The religious imagery surrounding Mulligan suggests, also, that even this liberated medical student, for all his profanity, cannot rid himself of his theological training. For instance, the appearance of the Catholic priest near Mulligan's forty-foot "swimming hole," besides implying the ubiquitousness of the clergy in Ireland, implies that Buck's immersion into the waters of joyful paganism can result in only a partial cleansing from his Irish Catholicism.
Other religious allusions, however, are more subtle. Mulligan's gesture of turning his shaven cheek over his shoulder to speak to Stephen resembles the gesticulations of a priest at the altar during Mass, when celebrants officiated with their backs to the acolytes and the congregation. Mulligan calls Stephen "poor dogsbody," foreshadowing an important confrontation with an actual dog in "Proteus" and reminding the reader of the famous Joycean adage that God is dog spelled backwards. Stephen's reference to himself as a "server of a servant" spells out his relationship to Ireland, a country which is itself a servant to two foreign tyrants, England and Rome; and it also suggests one of the Pope's titles, "Server of the Servants of God," and thus is part of the mock heroic tone of Ulysses. Consider also the old milk woman's "Glory be to God"; it is the start of an ironic Gloria, another prayer used in masses during certain joyful times of the year.
Religious allusions are used, as well, to express the false father theme of Ulysses. Haines has nightmares about being attacked by a black panther, and one apocryphal tradition holds that Christ's father was a Roman centurion named Panther or Pantherus (Joyce uses this legend in Finnegans Wake). Mulligan recites his irreverent "Ballad of Joking Jesus," with its parody of the Virgin birth ("My mother's a jew, my father's a bird"), after he has flung his towel around his neck as if it were a priest's stole ("stolewise"). In a similar vein, the heretics Arius and Sabellius long ago debated the procession, or order, of the members of the Trinity.
