Laundress and Star (AEG spoilers)

John Watkins · 20 Oct 2008, 12:13 · from 2008-October.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: john.watkins04 at gmail.com (John Watkins)
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2008 08:13:52 -0400
Subject: (urth) Laundress and Star (AEG spoilers)
In-Reply-To: <13818.72.171.0.143.1224503003.squirrel at brunians.org>
References: <48F6F93B.8010802 at gmail.com> <48F772FB.6090103 at mindspring.com>
	<b12d82080810200242n60268449ucb972989e29f1f36 at mail.gmail.com>
	<1606.72.171.0.143.1224499464.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<14368.72.171.0.143.1224500262.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<93d4039f0810200416m2b356419kc24041089439887 at mail.gmail.com>
	<13818.72.171.0.143.1224503003.squirrel at brunians.org>
Message-ID: <93d4039f0810200513y4854a1c9p5e1a3291f3db4e64 at mail.gmail.com>

Of course--I'm not using Chesterton as gold-star history here.  The
question is whether we can infer that Wolfe had the sacrifices to
Phoenician false gods in mind when he threw that "Cassiopeia weeps for
her children" bit in.  It's certainly an interesting thought.  The
Squid God is already Cthulhu layered with Cetus and sort of the pulp
notion of a human sacrifice to quiet an angry volcano or storm.  Are
we meant to also take him as the deity honored by human sacrifice
around the southern and eastern side of the Mediterranean?  I don't
know if this points toward any other interpretive clues, although it
is interesting that what we typically consider a Greek myth is set in
what is now Israel.  That's rich turf--I doubt Wolfe would leave it
fallow.

Or maybe it's just Wolfe's guess at the origin of the Cetus myth.
Ultimately the myth is about a queen trying to sacrifice her daughter
to a monster, and the heroic foreigner who stops the sacrifice.  Maybe
Wolfe takes the myth as in part chiding by the Greeks of the
child-sacrificing practice of their neighbors?

On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 7:43 AM,  <brunians at brunians.org> wrote:
>> Phoenicia, Aethiopia--either way it's where Baal was worshipped,
>> right?  They had human sacrifices, at least according to the Bible.
>
> So did the Bni Israel, at least according to the Bible.
>
> 'Baal' means 'Lord'. That's it. Contrast various names in Kings and
> Chronicles. -baal becomes -bosheth ('bosheth' means 'shame'). Remember
> that the order of books does not correspond to historical order:
> Chronicles is the earlier work.
>
>> Chesterton has a whole bit on it in The Everlasting Man, about how the
>> Phoenician civilization was just about the only thing the Romans and
>> the Jews hated equally.
>
> Chesterton is right a lot of the time, and clever and amusing even when he
> is wrong. Not having read 'TEM' I have no idea which he is being here.
>
>
> .
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>

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