombstone that serves for the graves of both Hester and her one time lover, Arthur Dimmesdale: "ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES." This looks coded, but once again Hawthorne provides the key that it uses heraldic nomenclature. Heraldry is a system of communicating symbols, signs and colors to provide identification usually as a familial Coat of Arms. Field indicates the background; sable means black; gules means red. On a black background the scarlet letter A. 

* * * * * * 

And now a word from our sponsor, Earth Coincidence Control Office. 

After writing the above paragraph I took a break. Looking at You Tube, I saw Lon Milo Duquette's daily video in my recommended list. Today's offering, just posted, covered the subject "Aleister Crowley and Baseball." It starts with Lon holding up an old California Angels baseball cap with a large scarlet letter A close to the camera so that it fills the frame. 

The scarlet letter representing an Angel does find a parallel in the novel with Hester's young daughter Pearl. Describing the way Hester dressed her in a crimson velvet tunic "embroidered with fantasies and flourishes of gold thread" for the visit to the cabalistic governor's mansion. "So much strength of coloring ... was admirably adapted to Pearl's beauty, and made her the very brightest little jet of flame that ever danced upon the earth." ... "It was the scarlet letter in another form, the scarlet letter endowed with life!"

Nathaniel Hawthorne was profoundly influenced by the late 16th Century epic poem The Fairie Queen by Edmund Spenser, a recognized classic of Hermetic literature. So much so, that he named his daughter Una after one of the main characters. A primary aim of modern Hermeticism is the valorization and promotion of Female Intelligence. This appears evident in contemporary writers of the esoteric persuasion such as James Joyce, Aleister Crowley, Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, Thomas Pynchon and Gilles Deleuze to name a few. It began as far back as the 15th Century with Francois Rabelais' classic Gargantua and Pantagruel. 

In The Fairie Queene Una plays the love interest and guide to the Redcrosse Knight on his journey. Her story becomes an apt allegory of female wisdom and higher intelligence. She compares favorably with Babalon in the Thelemic cosmology. Spenser's poem has several strong female characters, notably different from the literature of that era, maybe from much literature of any era.  The Scarlet Letter's strongest and most intelligent characters are two woman, Hester and her daughter Pearl. Pearl's name also has Biblical allusions referring to the pearl of great price (Matthew 13:45-46). Hawthorne calls her an "elf-child" though says the Puritans think she might be a "demon offspring." She ends up becoming "the richest heiress of her day, in the New World." She was a new born baby at the beginning of the book reaching the age of 7 when the tale ends. The final chapter writes of what happened to her afterwards. In real life, Una Hawthorne was 6 at the time it was written thus likely providing an inspiration and model for Pearl.

Another mask or guise of the scarlet letter is being a Bardo Guide, a guide in and around death. Hester took on the task of visiting and providing human contact with sick people in times of pestilence. "There glimmered the embroidered letter, with comfort in its unearthly ray. Elsewhere the token of sin, it was the taper of the sick-chamber. It had even thrown its gleam, in the sufferer's hard extremity, across the verge of time. It had shown him where to set his foot, while the light of earth was fast becoming dim, and ere the light of futurity could reach him" (emphasis added).

There are more scenes touching upon death and describing a liminal, bardo-like space. Significantly, Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter in a 6 month burst of inspiration following the death of his mother. Thus, he was most probably in an altered state of mind some, if not all, the time he wrote the book. I infer this based on my own experience of feeling like I was on a mild psychedelic for about 3 months following the death of my father.

Synchronicity strikes again. Within two minutes of writing the last sentence I received an email from a woman who knew my mother well and had just discovered the Memorial I wrote for her in 2020 following her passing. 

* * * * * *

The Scarlet Letter tells a tragic love story, but there appear instances where it sublimates into divine love, what the ancient Greeks called Agape. This describes the love or vitality that lights up and provides vivifying life force to Creation. May the force be with you.  In this, and in other ways, it aligns with the doctrine of Thelema which advocates a philosophy of love: "Love is the law, love under will." Thelema also advises being true to your genuine nature – as opposed to what societal and other conventions tell us how to be – with the injunction: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law." We find this great lesson expressed in the "Conclusion" chapter: "Among many morals which press upon us from the poor minister's miserable experience, we put only this into a sentence: – Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred." The minister's experience felt constantly miserable precisely because he lived a lie to himself and to the world. He had a habit of putting his hand over his heart as if in pain.  

