Mater Mary Mercerycordial
From FinnegansWiki
Jump to navigationJump to search- Mater Misericordiae Hospital: a hospital at the top of Eccles Street in Dublin; popularly known as the Mater, its name is Latin for Mother of Mercy
- Mary Mercer: the benefactor (died 1734) whose legacy led to the founding of Mercer's Hospital
- Mercer's Hospital: a hospital near the centre of Dublin → Handel's oratorio Messiah was given its world premiere in Dublin in 1742 in order to raise funds for Mercer's Hospital → there are other musical allusions in this paragraph
- Mercury: Roman god of merchants, thieves, money, etc, identified with the Greek Hermes and Egyptian Thoth; as Shaun walks the Via Dolorosa backwards in III.1 and III.2, he is always illustrating some attribute of backward-walking Mercury-Hermes-Thoth; in Ulysses, Malachi Mulligan, who works in the Mater Hospital, is Mercurial Malachi, and so is, in part, one of the models for Shaun
- cordial: a drink that is supposedly good for the heart → a mother's milk?
