# hierarchy of days *The Urth list — 2 messages, 2 voices, 02 Jul 1998* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### mary whalen *02 Jul 1998, 18:59* 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. --- ### m.driussi *03 Jul 1998, 03:42 · follows mary whalen* 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= ---