Hierogrammates, Briah and Yesod

James Wynn · 10 Aug 2010, 17:31 · 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: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2010 12:31:04 -0500
Subject: (urth) Hierogrammates, Briah and Yesod
In-Reply-To: <266683.33370.qm at web84101.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
References: <266683.33370.qm at web84101.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <4C618CD8.3000500 at gmail.com>

On 8/10/2010 12:18 PM, DAVID STOCKHOFF wrote:
>
>
> --- On *Tue, 8/10/10, James Wynn /<crushtv at gmail.com>/* wrote:
>
>
>

 >>Severian says that the power to travel the corridors of Time is the 
same for escaping the universe.
 >>
 >> "The hammer they wield is their ability to draw their servants back, 
down the corridors of time,
 >> and to send them hurtling forward to the future. (This power is in 
essence the same as that
 >> which permitted them to evade the death of their universe--to enter 
the corridors of time
 >>is to leave the universe.)"
 >>
 >> If one had to travel to the beginning or end of the universe to 
access Yesod [assuming I
 >> am understanding the propose model], then you would have to have a 
separate method
 >> of Time travel to reach the beginnings and endings of universes.

 >That's a good point. But then there is ship-travel, and then there is 
other time travel.
 >
 >Or so I assume, since the green man does not ride the ship. If I 
understand correctly,
 >Severian uses both methods at different times.

Well, the Severian says here that the technology is the same. Tzakiel (a 
Hierogrammate) IS the ship, right?
So unless Tzakiel has a method of travel that is different from his 
brethern...

Essentially, as Sev paints it, in order to travel through time, you have 
to have the ability to exit your universe into the meta-universe. This 
defeats the Laws of Relativity.

The truth is, I really like this model as I understand it: that 
Hierogrammates escaped their universe to the next one in line...that 
there is no "other", just a succession of universes through which 
Tzadkiel travels as though along a chain. I'd like for Wolfe to have 
employed it, but I don't see how it can be managed given what Severian 
says in _Citadel_ both in the passage above and this one here:

"I was not told what became of the Humanity of that cycle. Perhaps it 
survived until the implosion of the universe, then perished with it. 
Perhaps it evolved beyond our recognition. But the beings Humanity had 
shaped into what men and women wished to be escaped, opening a passage 
to Yesod, the universe higher than our own, where they created worlds 
suited to what they had become. *From that vantage point they look both 
forward and back*, and in so looking they
have discovered us."

The use of the term "vantage point" implies something apart...but it 
does not not require it, I admit. However, that they looked forward and 
back implies that they did not escape only one manvantara away. Why look 
for Severian in Abbadon if they had just come from there? And if they 
could leap-frog universes...well, the model begins to lose it's elegance.

u+16b9
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20100810/54070888/attachment-0001.htm>

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