Oldest altar

Roy C. Lackey · 16 Sep 2010, 19:30 · from 2010-September.txt.gz

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From: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2010 14:30:28 -0500
Subject: (urth) Oldest altar
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Andrew wrote:
> As to how the Whorl-dwellers were "converted", it's worth recalling Auk's
> meeting with Tartaros in the tunnels (Calde Ch.6). It happens at the
"oldest
> altar", of which Tartaros says: "When the first people came here, Auk,
they
> were shown how we desired to be worshipped. Soon, they were made to
forget.
> They did, but because they had seen what they had seeen, a part of them
> remembered, and when they found our altars on the inner surface, they
> sacrificed as we had taught them. First of all, here."

That quote doesn't make sense. I wonder if it's tied to what Lemur said
about entrenched memories of Typhon and his family being too deep to
eliminate, so the Nine were renamed. Let's parse the Tartaros quote.

At first glance, the first sentence seems straightforward enough, but then
you have to wonder what the first people were doing down in the tunnels. The
area with the altar and a Window was wider than the tunnels that led to it,
but it's unclear just how large the area was. The chamber was not too far
from the Pit. So was it some sort of orientation center for new arrivals who
had just been brought up to the ship in landers?

Even if that is so, why were they then made to forget what they had been
taught? Is this where Lemur's comments come in? Maybe I better give that
quote again: "The surgeons found, however, that their patients' memories of
their ruler, his family, and some of his officials were too deeply
entrenched to be eliminated altogether. To obscure the record, they renamed
them. Their ruler, the man who called himself the monarch, became Pas, the
shrew he had married Echidna, and so on."

Now to the third sentence of the Tartaros quote. After being made to forget
how to worship properly, complete with sacrifices, when the first people saw
the altars set up in the cities that had been built for them, they went back
to worshipping as they had been taught, complete with sacrifices. What had
changed?

I really have no vested interest one way or the other in the notion that
Typhon and his family had been worshipped on Urth, so if anyone has a better
explanation for Tartaros' statement, I'd like to see it. And that is not a
challenge.

BTW, while it is true that there is no evidence in the Urth Cycle that
Typhon and his family had been worshipped  back on Urth, neither is there
any evidence that Catholicism or some approximation thereof had been
practiced in Typhon's time.

-Roy

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