Divine Weak

Reply: Item #6180832 from URTH at LISTS.BEST.COM@INET01# alga, Re: Solange as stereotypical name for a maid. Onomasticly or otherwise--do you have any examples or sources? (I've looked OED and Latin.) Tony Ellis, Re: Divine Week, again, let me stress that this is the most speculative bit. It arose from my having "discovered" the patterns of four and five segments in TBOTNS/URTH as hologrammically reproduced (or anticipated) by most of the stories from the brown book (which also have five segments or are truncated at four segments as TBOTNS is truncated without URTH). When I tried to apply this scheme to the play E&G it didn't fit as cleanly as the fit I'd gotten from brown book stories, so I started casting about for a different structure. However, it is, I believe, less arbitrary than you seem to think, since Genesis of the Old Testament does, after all, begin with a Divine Week of creation (from "In the Beginning . . ." to ". . . and on the seventh day He rested") and this play =is= titled "Eschatology and Genesis." (Granted that the OT Genesis doesn't follow planetary attributes that we recognize today--they didn't have exactly the planetary week that we have. But the menora has seven branches, etc.) Thursday is "Jupiter's day" for the same reason that Monday is Moon's day--i.e., that is the planet associated/inextricably linked with that particular weekday. (I probably should have listed them as "Planet Gods" rather than just planets?) FWIW Gabriel's role in the play is more like a herald, a "Mercury" of that sort (as opposed to psychopomp/shaman which I've assigned). The (Old) Autarch's role in TBOTNS is linked to the Old Sun (and also a bull of some sort: either the sacrificial Taurus, or/and the Minotaur of the maze [if there is any real difference between these archetypes!]); these linkages are probably carried out in E&G by having the same actor play Autarch and Old Sun (who is sacrificed for the New Sun). The whole Divine Week idea is tenuous and =only= has a toehold if the play has seven scenes--no more, no less. The strongest parallels (imho) are the hypothetical Sunday and the visible Saturday. For Thursday I was looking for thunder and other jovian or jovial things--then again, sentences of torture take us to Juppiter's grimmest side: condemning Prometheus to eternal torment, etc. Here is another general statement about E&G: I don't think it is as much an unconscious blending of various and sundry eschatologies and genesises; rather I think it is a self-aware, self-conscious eschatology and genesis that remembers (or whose audience remembers) all the earlier stories (as well as our post-modern concepts of evolutions and extinctions) and now makes them equally valid and somehow sequential--this is the umpteenth eschatology and genesis in a long series. (Kabbalah opens up Genesis from the same OT text and finds not one creation but the creations of four different universes, each successively further from God; and of course the Hindu cosmology which posits a chain of four major ages, from a golden age to a base and degenerate age, with minor twilight ages and apocalypses in between.) =mantis=

03/12/97 14:17 RE>Divine Weak Apologies to everyone for those <equals>3D" pustules which littered my last message. I don't know where they came from but I'll try not to use the <equals> key again until I find out.

Understood.

This sounds intriguing. If you can put up with more of my remorseless blinkered scepticism I would love to hear the argument behind your theory.

Here I am much happier to go along with you. The composite stories from the Brown Book read as if they have accidentally blended together (The Jungle Book + The Founding of Rome etc) over the eons, but the play seems more knowing. Hardly surprising, perhaps, given that it was written by the wily, highly erudite Dr Talos. He seems to posses an almost encyclopedic knowledge of past human culture: not only is he familiar with the "lost" Book of the New Sun, but he's read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein too!