Autarchs

Jeff Wilson · 26 Sep 2010, 21:36 · from 2010-September.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: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Sun, 26 Sep 2010 16:36:57 -0500
Subject: (urth) Autarchs
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTi=xpPAz2mu=xUH59-nUXLdL17VBr135kZXWRtJO at mail.gmail.com>
References: <AANLkTi=xpPAz2mu=xUH59-nUXLdL17VBr135kZXWRtJO at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4C9FBCF9.6010205 at io.com>

On 9/26/2010 2:24 PM, Andrew Mason wrote:
> Jeff Wilson wrote:
>>
>> Typhon is the first to carve his face into the western Andes, at least.
>> The Autarchs that follow do likewise, but there semms also to be a
>> succession of Autarchs before Typhon, or at least a succession of people
>> whose minds are inherited by the post-Typhon succession. URTH, XLI: "and
>> I began, as I walked on, to search those veiled lives that lie behind
>> the last, memories that I have scarcely mentioned in this narrative,
>> that dim as they grow stranger and stretch backward, perhaps, to Ymar,
>> and behind Ymar to the Age of Myth."
>
> It's not clear to me that Autarchs eat the brains only of Autarchs:
> the stated aim of the practice is to make the whole Commonwealth
> present within one person. Though of course this raises the question
> who might have maintaining a chain of brain-eaters before Ymar's time.
>
> One piece of evidence that the autarchy existed in some form before
> Ymar arises in connection with the Antechamber; we are told that
> before Ymar, all crimes committed around the House Absolute were
> judged by the Autarch himself. I suppiose, though, that this might be
> another case of the loose use of 'Autarch' to mean 'ruler'.

In that case, what distinguishes autarchs from those rulers who are not?

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >

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