Hierogrammates, Briah and Yesod

Tony Ellis · 12 Aug 2010, 15:37 · from 2010-August.txt.gz

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From: tonyellis69 at btopenworld.com (Tony Ellis)
Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2010 16:37:03 +0100
Subject: (urth) Hierogrammates, Briah and Yesod
Message-ID: <AANLkTimjVPoR_Ji1nY5LPa2wKvMbTqDoOKU2JzQbYzUw at mail.gmail.com>

Lee Berman wrote:
>But it is Tzadkiel's words which come as close as possible to crystalizing my thoughts on the situation.
>He says that Severian's race IS the one that shaped his, and I am willing to believe he is more
>knowledgeable than Malrubius.  Tzadkiel speaks of Severian as a legendary folk hero to him, placing
>Severian and his Briatic life in Tzadkiel's cosmologic past, thus placing Yesod in Briah's cosmologic
>future.

You think that when Hierogrammates say "your own race made us" they
mean 'the human beings of your particular universe'. They don't. They
just mean 'human beings'. The endless virtually identical iterations
of Briah all contain Severian's 'own race'.

It has already been pointed out that there is a passage in chapter XIX
where Apheta says that actually it was a race 'cognate' to Severian's
that made the Hierogrammates. A few paragraphs later, in the same
scene, she says "we must go masked  - not with an actual mask, but
with the appearance of *your own race*, the race that our parents, the
Hierogrammates, first set forth to follow."

'Your own race'. How can she say the Hieros were 'cognates' in one
breath and 'your own race' in another unless the terms are synonymous
to her?

And notice that the world does not stop turning when she says it.
Severian does not jump up and say "what?! You mean that the people of
*my* universe made the Hierogrammates?!" He understands that she is
just saying 'human beings'.

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