James Joyce
Irish novelist and poet (1882–1941)
The numbers
2 + 3 = 5
Lo Shu grid
Missing: 4, 6, 7, 9. Present digits repeat to show how many times they occur.
Life path 5 — The Free Spirit
Five sits at the centre of the Lo Shu grid and at the middle of 1–9, and the tradition makes much of that: it is the number of movement, appetite and change. Practitioners associate it with travel, reinvention and an unusually high tolerance for uncertainty. The reading is equally direct about the cost — 5 is described as leaving at the point where things get repetitive, which is often the point just before they would have paid off.
Complete lines
Line of Feeling
A complete line in the grid.
Line of Expression
A complete line in the grid.
Repeated numbers
2 appears 4 times
Concentrated sensitivity. Read as perception so continuous it becomes hard to switch off.
What is missing
Missing 4
Read as impatience with structure and maintenance. Associated with starting well and leaving the scaffolding to someone else.
Missing 6
Read as a complicated relationship with obligation — either avoiding it or over-shouldering it, rarely a settled middle.
Missing 7
Read as reluctance to sit with an unresolved question. Associated with wanting the working answer rather than the true one.
Missing 9
Read as a narrowed field of view: strong loyalty close in, less pull from causes further out.
Vedic — Ank Jyotish
Moolank 2 comes from the day of the month alone; Bhagyank 5 from the whole date. They differ, which is the ordinary case — the two numbers answer different questions.
Chandra
The Moon. Mind, mood, reflection. Read as receptivity and changeability.
Bhagyank uses the same arithmetic as the Western life path, so the two will always agree. That is not two traditions confirming each other — it is one calculation under two names.
In their words
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. It speaks of what seems fantastic and unreal to those who have lost the simple intuitions which are the test of reality; and, as it is often found at war with its age, so it makes no account of history, which is fabled by the daughters of memory.
Every age must look for its sanction to its poetry and philosophy, for in these the human mind, as it looks backward or forward, attains to an eternal state.
Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when the imagination contemplates intensely the truth of its own being or the visible world, and the spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are realities and these alone give and sustain life.
I want to achieve myself—little or great as I may be—for I know that there is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to my church as a human being, and accordingly I am going to Paris.
All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light. And though I seem to have been driven out of my country here as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.
My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?
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