Subject: (urth) some help? Mary King (famous equestrian), Riverman (famous stud horse), and horse races vs. the Odal rune (inheritance) in Sorcerer's house

From: Marc Aramini <marcaramini at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 04 May 2018 14:11:49 +0000

So ... I am almost done with the Sorcerer's House writeup, but Gene has
doubled down on obscurity here. As those who have read the book know, a
spectral horse appears in the same chapter as Kiki, right in the middle of
the book, when Bax has a vision of himself on the side of the road after
his brother has assaulted a police officer (Kate Finn) and been arrested.

For those familiar with my thesis, you will recall that I argue that the
house visions are born of a kikimora spirit, and that she sometimes wears a
foxes appearance, but that there are two such spirits, one more malevolent
than the other, with the benevolent one being Martha Murrey (who says she
is a "scarecrow" after traveling - the kikimora name can mean "scarecrow).
Martha is 40 years old in appearance, Bax is 40 years old, the butler
appeared to cause havoc in the town 40 years ago - the kikimora can be born
when a mother or child dies in childbirth, and those things add up pretty
nicely.

The Odal Rune looks like a fish and is found on all three rings of the
triangles.( ? )
It means inheritance. Since I argue that in patterns of three two are
supernatural are not real while one is real, the Odal rune on the inner
ring suggests to me that the Skotos strip is a real inheritance (i.e. - he
is the son of Alexander Skotos and maybe Mary King, who dies in childbirth
and gives birth to the spirit of ... (?) (They appear in letter 20 BEFORE
Mary King's context is introduced, as nebulous as it is - she shows up to
disappear by the cemetery, on the same night Kiki appeared to say that she
goes to the river to wash her shroud.)

Both Mary and Skotos showing up in the same letter, even though Bax
disavows any relationship, suggests to me that they might be Bax's real
parents, and that the Skotos strip is his real inheritance, though his
mother would then have died long ago - and how Kiki, Lupine, Winkle, and
Martha Murrey map onto that is still a headache.  HERE COMES THE BIG
PROBLEM - his first hand switch occurs when he asks Martha Murrey about
gambling and the horse races. He mentions gambling quite a bit, even
associating Skotos with Sandy Scott, whom he knew from Churchill Downs.
WELL ...

Mary King, the only famous one I could find, is a well known and successful
equestrian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_King_(equestrian)

Riverman is a famous and successful race winner and sire of champion
horses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverman

That's a really, really big coincidence. So ... funding the house through
horse races, which would pretty much eliminate the possibility that
something happened forty years ago that caused these spirits to be born
(Emlyen and Iuean are internal visions manifested by the Kikimora in this
reading - whatever happens to them (hit three times with a stick)
immediately happens to Bad (hit back three times with a stick)) VS. Mary
King and Skotos as his parents, with something occurring which precipitated
the birth of a Kikimora spirit in childbirth 40 years ago ...

One more thing. Manjushri says that he must team up with the woman "he"
struck to come out ahead. Bax notices a falseness to Manjushri's claims
about what is holy (because it is a kind of deceitful illusion, like the
facefox), but then teams up with Kate Finn so that charges are not pressed.
Kate Finn appears right after the first dismemberment and also, I think,
drops him off when he finds another body part at his house. This team up is
more than finding George in the house - it is so that he can keep George
from getting a record when he takes George's place. She also sees
Goldwurm's tower from the window during their search (I am pretty sure, but
will review this). Martha Murrey says that she had a friend  named Nina
O'Brien who was run down in the street but people only cared about the
Hound of Horror stories ... If she is a spirit that lingers forty years
passed, then ... who is Nina O'Brien and when did she die? (this does
create a weird link between the deceased friend of Martha and the hound of
horror, but that is nebulous). Emlyn winds up in a pact with Lupine - does
this parallel Bax's final alliance with Kate Finn? Is the Irish connection
of O'Brien and Finn enough to parallel those two? (i.e. - is Kate Finn the
face of Lupine like Martha Murrey might be the face of the benevolent
Kikimora?) Are we to assume that the spirits also have triple identities,
two assumed and one true? If so, how does that work?

Could Mary King and Riverman being associated with horse racing really be
coincidence? It seems to me that everything except that is explained by the
Kikimora - EXCEPT the dinner scene after he meets Kiki in which Cathy Ruth
comes over and the gnome like jeweler seems to know Skotos but own't talk
about it. Is that a dream vision, too, like his sojourn through his
fireplace and out his window (the kikimora brings vivid dreams)? If so,
what the heck is up with Cathy Ruth? I really want to square these details
away before I close out the essay.
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From: Marc Aramini <marcaramini at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 04 May 2018 14:18:03 +0000

autocorrect and poor typing may cause some confusion there - triannulus was
replaced by triangle, Bax always auto-corrects to Bad. Sorry.

