Subject: (urth) Occam's Razor and Pas's Heads

From: Jeff Veyera <teflon93 at cox.net>
Date: Sat, 09 Nov 2002 02:24:31 +0000

There is a simpler explanation for all of this---Wolfe simply needed a quick
visual way to alert longtime readers as to who the builder of the Whorl
really was.

-----Original Message-----
From: James Jordan [mailto:jbjordan4 at cox.net]
Sent: Friday, November 08, 2002 7:54 AM
To: urth at urth.net
Subject: (urth) Pas's Two Heads

At 11:24 PM 11/7/2002, Roy wrote:

>So, when Typhon decided to build the _Whorl_ (for whatever reason), he *did
>not* plan to have himself scanned as a two-headed god. At some point before
>the launch, events overtook him. He was forced to change his original plans
>and have himself scanned *after* he had been grafted to Piaton. (Why he
>didn't have himself poured into a custom-made, look-alike chem body, like
>Loris, and Potto, and the others, I don't know.) But, so far as I know,
>Typhon never set foot in the _Whorl_. There was *no reason* for his
scanned,
>digitized personality to have been depicted as two-headed. Given Typhon's
>vanity, it doesn't make sense for it to have been done that way.
>
>The entire pantheon of Pas and his family and friends is all the more a
>travesty, some sort of sick joke, apparently. Yet the manteions in the
>pre-fabricated cities were built before the human cargo was put aboard. The
>Sacred Windows, the gods in Mainframe, all of that seems to have been
>planned from the beginning. Did Typhon's original plan call for him to be
>scanned as his one-headed self (with a new body)? Did he have time to have
>the Writings composed to reflect his two-headed godhead, create the whole
>mythology that permeates the _Whorl_? Why bother? If he wanted to play god,
>he didn't need to be two-headed to do it, and from his egocentric
viewpoint,
>it wouldn't have been desirable.

Maybe. Maybe not. Janus of Rome was two-headed, and thereby ruled the past
and the future. Typhon may well have wanted a two-headed image for Pas, so
that he was visibly greater than other gods. Think also of the
double-headed eagle of Russia, and similar images. We don't know that Pas's
two heads looked like Typhon and Piaton. They may have both looked like
Typhon. Of course, on the other hand, the reason Pas is not as bad as
Typhon may be because the second head is Piaton's, and Piaton's nature has
become highly influential in Pas. I don't think we have the information to
decide about this.

Nutria

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From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 20:03:19 +0000

> visual way to alert longtime readers as to who the builder of the Whorl

Exactly.  If Pas had only one head, we'd have spent the last 7-8 years
arguing about why Pas only had one head.  And Robert Borski would have a
5000 word essay demonstrating that the "Typhon" of the Long Sun was not
Severian's Typhon but an alternate version from a past/future where
Severian wielded Occam's Razor instead of Terminus Est which he had used
to forcibly remove Piaton's head yelling, "There can only be One!"

And then Wolfe, despairing over our density, would have written five
seperate scenes in Return to the Whorl in which Horn/Silk muses about how
of course it would have made no sense for Typhon to create Pas in his
temporarily two-headed image.

-Rostrum

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