Subject: (urth) Re: hierarchy of days

From: mary whalen <marewhalen at yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, 02 Jul 1998 18:59:07 +0000

This is Sean Whalen (prion).

Quite a while ago, either mantis or nutria (I'm sorry but I can't
recall who it was) wrote about how each class in the Commonwealth was
connected to a day of the week, and used the Roman gods associated
with those days to determine which is which.

I, however, think that the comparison may be more significant and
observable if we use the Norse/Germanic gods as the base of
comparison.  I think this is allowable because Wolfe gives some
planets the names of Norse figures, and in English the days have
Germanic names.

Sunday:  Sun; priests
Monday:  Moon; cacogens
Tuesday:  Tiw (Tyr); armigers
Wednesday:  Woden (Odin); exultants
Thursday:  Thor; commonality
Friday:  Frigg/Freyja; servants of the throne
Saturday/Marketday:  optimates

This is for these reasons:  Sunday's the holy day; Moon is not part of
Earth, is like and not like the Sun (I think these are the
correspondents made for these two days in the previous post as well);
Tiw was the wargod and god of justice (armigers are also like
samurai); Odin was the god of jarls (the nobility), rule, etc.; Thor
was the common man's god; Frigg was Odin's wife, who attended upon
him; the optimates are merchants (Saturn; for whom this day is named
in English is not a Germanic but a Roman god, hence my use of
Marketday, which is what it is, too).

prion.

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From: m.driussi <m.driussi at genie.geis.com>
Date: Fri, 03 Jul 1998 03:42:00 +0000

prion,

IIRC, the purpose of the "days of the week and associated gods"
experiment was related to divining some of the hidden structure to
Doctor Talos's play "Eschatology & Genesis," which might have seven
segments (the stage darkens between these segments) and the play
presumably ends with the arrival of the New Sun (the "genesis" part,
and there is a cast role for "New Sun"); hence, the play ends by
definition on "(New)Sunday," which hints at further "divine week"
patterns of one sort or another.

Plus, in the play we see various archetypes scurrying around trying
to position themselves for the new world order.  Again, this seems to
me like the situation of the Titans as the Olympians were coming to
power, or later on, the Olympians as the Christians were coming to
power.  The character of the Autarch in the play seems to me like a
very Saturnian figure--in the end he razes the gardens (note
harvesting imagery: check) in an attempt to halt the new genesis--oh
Nero!  (It is my understanding that the celestial Titans were the
original gods of the days of the week, fwiw.)

And the play seems to loom large in the deeper structure of
Severian's Narrative, at least equal to the stories in the brown
book.

But the experiment was of dubious success and I haven't made much
progress in grasping the entire matter of the play, alas!  For
example, we (I) should be able to piece together what the missing
sections of the play have based upon (1) the characters on the list
not yet introduced in the play as we have it, and (2) the action
within Severian's Narrative related to the analogous characters
that Severian meets and interacts with.

For example, "Angelic Being" is obviously Tzadkiel in Severian's
life--but how would that complex situation on ship and Yesod be
represented in one or two segments of a rollicking play like
"Eschatology & Genesis"?  And what does "The Moon" do in the play,
when Lune only acted like a weeping Valeria for a moment in
Severian's life in Ushas?  (Unless  somehow we work in that whole
"Valeria's assassination as a solar eclipse" thing . . . )

=mantis=