Hierogrammates, Briah and Yesod

Gerry Quinn · 13 Aug 2010, 10:51 · from 2010-August.txt.gz

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From: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2010 11:51:26 +0100
Subject: (urth) Hierogrammates, Briah and Yesod
References: <39103.93841.qm at web84108.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
	<4C645979.3030403 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <797A7C87D8B6489681100C9C8E32E667@jill>

From: "Ant?nio Marques" <entonio at gmail.com>
> DAVID STOCKHOFF wrote:

>> I agree that the homologue interpretation is valid. I don't see any
>> confirming reason for it outside an analysis of Tzadkiel's remarks. All
>> there is, is pushing the explanation farther and farther away: well,
>> there's ANOTHER universe with ANOTHER race, and THEY created YESOD, and 
>> ...
>
> Which actually is said in the text. Of course, the text may mean 
> otherwise.
>
> You and Lee seem interested in not having more than two universes, Briah 
> and Yesod. Others see little sense in that idea.

I can accept that Wolfe was playing with the idea of multiple cycles, but at 
the same time I think of this a possibility rather than the only true 
reading of the text.

Also, I wonder whether talk of more than one Briah is really meaningful.  We 
have alternate timelines such as that of Ash and the Green Man, which could 
be said to refer to two Briahs splitting from one root.  We have other time 
shenannigans.  Yet nobody uses this to argue for multiple Briahs, although 
the Briah of Ash is quite different from the Briah of the Green Man, at 
least as far as Urth is concerned.

Okay, we can hypothesise that each Briah is a bundle of related timelines 
that don't connect much to the set of timelines bundled together as a 
different Briah, except at the start and finish of each Briah.  Maybe that 
makes sense.  But I'm not sure such detailed hypothethical cosmologies are a 
great jumping off point for further analysis.  Even physicists are running 
out of useful detectable signals that can distinguish between different 
cosmological hypotheses these days.  We should recognise that this is likely 
for analysts of BotNS also!

- Gerry Quinn

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