An example of Agape, providing life force to creation, gets suggested in the memoir prelude, "The Custom-House" where Hawthorne discusses the nature of romance writing. It begins in a bardo state (bardo = the realm of the in-between): "Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here, without affrighting us.

 . . .  The somewhat dim coal-fire has an essential influence in producing the effect which I would describe. It throws its unobtrusive tinge throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and ceiling, and a reflected gleam from the polish of the furniture. This warmer light mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the moonbeams, and communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness to the forms which fancy summons up."

Aleister Crowley believed Rabelais forecast the new Aeon when writing of the Abbey of Thélème in Gargantua and Pantagruel. I consider The Scarlet Letter  another precursor to the new Aeon envisioned by Crowley. We find a literal prophecy in its penultimate page:

"She assured them too of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish a surer ground of mutual happiness." Hester thought she might be this prophetess, but decided that wasn't possible due to her circumstances. "The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure, and beautiful; and wise, moreover, not through dusky grief, but through the ethereal medium of joy: and showing how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such and end!"

This "ethereal medium of joy" finds multiple expressions in The Book of the Law, the received text that inaugurated the new Aeon according to Crowley. The ninth verse of the second chapter easily applies to the life Hester Prynne:

"9. Remember all ye that existence is pure joy; that all the sorrows are but as shadows; they pass & are done; but there is that which remains." 

There seems ample room for extensive Qabalistic interpretation in The Scarlet Letter, but I'll spare the reader my full exegesis except to drop a few crumbs pointing to further research. The scarlet letter A connects, of course, with Aleph and all its correspondences – The Fool in the Tarot. Aleph (ALP) appears a prominent recurring image in Finnegans Wake as Anna Livia Plurabelle, another resonance with female Intelligence. 

A also corresponds with an upright pentagram, a five pointed star because of its shape. We find something very close to this kind of scarlet letter in the Book of the Law I:60:

"My number is 11, as all their numbers who are of us. The Five Pointed Star, with a Circle in the Middle, & the Circle is Red."

Crowley's comment on this verse: "The Circle in the Pentagram? See Liber NV." 

Liber NV is numbered 11. It begins:

"000 This is the Book of the Cult of the Infinite Without

  00   The aspirant is Hadit. Nuit is the infinite expansion of the Rose; (remember this rose). Hadit the infinite contraction of the Rood.

1. Worship, i.e identify thyself with the Khabs, the secret Light within the Heart. 

11 is the number of Magick or energy tending to change. The Scarlet Letter proceeds through a process of transformation. The first chapter, "The Prison-Door" begins with a sad, very strong male image in front of a prison door. The novel ends with a woman apostle and angel in the ethereal medium of joy saying how sacred love should make us happy. Very basically, the book starts sad and ends happy. Here's the first sentence:

"A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with woman, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes."

Yet even in this harsh locale magical aid is offered in the form of a wild rose-bush at the threshold of the prison door "covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he went forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him." 

Rose, June, beauty and deep heart of Nature all correspond with Tiphareth, the central sphere on the Tree of Life that also corresponds with the heart chakra. Hawthorne breaks the fourth wall at the end of this short chapter by plucking one of the rose-bush's flowers and offering it to the reader. "It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow." After giving a rose to the reader, he blatantly tells us it's a symbol. In the United States, and many other parts of the world, it sure feels like we're living in the "darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow." Hawthorne gives us a huge clue on how to relieve and get through it. 

Much could be made of both Hester Prynne and Pearl's initials connecting with the Hebrew letter Peh, a correspondence with The Tower in the Tarot aka The House of God. Also, the scarlet letter A seen as a pentagram and worn on the chest gives an obvious image of the instruction to protect the heart.

Moby Dick and Finnegans Wake

Herman Melville

James Joyce

Two classics of literature separated in time by nearly 90 years. Very different in their style of writing, yet similar in size, and in the full on aim of attempting to consider everything imaginable in life and in death. Both works come chock full of philosophy, metaphysics, alchemy, magic, and bardo information but differ drastically in presentation. The narrative seems clear and evident in Moby Dick, we always know where we are in the story. It's just the opposite, extremely opaque, in Finnegans Wake. The new reader often has no idea what's going on in terms of any storyline and is advised to consult a reader's guide such as the excellent one by Tindall or Campbell & Robinson's Skeleton Key.  The surface plot of Finnegans Wake seems either inconsequential or non existent. It all takes place over one night with the protagonists asleep until the end. Moby Dick's plot is more substantial, but you could probably cut out two thirds of it or more and not affect the basic elements of the story.  

