Omphalos in Ulysses

The word “omphalos” appears a few times in James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Twice it is mentioned by the American character, Buck Mulligan. He mentions it in Episode One as well as Episode Fourteen. However, his speech is not what I am truly interested in diving into. Rather, let us look at the third use of the word in the novel.

We find “omphalos” italicized amidst heavy thematic narration on the part of Stephen Dedalus. It appears within the first couple of pages on Episode Three (line 38 on page 32 of my Gabler Edition, to be precise). To fully grasp its place in the passage, however, we’ll have to dig into the rest of the text that surrounds it.

One of her sisterhood lugged me squealing into life. Creation from nothing. What has she in the bag? A misbirth with a trailing navelcord, hushed in ruddy wool. The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh. That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos. Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one. (Joyce, Episode 3 Lines 35 – 40)

This passage clearly involves the stream-of-consciousness narration style that Joyce pioneered with this novel; as Stephen jumps between thoughts, we must follow him and hear the thoughts as they roll out. The interesting focus of his stream revolves around the nature of life and creation (particularly human creation). His thoughts are made up primarily of images and simple, single thoughts. However, this does not prevent his philosophizing.

Though the passage may be small, there remains plenty to be said about it (isn’t it always the case). At first, Stephen concerns himself with the affairs of a midwife at a birth. His birth, it seems, as he mentions getting “lugged . . . into life” by a sister of sorts. It is interesting that Joyce uses the term “sisterhood,” since it implies (particularly to the mind of someone raised Catholic, as he and many of his Irish peers were) that the woman is a nun. The dual image of a celibate nun and a midwife mid-birthing prove to be difficult to reconcile. Already, there is tension in Stephen’s discourse, and this tension shows the issues of identity as they relate to the indefatigable human condition.

Here, Stephen jumps to, “Creation from nothing.” His first thought was an image, and this sentence works as a tool to understand how he processed that image. He thinks of the conception and birth of a child as the advent of life from nothingness. He then turns his mind to other thoughts of life and nothingness: death.

The miscarriage he envisions in the sister’s bag embodies death as he mulls over the origin (and demise) of life. From this sentence, we find the concept of the navel (the omphalos) first appears. Stephen imagines the “navelcords” connecting each child to its mother, and then the mother to hers, all the way back until some map of “all flesh” has been bound together to show the idea that everyone is ultimately from one source.

The omphalos becomes, then, a mock telephone line through which he pretends to communicate back to Eve (“Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville.”), who would not have had a navel “as gods.”

In this way, Joyce has associated the navel of a man with some of the essences of the human condition: the omphalos symbolizes the unity of all humans, their origins, and their personal and communal identities.

Omphalos at Delphi

The ancient Greek omphalos is a curious object. What one sees if one were to go to the museum in Delphi would be a partially restored stone in a shape reminiscent of an egg with relief carvings of rope netting surrounding it. In fact it would look like this:

Omphalos at Delphi

The omphalos hardly looks like belly buttons I know!

Historians and Classicists have proposed various purposes behind this peculiar object. Some say it works as a funnel for the fumes that caused the Oracle at Delphi to get visions (read: the visions were probably just hallucinations from fumes rising out of the ground), while others propose mythological meaning such as the stone the goddess Rhea gave to Cronus (in an effort to thwart him from eating the newborn son they had together: Zeus). What is generally agreed upon is that this particular stone is probably a replica built in the 4th century B.C.E. The original was said, by ancient sources, to have been covered in actual netting, not carved netting.

The importance of the omphalos, however, was more tied to its location than to any role it directly played in mythology. Delphi was an incredibly important locale in ancient Greece; it was at Delphi that Apollo—a major deity of the Greek pantheon—had his temple. The Pythia, aka the Oracle at Delphi, was one of the most important oracles in all of ancient Greece. Delphi was itself fairly neutral territory, granting all Greek city-states access to Apollo’s temple. Also, Delphi hosted one of the Panhellenic games (which later inspired our contemporary Olympics). Delphi’s role was therefore in many ways crucial to the general ancient Greek way of life, and the omphalos was a great symbol of that.

The omphalos was also integral in establishing a proof of creation for the Greeks. It gave them something to identify with as a people. The mythological role of the omphalos is how they could achieve said identification; since the omphalos was said to be the stone Rhea used to save Zeus’ life and trick Cronus, it stands to reason that its presence in the world would reaffirm the ancient Greeks’ belief in their mythos and their history as a people (I shouldn’t even mention the fact that we’re looking at just a replica).

It then serves doubly as a symbol for the origin of mankind, as well. While Zeus is no mere mortal, the representation of Zeus by the omphalos in Rhea’s deceit does well to insinuate a connection of human origins to the origins of the gods. The omphalos stands in for the baby—a very intimate and connected (literally; until the umbilical cord gets severed, the baby is attached by the navel) object to Rhea, the mother. Imposing upon the gods some mortal experiences like conventional birth and the severing of the umbilical cord (it is called the omphalos, after all) establishes a link between them (the gods) and the ancient Greeks themselves.

The omphalos at Delphi was a significant object for the ancient Greeks, as it represented their unity, importance, identity, and origins. What we can glean from this knowledge, then, is the significance of such an object, such a word. Omphalos, the navel, carries with it a great amount of symbolic weight regarding the very source of the human condition: our own births.

Omphalos on the Internet

I must admit that I am completely at a loss for an explanation as to how or why the following exist. What I am about to present to you I present with little comment and great confusion. These were discovered in the course of some of my research, and strike me as notable pop culture references to omphalos.

 

A Korean Song (by far the largest hit on YouTube for the search query “Omphalos” [though, it’s still relatively unknown: look at the view counter]):

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTMynE81RXw

A Korean Clothing Shop (perhaps inspired by the song above?):

www.omphalos.com