Abaia & co.

mournings glory · 19 May 2006, 15:43 · from 2006-May.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: mourningsglory at hotmail.com (mournings glory)
Date: Fri, 19 May 2006 15:43:05 +0000
Subject: (urth) Abaia & co.
In-Reply-To: <20060519083226.99525.qmail at web54205.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <BAY107-F27F2C17F272EE027C287F2D8A70 at phx.gbl>

>I'm enjoying the reheated discussion about Baldanders
>and the megatherians.
>Baldanders as a "kind of baby Abia" is an important
>theory, but what if he IS Abia? This has been proposed
>before (I can't find the ref, but it must have been
>Borski, right?), and Sev as eventual Lake God
>(Oannes?)

Could the giant baby found in Baldander's castle be the infant Abaia? As 
Severian tells us, "I left this boy where I had found him, and to this day I 
have no notion of what may have become of him."
Pronouncements like this by Wolfean characters make me very suspicious, and 
if his mother is Juturna and experiences time backwards, he could evolve 
widdershins fashion into Abaia -- a rather nice irony, if Severian is his 
father. This would also make the undines mother-aunts more than 
sister-brides -- or maybe not, given the novel's many incestuous couplings.

> > The undines as "brides" of Abaia strikes me as
> > ludicrous unless bride is
> > meant metaphorically, in the sense that nuns are
> > said to be brides of
> > Christ. Juturna was big -- about sixty feet tall at
> > the Cephissus -- but
> > still quite small in comparison to a mountain.
> > Undines as sexual playthings?

Again, I think you're thinking too rigidly biological here. Severian couples 
with Apheta, and their child is the White Fountain. Explain the genetics of 
that one.

Re 14 vs 17, and minotaur math:

>I guess that makes more sense: 14 is as high as the Minotaur can
>count.  Ten fingers, two hooves, two horns.

What? No pizzle? Guess that makes him related to Appian-the-bull in at least 
two respects, no?

emotaur

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net