These two magnum opuses offer masterpieces of metaphor over multiple levels of sense. W.H. Auden called Moby Dick an 'elaborate synecdoche' in which whale fishing becomes an image of all our lives, teeming with parable and multiple symbolic correspondences. The same description could easily apply to Finnegans Wake sans the whale fishing. A snapshot of the microcosm - the local environment, representing the macrocosm – all and everything, seems the ultimate synecdoche. One example of this in Finnegans Wake: the initials HCE, that of the main protagonist Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, also stand for "Here Comes Everybody." 

Melville writes of uniting the microcosm with the macrocosm at the end of chapter 70, "The Sphynx:"

"O Nature and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind." In this chapter, they behead a Sperm Whale and "in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx's in the desert." Captain Ahab proceeds to address the dismembered head as if its spirit lived on and could communicate what it has seen in its travels. This seems on par with a magician grilling a non-human entity that's been invoked:

"speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in there. Of all divers, thou has dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved among this world's foundations.  Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot, where in her murderous hold, this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home."

This quote alludes to the land of the dead at the end; that subject is another point in common between MD and FW as we shall see. Death runs throughout Moby Dick. The first words in the book come from a person who is dead. Chapter 49, "The Hyena," laughs at death. The cycle of death and rebirth/renewal appears throughout Finnegans Wake. Obviously, the title itself immediately suggests Finnegan's death. The reader confronts death on the front cover. 

The use of Cabala provides another commonality between Joyce and Melville. Cabala appears evident in the above quote. The Hebrew letter Resh means "head" and corresponds with The Sun in the Tarot. Melville demonstrates this correspondence with the phrase: "That head upon which the upper sun now gleams."

No direct evidence exists that Joyce read Moby Dick except, possibly, for the apparent appearance of it in the Wake. The occurs in FW page 13 in the penultimate paragraph. Before we examine that, let's look at what immediate precedes the great white whale's entrance. Top of page 13:

"So. This Is Dyoublong?

Hush! Caution! Echoland!"

Dyoublong alludes both to Dublin and to the phrase "do you belong?"

The second line suggests the Bardo of HCE, with the suggestion reinforced in the subsequent paragraph which has multiple references to death. For instance:

"gravemure" = grave + mure (wall). This gets reinforced a couple sentences later with: "Hear? By the mausolum wall." Then: "With a grand funferall" (funeral, combined with the suggestion of laughing at death).  In this paragraph we find multiple references to music and listening or hearing, and a couple to magic. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, aka the Bardo Thodol, translates as the power of liberation by sound. At the end of the paragraph for example: "They will be tuggling foriver. They will be lichening for allof. They will be pretumbling forover. The harpsdischord shall be theirs for ollaves."

"They" and "theirs" in the last four sentences could easily refer to disembodied souls traveling in the land of the dead; "foriver" alludes to both "forever" and "for river." The river, in Finnegans Wake represents the flowing of LIFE.  Next sentence: "lichening" = listening; "for allof" – all of time or all of life? Then "pretumbling forover" seems a unique way to represent the Bardo, the territory a soul enters after life ("forover") and before rebirth ("pretumbling"). The last sentence: "harpsdischord" – many events feel discordant in the Bardo, but some things feel harmonious like a harpsichord might sound; "ollaves" reflects "allof" again, but also suggests "all loves" (all our dearly departed) by switching the "o" with the "a"; "ollaves" also reminds me of those small balls of fruit that go in martinis though I honestly don't know what that has to do with anything.

The paragraph just examined also contains another reference to Dublin, "Dbln." Dublin plays prominently into the Bardo or subconscious mind of both HCE and Joyce. Believe it or not, all this appears relevant to Moby Dick. 

