#leon surrette

—Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study

A sequel to yesterday’s post: maybe it took another Irishman to do it; maybe Ulysses after all is the Bible of occultic Nietzschean Catholicism. Note that Gilbert leaves Wilde among the nameless “writers of the ’nineties,” whereas I tend to think he is the key that picks the Joycean lock. Then again, I confess to not knowing Meredith except as a poet, to not having gone beyond Modern Love, so perhaps there’s something there. 

As for theosophy—and the connection more broadly between modernism and magic—this is a book that should be better known (you can get it for free on libgen, you didn’t hear it from me):

I read it in graduate school but wasn’t then able to integrate it into my thesis. I’m still pondering the implications. I myself know theosophy mostly by reputation. 

I see with some amusement that an eminent theosophical book Gilbert cites among Joyce’s sources is Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism: this is available on Amazon in a version edited by probably the most fascinating and original of the right-wing YouTubers, the occultist, libertarian, and Trump supporter Tarl Warwick AKA Styxhexenhammer666. Would would Joyce make of that?