MINOR ARCANA: Mme Marion Bloom's Tarot

The MINOR ARCANA, or the SUITS are the 40 cards (Ace through ten) which further represent archetypal connections between Ulysses and the tarot, and the novel's claims on time which are universal, expansive and yet quotidien in approach.

Traditionally, the suits are Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles. Much of my research and training adopts the Crowley-Thoth deck's adaptations, refiguring, and renaming. Embellishing on this Golden Dawn-Yeats-influenced viewpoint, not only have I substituted "disks" for "pentacles", I have incorporated many of the meanings imparted by personal images, Feng Shui, Crowley, Yeats, Joyce, Papus, playing card, and traditional tarot.

ACE of WADES

Notes on the SUITS:

WANDS (Dynamism)- Yang

Associations in this deck: Gnostic Psychic, Energy, Wizardry, Cigarettes, Lights, Torches, Unicorns, Power, Chapter 12, Chapter 5, Lotus Eaters "He won't grow"; Bloom's cigars in chapter 11 ('Smokeless Mermaid, the coolest whiff...'), Chapter 15 Stephen's smoking "Lucifer", Giganticism, Technology

Playing Card: Club

Element: FIRE

Vice: Tobacco, Smoking

Colours: Red, Yellow, Smouldering Brown, Black, Sepia, Gold, Bronze

From Biddytarot.com:

The Suit of Wands represents your energy, motivation and passion. The Wands cards often appear in Tarot readings about life purpose, spirituality and new ideas.

ACE of WANDS

THE ASHPLANT

"STEPHEN: Nothung!

(He lifts his ashplant high with both hands and smashes the chandelier. Time’s livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.)" (U.15)

MOLLY TWEEDY'S HAIR

"Hester we used to compare our hair mine was thicker than hers" (U.18)

THE ASHPLANT, THRYSOS OF MERCURY, TALISMAN, MAGIC WAND

ACE of WANDS for obvious reasons is a symbol of male power. Ostensibly a Shiva linglam, it is the fire aspect of personal power. In this deck, the genders of personal power may be read in reverse, like many of the reversals in this novel. As Buck Mulligan says to Stephen in chapter 1, "Because you have the cursed jesuit strain in you, only it’s injected the wrong way." Beyond the butt joke, on a deep Dedalan level, the ashplant able to destabilize all quanta reality of time and space may be read for male querants, those making a decision/pondering a question that only a walkabout, an acid or Ayahuasca journeying could solve/reveal (ineluctably modal).

Molly Bloom's personal power in her eyes/"titties" and Jewess locks. Her Venus-like ('on account of me looking after my mother' (U.18), I believe Lunita Laredo is Venus in disguise) confidence shines through WANDS.

Connections between the Major and Minor Arcana

Five of Wands:

In the minor arcana, fives always signify false endings. Five connects with the Heirophant, the Pope card, the Sophmoric pupil's quality that makes seekers believe that they know as much as their masters. The five of wands is called "strife": four wands plus the dynamism that makes for imbalance and power struggle.

2 of WANDS

'DOMINION'

"But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under everchanging forms.

I that sinned and prayed and fasted." (U.3)

3 of WANDS

VIRTUE

"All those who are interested in the spread of human culture among the lower animals (and their name is legion) should make a point of not missing the really marvellous exhibition of cynanthropy given by the famous old Irish red setter wolfdog formerly known by the sobriquet of Garryowen and recently rechristened by his large circle of friends and acquaintances Owen Garry. The exhibition, which is the result of years of training by kindness and a carefully thoughtout dietary system, comprises, among other achievements, the recitation of verse." (U.12)

4 of WANDS

COMPLETION

PLUM TREE'S POTTED MEAT

"What is home without

Plumtree’s Potted Meat?

Incomplete.

With it an abode of bliss." (U.5)

5 of WANDS

STRIFE

"Ill tell him about that some day not now and surprise him ay and Ill take him there and show him the very place too we did it so now there you are like it or lump it he thinks nothing can happen without him knowing he hadnt an idea about my mother till we were engaged otherwise hed never have got me so cheap as he did he was 10 times worse himself anyhow begging me to give him a tiny bit cut off my drawers that was the evening coming along Kenilworth square he kissed me in the eye of my glove and I had to take it off asking me questions is it permitted to enquire the shape of my bedroom so I let him keep it as if I forgot it to think of me when I saw him slip it into his pocket of course hes mad on the subject of drawers thats plain to be seen always skeezing at those brazenfaced things on the bicycles with their skirts blowing up to their navels" (U.18)