In the essay "Moby Dick's Hyphen" by David Collard, which appears in his book, Multiple Joyce, he writes that what Melville does for whales and the whaling industry, i.e. going into it at considerable length and detail, Joyce does for Dublin in Ulysses. If you're thinking of picking up a copy of Multiple Joyce to read how Moby Dick may have influenced him, don't. I just communicated everything he has to say on the subject. It's not a bad essay on Moby Dick, yet with little connection to Joyce. If you, like me, wondered why the original title of Moby-Dick has a hyphen in it that never appears in the text, there's nothing mysterious about it. According to Collard, a typesetter inadvertently put a hyphen in the title and it stayed, basically a typo. The rest of Multiple Joyce looks good, but I haven't read enough to recommend it.

Skipping the next paragraph in FW p. 13 after the one just analyzed brings us closer to our whale friend:

"So, how idlers' wind turning pages on pages, as innocens with anaclete play popeye antipop, the leaves of the living in the boke of the deeds, annals of themselves timing the cycles of events grand and national, bring fassilwise to pass how."

The first phrase: how idlers' wind turning pages on pages could suggest reading a book. I know Joyce scholars give a different interpretation of "idlers'" so this may seem purely coincidental, but in Moby Dick chapter 102, "A Bower in the Ardacides" Melville calls the skeleton of a dead Sperm Whale washed up on the beach "a gigantic idler!" The next sentence has: "the mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver." Weaver is used metaphorically – when you read the whole passage it appears akin to the Sufi metaphor of weaving together the fabric of existence. 

"the leaves of the living in the boke of the deeds" = the leaves of the living in the book of the dead. Joyce uses "leaves" multiple times in FW as a pun for leaving the body – told to me by Robert Anton Wilson in his Tales of the Tribe class. 

In the same chapter, slightly before Melville calls the whale skeleton a gigantic idler, he writes: "Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure." The weaving metaphor plays throughout this section. "Leaves", as a metaphor for the soul leaving the body, right beside "the great sun" recalls the Egyptian Book of the Dead where the primary goal of the soul is to unite with Osiris after bodily death. Osiris qabalistically corresponds with the sun.

In his mid 19th Century ornate language Melville sums up this section with: "Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories."

Books of the dead deliver instructions and navigational tips for passing through the Bardo hopefully liberating the soul or programming a favorable rebirth (curly-headed glories). This information appears practically useful whether going through a physical, biological death or a psychological one with a temporary death of the ego. Both Finnegans Wake and Moby Dick qualify as books of the dead. 

"bring fassilwise to pass how." I don't have a good read on this line and would only be speculating. In an earlier missive on FW, I postulated that the question "how?" appears central to the opus. 

At last we get to our whale:

1132 A.D. Men like to ants or emmets wondern upon a groot hwide Whallfisk which lay in a Runnel. Blubby wares upat Ublanium.

1132 A.D. looks like a date, but seems more cabalistic, to me. 

11 = magic, or energy tending to change; 11 also = a circularity of form or motion. Joyce had a strong interest in cycles of time. Finnegans Wake has a circular form. 

32 = the ten Sephiroth (spheres) on the Tree of Life + the twenty-two paths that run between them. The Tree of Life provides the form for the filing cabinet of correspondences. Qabala can be considered one kind of coding or mapping of consciousness. It also maps the Bardo. These particular correspondences appeared in Sepher Sephiroth first published in 1909 by Aleister Crowley and derived from the work of MacGregor Mathers and Allan Bennett of the Golden Dawn. Joyce knew people from those circles such as William Butler Yeats and others. It seems probable those correspondences were known to him. 

A.D. = after death therefore indicating the Bardo. 

"groot hwide Whallfisk" sounds like great white whale-fish. "groot" = Danish and Dutch for "big;" "hwide" = Danish for "white;" "Whalfisch" = German for whale; "fisk" = Danish for fish. Melville mostly (incorrectly) considers whales to be fish in Moby Dick. The exception being when he considers how they have to breath air in chapter 85, "The Fountain."

Joyce's word for whale, "Whallfisk"  contains both "all" and "whall" (sounds like "wall") – connecting  with the multiple mentions of "wall" and "all" earlier on this page. Two earlier instances of "wall" occur beside images of death – by the grave and by the mausoleum. The Hebrew letter "nun" translates as "fish" in English and corresponds with the Tarot card Death. Whallfisk shows another wall beside death with the fish correspondence. Could this wall indicate the separation or boundary between life and death?

