lots of stuff

John Watkins · 12 Jul 2010, 19:25 · from 2010-July.txt.gz

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From: john.watkins04 at gmail.com (John Watkins)
Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2010 15:25:43 -0400
Subject: (urth) lots of stuff
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W55C05233F67B511EFB7F50CFB80 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W55C05233F67B511EFB7F50CFB80 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <AANLkTikBqry4_JK13MDUvJH7mq7hAT9jisRUeO3iKQoX at mail.gmail.com>

Some thoughts...

On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 3:11 PM, Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com>wrote:

>
>
> I'd seen the "to enter" meaning of "inire" mentioned before but not so much
> that it might be a specifically sexual reference. The mention of mating
> with
> animals is rather intriguing to me since I am exploring the possibility
> that
> Father Inire has sexually acted on his attraction to young girls to the
> point
> of mating with most/all of the female members of Severian's family,
> including
> his own daughters. Perhaps "mating with animals" does not mean the same
> thing
> to a hiero race being that we would take it to mean.....
>
> I brought it up and missed the (somewhat obvious in retrospect) sexual
valence of the word.  I would simply add that there's a possibility that the
meaning is sexual but not especially descriptive of Inire's personal
proclivities--he may be interested in mating animals with each other either
in collaboration with the Heirogrammates breeding program or for a rival
breeding program.  I don't say this, though, to exclude your
hypothesis--it's just that this hypothesis is the first reason I've seen to
seriously consider Inire as sexually interested in humans.

> Who was it that was recently suggesting Severian could be a version of
> Inire recently?
> That seemed pretty far fetched or even tongue-in-cheek.

Me again, and I was joking.

> But I think the idea that Silk
> is a cloned version of Pas is reasonably well accepted maybe?

I think it's one of many reasonable hypotheses.  He's unlikely to be a
strict clone of Typhon--he's almost certainly genetically enhanced in some
way--but Typhon's souped-up clone is a good bet.

> Anyway, so if Typhon=Pas=Inire, then the idea of Severian as a some version
> or
> offspring of Inire becomes....possible?

I think the weak link here is the idea that Typhon and Inire are one and the
same.  There's maybe some onomastic link, but we have no other reason to
accept this, and in order to accept it we have to believe some pretty stange
things--Typhon preserved himself not only via "possible rehydration
resurrection" and by copying his personality into the Whorl (and maybe other
ships too!) but by finding some way to put his soul in the body of a bent
old monkey-looking fella?  This bent old money-looking Typhon is content to
be the power behind the throne, instead of ruling himself?

> Either way, I must think all this suggests
> the "Inire" epithet for Pan becomes a very good candidate for the origin of
> the
> padre's name.
>
>

It's certainly worth considering, but we should probably recall that
"Typhon," the monster, is who the dude is.  "Pas," the Pan-derived god, is
who he *pretends to be*.  If Pas and Inire share a common link to Pan, I
expect only the latter is genuine.

>
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