Grand Unified Theory

James Wynn · 29 Aug 2010, 01:50 · 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: Sat, 28 Aug 2010 20:50:25 -0500
Subject: (urth) Grand Unified Theory
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTikyyiJ-LEZ496ULv-rSvCrmeKziCjtA1TxucBOX at mail.gmail.com>
References: <AANLkTikyyiJ-LEZ496ULv-rSvCrmeKziCjtA1TxucBOX at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4C79BCE1.107 at gmail.com>

> Dave Tallman - Does this mean we won't see your Hyacinth/Fava theory 
> this weekend after all?

Tell you what. Now I'm feeling a little guilty. I don't want to play 
peek-a-boo. I'll give the synopsis without the textual proofs and give 
the rest later. Actually, others will probably post most them to argue 
the theory down.

I believe Pike's Ghost is the Rajan. I think the Rajan's presence in the 
grandmother's in "In Green's Jungles", the screwy time-line from Horn 
leaving Lizard Island until his return, and the ages of Sinew's sons on 
Green, is sufficient proof that dream-travel can involve Time-travel. 
Also, the presence of the flying Oreb when Silk's Oreb had an injured 
wing down stairs and asserted anyway that he had not been upstairs. 
Unless one credits that Pike got his own night chough in Mainframe or 
Heaven, it was the Rajan. I suspect he's probably also Silver Silk _and_ 
, maybe, he was Patera Pike. Maybe. Otherwise, we get into clone theories.

I think that after the end of "Return To the Whorl", the Rajan went back 
to get Fava in dreamland where he left her when her body died. Then he 
takes her back in Time to Viron so everything can happen as he remembers 
it from Silk's memory. There, Fava --who, in dream-travel looks like a 
teenage girl-- has some breast augmentation (as Chenille implies) and 
becomes Hyacinth. As you have already pointed out, favas and hyacinths 
are both beans. The Romans believed beans contained the souls of the dead.

Anyway, I think the Long Sun/Short Sun should properly be read as a 
single 7 volume novel. Asking what happened to the Rajan went they went 
to the Whorl is not understanding that Wolfe already told us what 
happened to him.

I further believe that Hyacinth's exceptional light weight -- to which 
the text refers TWICE-- is evidence that she is a being in dream-travel 
(the Rajan reported this as a symptom when he was climbing the mesa). 
Also, Hyacinth's promiscuity is pretty much the way inhuma behave when 
they get their human bodies. It's in "their reptilian nature".

I think the "taint" that Silk spoke of occurring from sex with Hyacinth 
refers to her actually being an inhuma -- which he learned during his 
wedding night enlightenment. And I think that is why Silk was so 
despondent on the floater. In RttW, when Jahlee comes on to Horn's son 
while in dream-travel, the Rajan tells him that although she is a true 
human woman, relations between the two of them would be wrong. I also 
think Hy being an inhuma is the what Silk meant when he said that little 
Hy defeating the guard on the floater was "one more lie".

I think Hyacinth's "father" at the Juzgada was the Rajan, fulfilling the 
dream of Silk's mother that Silk go to work there (Fava was the first 
inhumi to called him her father).
I think the belief that Hyacinth had siblings is based on a misreading 
of what Chenille says (it was the family she went to work for that had 
"a lot of sprats".
I think the mother Hy met in mainframe was the mother of the girl that 
FAVA's mother fed on. She was her spiritual mother. I believe the green 
umbrella and two gowns that Hy says her mother (this time her inhuma 
mother) gave her is a red herring. The green umbrella (the one she can't 
remember what happened to it) was the planet Green in Blue's sky. And 
the two gowns were her inhumi body and her dream-travel soul.  I don't 
know if Fava has forgotten her origin (until faced with the prospect of 
returning to Green) or if she is covering up.

I believe the used cameo ring she bought with the picture of the older 
woman --because the seller said the image looked like her--  was the 
woman who gave her her soul (as a teenage girl). I strongly suspect that 
woman was Silk's birth-mother. But Orpine is on the table too.

Only quotation I'll offer here:
"The Outsider was the dancing man on a toy, and the water the
polished toy-top on which he danced with Kypris, who was Hyacinth
and Mother, too. _First romance_, sang the Outsider with the music
box. _First romance_."
~ Calde of the Long Sun, Ch VII.

Of course, "Mother" could be another red herring. It could imply the 
Mother on Blue. I don't know. It gets messy there.

I believe there are at least two thematic purposes that Wolfe is riffing 
on with Hyacinth and Silk.
For the first, I offer this:
http://www.urth.org/whorlmap/worm.htm "The Wolfe and the Laidley Worm".
-- which is something I wrote years ago when I was at the time I was 
debating the "Hy is a male chem" theory.

The second is that Silk/Rajan & Hyacinth/Fava is a retelling of the 
gnostic story of Simon Magus and Helena.
The story goes like this. Ennoia was a female half of the Cosmos. She 
was the first thought of Nous, whom she named "The Father". She became 
separated from The Father and descended through the Aeons to the Third 
World, eventually becoming trapped in a human body. It was she who 
brought the "Spirit" of the Father into the world so he could rule it.
Now Simon Magus was revered The Father in the incarnation of The Son. 
One day, in Tyre, Simon saw a prostitute, Helena, on the roof of a 
brothel. He recognized her as the incarnation of Ennoia, and their 
marriage began the redemption of the world. The story of Helena is 
related in some way to the myths of Sophia.

A nice overview of Simon Magus here:
http://hermetic.com/sabazius/simon.htm
Here you will also see other little bits of the Long Sun/Short Sun story 
poking out like the tops of the heads of friends seen in a milling crowd.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20100828/e85987f8/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