Subject: (urth) Urth Digest, Vol 52, Issue 108

From: David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2008 19:57:05 +0000

The significance of Apu Punchau is a mystery to me. I find it hard to believe that he's related to the Commonwealth state religion. 

It's also not clear exactly how the Conciliator myth influences events, although that's something that can be understood broadly. 

But you're right about the Guild, whatever form it took---still, if it already existed, then Severian's presence would not have changed things significantly. Unless we knew exactly what changed---and we don't. Other than the color of their cloaks.

Does Severian ever hint that the Guild even remembers its role as the Conciliator's "hosts"? (I can't help but think of the Guild as resembling a "sons of the Revolution" type organization that claims descent from the soldier who stabbed Christ in the thigh---that the Guild might be aware of the necessary role it played the way Pontius Pilate had a necessary role: not an glorious one, but a necessary one and therefore in its way honorable.)

If none of these 3 things was necessary to Severian's passing the test at Yesod, then the time loop can't be intractable.

However, the loop does seem intended to suggest something important about Ymar and Severian---the first and the last Autarchs, and the first and last to be tested. But what?

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Message: 3
Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2008 19:08:35 +0000
From: "Son of Witz" <sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org>
Subject: Re: (urth) Particolored Brocade
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <W997314252102271229800115 at webmail45>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: David Stockhoff [mailto:dstockhoff at verizon.net]
> >Sent: Saturday, December 20, 2008 09:35 AM
> >To: urth at lists.urth.net
> >Subject: Re: (urth) Particolored Brocade
The Guild may have already existed under Typhon, however. At least, an office existed that carried out torture for the monarch. But it uses a "strange uniform" rather than fuligin and may not use the term "journeyman." (Severian is vague on that point.) They are clearly not military but another branch, but are closer to being military than in Severian's time: "another journeyman with a vouge, looking almost like a soldier." So that's several points on which Severian created his own legend.

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The circularity of myth here is what leads me to consider the timeloop paradox as intractable.  There can't be a Severian who doesn't become New Sun and then Conciliator, because there most likely wouldn't have been a Guild to nurture him or a Conciliator to inspire him, and perhaps much of Civilization would have been different without Apu Punchau.  Who knows though?
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