Subject: (urth) Inire

From: Nicholas Gevers <potto at webmail.co.za>
Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 08:09:31 +0000

In his Lexicon Urthus, mantis translates "Inire" plausibly enough by
reference to the Latin for "to begin, to enter". I'd like to suggest
that a different, more literal reading might also be helpful: that of
Father Inire as "Father In Ire". By striving to make the New Sun a
reality, Inire helps bring a new Deluge to Urth, ultimately
exterminating the people of the Commonwealth; would it to be fair to
regard him as an instrument of Divine justice, of God in His Ire
punishing the human race for the excesses of the past (the First
Empire, Typhon, or civilization in general)? Needless to say, I don't
see the birth of Ushas as an unalloyed blessing; Severian writes of
"what I have done to Urth", and he has always seemed to me a dupe of
the Increate, the carrier of a merciless judgement.
//--------------------------------------
Nicholas Gevers
potto at webmail.co.za
_______________________________________________________________
 http://www.webmail.co.za the South-African free email service

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

---

From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at sirius.com>
Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 08:24:52 +0000

Potto,

Re: Father Inire as "Father In Ire".  Several years ago now, Jennifer K.
Stevenon (who btw had an essay on John Crowley's work in NYRSF last summer)
took a similar approach to an opposite reading: she parsed it as "Daddy
Isn't Angry (Anymore)."

(I =think= she meant this in the sense of a transition from the God of the
Old Testament to the God of the New Testament; and, in the Urth sense, that
if the Powers were still angry they would just let Urth continue crawling
toward the icey eternal grave.)

I'm quite fond of JKS's interpretation, and yours as well. Certainly either
can be used: it all depends upon the application in question. We might
think that the discovery of a mythological/saintly/kabbalistic "Inire"
would erase all other Inires as mere shadows, but until such discovery is
announced I still doubt that other readings would be invalidated.

So is Inire "Yaweh," the big sky-daddy himself? No, of course not.  But he
is an agent of Yesod, and he may represent Yaweh in the same crude sense
(on the small stage; at the lower level) that the Autarch's anpiels
represent "angels." And Tzadkiel is even more "angelic," which is what
causes us to downgrade our rating of anpiels, yet they don't seem to think
they are closer (or even as close?) to the Increate than Humanity (but then
again, =that= is also a trait of angels!). Yesod is engaged in a
technological program that Briah has no words for; like explaining even an
encyclopedia entry on atomic fission to a stone age tribe--you are going to
get something closer to RIDDLEY WALKER.

=mantis=