Men would look like ants when doing their business with a great white whale; "emmets" appears an archaic British word for ants. Extensive whale hunting would seem archaic even in Joyce's time; "wondern" sounds like wandering, but also "wonder" = a cabalistic pun for "all" when considering the mystical tautology, "all is one," (found at the very end of Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven, and elsewhere);  "wondern" = wonder + n; nun = n = Death; ergo wondern cabalistically puts "all" besides "death." When you die, either biologically or egotistically, mystics say you have an opportunity to connect with "all."

"Blubby wares" = the oil obtained from whale blubber used as fuel in lamps at one time.  

"upat" = "up at," but also translates as "four" in the Cebuano language, a language spoken in the Phillipines near where a lot of the action in Moby Dick takes place. Of course, for Joyce and his unbridled use of homonyms, four = for.  Joyce uses the word "for" multiple times on this page (see above). Joyce starts the paragraph on p. 13 that I didn't examine: "Four things therefore..." as kind of a humorous pun on "four" with "therefore."

"Ublanium" appears close to an archaic name for Dublin (Eblana) and also sounds like Dublin. 

Blubby wares upat Ublanium translates as"Whale oil for Dublin." Perhaps Joyce alludes to the archaic name for Dublin because of the archaic nature of this illumination. Whale oil stopped being used to light up lamps somewhere around 1860. 

"Blubby wares" could easily indicate a shorthand term for Moby Dick (full original title Moby-Dick or, The Whale) as Melville provides encyclopedic information (wares) on just about every aspect of whales one can think of. Since Joyce identifies so strongly with Dublin, could blubby wares for Dublin, or blubby wares up at Dublin be a sly acknowledgement by Joyce of the influence of Moby Dick? 

It's true that these passages analyzed don't provide an explicit connection to Melville or Moby Dick, but it comes pretty close with "great white whale," Moby Dick indisputably being the most famous one in literature. Let's call this circumstantial evidence.

More circumstantial evidence: Moby Dick begins by looking at the etymology of "whale." The first quote comes from Richard Hakluyt (Melville incorrectly spells it Hackluyt) and refers to a "whale-fish," very close to Joyce's "Whallfisk." Hakluyt goes on to stress the importance of "the letter H, "which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word..." Joyce's word for white, "hwide" begins with h.

* * * * * * 

This seems the extent of Moby Dick appearing in Finnegans Wake if indeed it does at all. There are a couple of other parallels, but they don't seem convincing to me as anything more than coincidence. The closest comes on FW page 210 with: ". . . a reiz every morning for Standfast Dick" followed a couple of lines later by"two appletweed stools for Eva Mobbely." Someone else might have more luck connecting this, or anything else in this section to Moby Dick, I don't buy it, or maybe I don't see it.  FW p. 492 has the name, Afamado Hairductor Achmed Borumborad whose initials make AHAB, and does show Arabic overtones, but the rest of the section appears to connect with One Thousand and One Nights more commonly known as Arabian Nights. It seems to have nothing to do with Captain Ahab.

Some general parallels between the two novels:

• both appear very influenced by The Bible and by the works of Shakespeare.

• the writing in both novels sounds musical, at times; moreso with Joyce. Both books incorporate songs; I only recall one in Moby Dick in chapter 9, "The Sermon," but the "Extracts" section at the beginning quotes from songs.

• Joyce got known for putting lists and catalogs in. Melville has a little of that as does Rabelais who influenced them both. Melville quotes Rabelais in the opening section and directly mentions him later in the text.

• Moby Dick originally was published in England as The Whale before assuming its final title, Moby-Dick or, The Whale. Wake and Whale sound alike and rhyme at the beginning. In the latter, taking out the "h" and replacing "l" with "k" turns Whale into Wake. The word Joyce uses for whale, "Whallfisk" removes the "h" in fish and replaces it with a "k." Would Joyce make such a subtle nod to Melville, by switching two letters? In my opinion, absolutely yes.

• Water runs in the background (often the foreground), throughout both novels. Finnegans Wake famously starts with riverrun, sometimes called the "river of life." Most of the action in Moby Dick occurs in the ocean. It starts in the rain with Ishmael deciding to go to sea. The second paragraph begins a lyrical ode to water continuing for a few pages before landing on the same metaphor Joyce uses: "But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all." Joyce ends FW with "The keys to. Given!" before returning to the river that started it all.

Oz Fritz

December 19, 2024

Nevada City, California