Hierogrammates, Briah and Yesod

Gerry Quinn · 10 Aug 2010, 15:12 · from 2010-August.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: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2010 16:12:45 +0100
Subject: (urth) Hierogrammates, Briah and Yesod
References: <SNT123-W364CA387AD5923CDA7A9D4CF940 at phx.gbl>
	<5812D15F-800B-4971-83D8-F829E9D0CC15 at liftingfaces.com>
Message-ID: <94C753843CC24501ACEFA3743D1C51E5@jill>

From: "Ryan Dunn" <ryan at liftingfaces.com>

> I want to believe that Mr. Wolfe himself would like to claim that the 
> answer to every single riddle ever posited on this mailing list since it 
> began is answerable, and answerable in the text we're pondering.
>
> Do you think he would agree? Do you agree?

I say no to both.

In the first place I think this list has probably posited many riddles on 
subjects he has not even considered, because the riddles are based on 
assumptions that the author did not place in the text.  for example (just 
using this as a simple example) if Agia was not a sexbot, then the riddle of 
whether she was Hethor's sexbot is moot, and the sound when her head hit the 
floor was probably just intended to indicate that she took a nasty knock.

In the second place, I think he probably left some things ambiguous, i.e. 
with no fixed answer.  For example, he might have thought it would be 
interesting if there were some hints that Severian might have had a sister, 
without making any decision one way or the other.

- Gerry Quinn

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