On Fri, May 4, 2018 at 7:11 AM, Marc Aramini <marcaramini at gmail.com> wrote:

> Mary King, the only famous one I could find, is a well known and
> successful equestrian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_King_(
> equestrian)
>
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From: Marc Aramini <marcaramini at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 09 May 2018 16:05:17 +0000

Thanks for responding Jeffery. Finn also means "fair," which could be
contrasted with Skotos (Darkness), Murrey (dark purple almost black) and
Mr. Black.

In my opinion Wolfe became slightly too minimalist post 2010 in presenting
these puzzle pieces - it's almost impossible to faithfully reconstruct the
events from 40 years ago with confidence in this text. Mary King, who is
emphasized as an important part of the puzzle, is given like three lines
dedicated to her in the book, during which she is presented far before she
appears, and then appears only to disappear near a cemetery and say she is
headed the same place Bax is headed ... The text even says details about
her will be important "no matter how nebulous" - gee.

While I am confident in my reading of Home Fires, I had to make the biggest
leap ever to understand who Coleman Baum was - there wasn't enough in the
text to train me. Consider the difference in Fifth Head of Cerberus: the
names of three women on St. Crois - Pheadria, Nerissa, and Urania. When I
found that Phaedria was a type of moth, I KNEW that Nerissa and Urania
would be moths or butterflies BEFORE I EVER LOOKED THEM UP. People say that
you can force Wolfe into any pattern, but you simply can't. I couldn't do
this with character names in any other of his novellas, and knew with
certainty that it would be so, because I had already internalized the
patterns in that particular text. Extra research is just verification of a
conclusion reached through other means.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cepora_nerissa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urania_sloanus

I already knew these women had a metamorphic stage to their life cycle and
I didn't even really need to do that extra textual research. Many many
times I know that what I am looking up for verification is not apophenia
because the text has already taught me I will find what I expect once I
literalize metaphors or switch them to ironic statements and follow them to
their logical conclusions. I was not surprised to find that on the island
of Philae where Latro ends up in the last Soldier book all of the symbols
of the Egyptian Gods save to Horus were erased by Christian iconoclasts in
history - it was exactly what I was expecting from the text, though it
isn't in the book.

But the introduction of a different name here and a friend of Martha dying
in such a way becomes very difficult to integrate into a book already built
on a triple structure that occasionally seems to violate it, with Cathy
Ruth and Kate Finn being the two most obvious and egregious "outliers" that
might just be another manifestation of the triple structure - right after
we get the warning that  of what seems to be "She comes" from Winkle, Cathy
Ruth calls and enters the text - but that She could be lupine, kiki, mary
king, martha, Madame Orizia, or even Kate Finn, and those identities could
blur into one another.

The final dinner at Lakeshore, where the waitress can't seem to remember
that Bax orders his food done a particular way, and Cathy Ruth and her
jeweler soon-to-be father in law come over, she finding the note about the
werewolf and the jeweler refusing to answer how he knows Skotos, also seems
to be very dreamlike, but how can we integrate these characters into the
waking world? The fractures here require some serious extra-textual
assumptions to force into a linear pattern at the finest level.

On Tue, May 8, 2018 at 10:28 PM, Jeffery Wilson clueland.com <
jwilson at clueland.com> wrote:

> On 04-May-18 9:11 AM, Marc Aramini wrote:
>
>> Martha Murrey says that she had a friend  named Nina O'Brien who was run
>> down in the street but people only cared about the Hound of Horror stories
>> ... If she is a spirit that lingers forty years passed, then ... who is
>> Nina O'Brien and when did she die? (this does create a weird link between
>> the deceased friend of Martha and the hound of horror, but that is
>> nebulous). Emlyn winds up in a pact with Lupine - does this parallel Bax's
>> final alliance with Kate Finn? Is the Irish connection of O'Brien and Finn
>> enough to parallel those two? (i.e. - is Kate Finn the face of Lupine like
>> Martha Murrey might be the face of the benevolent Kikimora?) Are we to
>> assume that the spirits also have triple identities, two assumed and one
>> true? If so, how does that work?
>>
>
>
>
> If Nina O'Brien was pregnant, perhaps there were two spirits generated at
> the one time.  Also, Finn may be Finnish rather than Irish, since kikimora
> is also Urgo-Finnish.
>
>
> --
> Jeffery Wilson - < jwilson at clueland.com >
> RIP - A&M Texarkana Computational Intelligence Lab
> < http://clueland.com/demo/interact/ >
>
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