Hierogrammates, Briah and Yesod

Ryan Dunn · 13 Aug 2010, 15:39 · 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: ryan at liftingfaces.com (Ryan Dunn)
Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2010 11:39:02 -0400
Subject: (urth) Hierogrammates, Briah and Yesod
In-Reply-To: <4C656553.6060300 at verizon.net>
References: <39103.93841.qm at web84108.mail.mud.yahoo.com>	<4C645979.3030403 at gmail.com>
	<797A7C87D8B6489681100C9C8E32E667@jill>
	<4C656553.6060300 at verizon.net>
Message-ID: <1BA23467-4415-468A-AD5C-6DAFBC6AC5B1 at liftingfaces.com>


On Aug 13, 2010, at 11:31 AM, David Stockhoff wrote:

> That's exactly what I have proposed: branching Briahs. From the back end, these will look like multiple Briahs, although branches do die.
> 
> Gerry Quinn wrote:
>> 
>> 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!
> 


Yes, but there's such linearity between Pre-Briah imploding (Yesod looking forward and back, the flower cycle of divine years, the word "succession" being used, past tense for post-Briahan dealings, etc.) and a new universe, Briah, the one housing Urth. The Pre-Briah also had an "Urthlike" planet that was also emprical and the center of the universe for a time (empirically not cosmographically). I suspect that was Earth. It was the planet whose humans created the Hierogrammates, killing uncountable billions in the process, and it took the rest of that universe's life. I suppose there was an action which triggered the universe's collapse, and the completion of the Hierogrammates sounds as good as any. Did they destroy that universe and escape to Yesod?

Another question is, when Severian activates the White Fountain, is he imploding Briah, and birthing Post-Briah?

If so, I guess Urth becomes Rth or Yrth or something.

:)

...ryan
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20100813/baaa1e71/attachment.htm>

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