# Cyriaca *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 02 Dec 1999* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Alice Turner *02 Dec 1999, 09:00* At Paul Duggan's site, I just read a 1991 essay by Stephen Palmer which posits a thought I'd never seen before (pasted); >> However the mother of the 'second' Severian, the carrier of the Claw, >> would seem to be Cyriaca, a.k.a. Catherine or Katherine, she who recognised Severian even though his mask was on then tried to cover her tracks. Incidentally, Catherine is derived from the word for pure, which could be translated as virginal.<< Well! Shagged both Granny and Mum! Good heavens! Looking further, it's unlikely, however. Cyriaca is not a form of Catherine. In its masculine form, it means "lordly" as derived from Greek. The etymology of C(K)atherine is unknown according to The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names (OTOH, my copy is copyrighted 1945; perhaps someone has something more recent), though it too derives from the Greek. The spelling has "assimilated" to that for "pure" but also--aha!--to that for "torture." Also, we know enough of Cyriaca's story to be pretty sure that she couldn't be Sev's mum. But it did give me a turn. The url for the essay is http://world.std.com/~pduggan/sevchrist.html -alga ---