To be fair, you have to have be a Rosicrucian to understand Finnegans Wake. The parody of theosophy is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of historical alchemy most of the jokes will go over a typical reader’s head. There's also Joyce’s Blakean comportment...
I cannot overstate how much “occult” or “esoteric” knowledge is required to truly appreciate Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, WB Yeats, James Joyce, etc.
The Apes of God is about the initiation of an idiot into a parodic theosophical society of “spectators” (the spectator society, look it up) representing Lewis’s cynical take on English high society & especially it’s Vogue for Theosophy & World Revolution.
When people say these works are “obfuscatory”— it’s because they’re about “obfuscation”— & “revealing how obfuscation functions”— they are themselves modeled as “counter initiations” into a “secret society” of people who “get it”
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