6 of WANDS

VICTORY

that was why we had the standup row over politics he began it not me when he said about Our Lord being a carpenter at last he made me cry of course a woman is so sensitive about everything I was fuming with myself after for giving in only for I knew he was gone on me and the first socialist he said He was he annoyed me so much I couldnt put him into a temper still he knows a lot of mixedup things especially about the body and the inside I often wanted to study up that myself what we have inside us in that family physician I could always hear his voice talking when the room was crowded and watch him after that I pretended I had a coolness on with her over him because he used to be a bit on the jealous side whenever he asked who are you going to and I said over to Floey and he made me the present of Byrons poems and the three pairs of gloves so that finished that I could quite easily get him to make it up any time I know how Id even supposing he got in with her again and was going out to see her somewhere Id know if he refused to eat the onions I know plenty of ways ask him to tuck down the collar of my blouse or touch him with my veil and gloves on going out 1 kiss then would send them all spinning however alright well see then let him go to her she of course would only be too delighted to pretend shes mad in love with him that I wouldnt so much mind Id just go to her and ask her do you love him and look her square in the eyes she couldnt fool me but he might imagine he was and make a declaration to her with his plabbery kind of a manner like he did to me though I had the devils own job to get it out of him though I liked him for that it showed he could hold in and wasnt to be got for the asking (U.18)

7 of WANDS

VALOUR

—O, to be sure, John Henry Menton said. I haven’t seen her for some time. She was a finelooking woman. I danced with her, wait, fifteen seventeen golden years ago, at Mat Dillon’s in Roundtown. And a good armful she was.

He looked behind through the others.

—What is he? he asked. What does he do? Wasn’t he in the stationery line? I fell foul of him one evening, I remember, at bowls.

Ned Lambert smiled.

—Yes, he was, he said, in Wisdom Hely’s. A traveller for blottingpaper.

—In God’s name, John Henry Menton said, what did she marry a coon like that for? She had plenty of game in her then.

—Has still, Ned Lambert said. (U.6)

8 of WANDS

SWIFTNESS

"She could almost see the swift answering flash of admiration in his eyes that set her tingling in every nerve. She put on her hat so that she could see from underneath the brim and swung her buckled shoe faster for her breath caught as she caught the expression in his eyes. He was eying her as a snake eyes its prey. Her woman’s instinct told her that she had raised the devil in him and at the thought a burning scarlet swept from throat to brow till the lovely colour of her face became a glorious rose. " (U.13)

9 of WANDS

STRENGTH—

"FROM THE FATHERS

...You pray to a local and obscure idol: our temples, majestic and mysterious, are the abodes of Isis and Osiris, of Horus and Ammon Ra. Yours serfdom, awe and humbleness: ours thunder and the seas. Israel is weak and few are her children: Egypt is an host and terrible are her arms. Vagrants and daylabourers are you called: the world trembles at our name.- " (U.10)

"we stood staring at one another for about 10 minutes as if we met somewhere I suppose on account of my being jewess looking after my mother" (U.18)

Notes on WANDS (to be worked into argument)

Although I have not directly correlated the QUEEN of WANDS to Molly Bloom, the Wands, or the [tarot deck's] penises of Ulysses do frame Molly. Men speak of her, [even to Bloom], with a brazen metonymical objectification. However, her stand in body part, (She is "quite a good armful", and merely an arm that drops a coin to a musician in chapter 10) an arm, is a masculine synedoche from Virgil on (vir armaque).

Even "give us a touch, Poldy, I'm dying for it" (U. 6) suggests this Virgillian "arm" as her sexualised/soldier mode. Her chapter 18 reverie seems to be to all the Mulvies (her lost soldier boy) and masculine gazes she's known. This ties strongly to my notion that the Molly chapter is a non-sequetor-riddled sequel to Ulysses standing in epilogue, just as the Aenead is sometimes viewed as the Odyssey's sequel because in it we have a different view of Odysseus, the trickster, and the Trojan horse (not a Homeric construct but first found in literature through Virgil) from a Trojan Aeneas perspective/narration. So do we have the poly-tropic Bloom/Odysseus from the Ulysses (Roman, not Greek as argued elsewhere...because the three masters Catholic/English/Odd Jobs- Dedalan trinity, Nietzsche "at home with the Greeks" etc) gazed from the Penelope/Molly απολογία (meaning a speech in defense). Especially when the "one-flesh" aspect of marriage gives Mrs. Marion Bloom the Bloom named wand (penis) by legal right.

10 of WANDS

OPPRESSION/MULTI-TASKING/OVERTHINKING/METACOGNITION

"What retribution, if any?

Assassination, never, as two wrongs did not make one right. Duel by combat, no. Divorce, not now. Exposure by mechanical artifice (automatic bed) or individual testimony (concealed ocular witnesses), not yet. Suit for damages by legal influence or simulation of assault with evidence of injuries sustained (selfinflicted), not impossibly. Hushmoney by moral influence, possibly. If any, positively, connivance, introduction of emulation (material, a prosperous rival agency of publicity: moral, a successful rival agent of intimacy), depreciation, alienation, humiliation, separation protecting the one separated from the other, protecting the separator from both. " (U.17)

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