"To ourselves... new paganism... omphalos": Stephen thinks of
three very different expressions, all of them apparently
associated with Mulligan and his plans for the tower. The
phrases encompass a wide range of implied meanings: political,
aesthetic, spiritual, sexual. But all seem connected to a
countercultural vision that is avant-garde and anti-bourgeois.
The Greek word omphalos reappears elsewhere in the
novel and collects a variety of associations.
“To ourselves” resembles the English sense
of Sinn Féin, “we ourselves.” As
Gifford observes, this phrase became a slogan for political
independence a year or two after the time represented in the
novel. Arthur Griffith
visited the tower, and in 1905 Oliver Gogarty worked with him
to help organize the movement that in 1907 became Sinn Féin.
But in the 1890s and early 1900s the phrase was connected
more broadly with the Irish Literary Revival, not simply
with politics.
Its juxtaposition with “new paganism”
suggests the cultivation of an Irish aesthetic that is both
nationalist and sensualist. This second phrase, Gifford notes,
was a slogan of the young artistic avant-garde of the 1890s.
It conveyed the idea that Christianity had run its course.
Thus it coheres with Mulligan’s Arnoldian
conviction that Irish society is too Hebraic and must be
"Hellenised," and with his Nietzschean
belief in freedom from
Christian morality and freedom
to pursue selfish impulses. Gifford notes that it was
also associated, in the first issue of the Pagan Review
in 1892, with “the various forces of sexual emotion.”
This emphasis upon sexuality suggests a connection with "omphalos,"
the word for "navel" in Greek, which in Mulligan's view is the
language of intellectual and sensual liberation. The prophetic
oracle at Delphi was called an omphalos, being
regarded as the center of the ancient world and a spiritual
life-source. Joyce's awareness of this connotation of omphalos
is made apparent in Circe, when Mulligan's Black Mass on the top
of the tower takes place "On an eminence, the
centre of the earth." In Proteus
Stephen thinks of "mystic monks" who seek to
return to the source of all being by meditating on their bellybuttons:
"Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos."
Ellmann suggests that Gogarty called the tower the omphalos
both "because it resembled a navel and because it might prove
'the temple of neo-paganism' as important to the world as the
navel-stone at Delphi" (172). (Another possibility, suggested
by Mulligan's telling Haines that William Pitt built many
Martellos around Ireland "But ours is the omphalos,"
is that it was the first of the
Martello towers built along the approaches to Dublin.)
The top of the tower does resemble a navel, but the whole
tower, as well as the navel-stone that Ellmann mentions, might
also be seen as phallic in shape. The large sculpted stone
that stood at Delphi from the 4th century BCE onward, a
replacement for a still more ancient one, survives, and its
appearance is certainly more phallic than umbilical.
One may not have to choose between these two images of the
tower. In Oxen of the Sun we learn that Mulligan
associates the procreative connotations of navels and
phalluses, omphaloi and obelisks. He proposes to acquire
a new property, Lambay Island, and to found there “a national
fertilising farm to be named Omphalos, with an
obelisk hewn and erected after the fashion of Egypt and to
offer his dutiful yeoman services for the fecundation of any
female of any grade of life soever.” Mulligan’s new paganism,
it appears, will involve much exercise of his own phallus, in
“the noblest task for which our bodily organism has been
framed.”
