Oldest altar

James Wynn · 06 Oct 2010, 16:19 · from 2010-October.txt.gz

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From: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Wed, 06 Oct 2010 11:19:18 -0500
Subject: (urth) Oldest altar
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  Nicely done, Roy.

I'll just address your proffered questions.

> Roy C. Lackey-
> Take two.
> [snip]
> Interpretations aside, it is indisputable that the worship preceded the
> forgetting. Why? I mean, why did the Typhons want to be worshipped at all?

Isn't it because they were worshiped _secularly_ on Urth? I mean, 
worshiped in the sense that Stalin was worshiped or Kim Jong Il _is_ 
worshiped.**

Also, it was a joke. The Wakers were already conditioned to obey the 
Typhons. Typhon couldn't redirect that conditioning onto something else 
(same issue as the head-transplant operation). He didn't want their 
memories of him to help them reconstruct their old memories. He didn't 
want to stir up too many actual memories. So he created the Nine to 
distort their memories of him and his family to obey something 
different--something that only exists on the Whorl, that they would 
never have encountered on Urth.

**I recently heard a report about refugees in South Korea being allowed 
to visit relatives in North Korea. One old woman who had become a 
Christian asked her nephew (meeting him for the first time) if he 
believed in God. He told her that Kim Jong Il was God.

> I can accept, in theory if not in practice, that an absolute dictator of a
> whole planet, who also had an unbridled ego, might have made himself so
> prominent in the lives of his subjects that he would leave an indelible mark
> on their memories, but why and how should that be the case for his wife and
> young children? His seven kids would have ranged in age from about 13 to 7
> at the time they were scanned. We know that the eldest, Cilinia, died soon
> after being scanned.

It doesn't require an unbridled ego. It seems obvious that absolute 
dictators who survive require absolute devotion of their subjects at all 
times. And they take multi-leveled steps to ensure their subjects are 
reminded of that.

As for why the children? That's a good question. That Typhon permitted 
his children to take part in his terror of Urth implies that he did not 
consider them a threat...he so them as part of his legacy. So his family 
represented a Royal Family of Terror-- Queen Elizabeth II meets Saddam.

> In Typhon's eyes, all of his children were found wanting in some way [snip] Hierax was a psycho who "inherited his father's virile indifference to the physical sensations of others to the point of mania."

Do you think Typhon saw this as a deficiency?

> [snip] Scylla (in Chenille) told her newly appointed prophets (Auk, Dace, Incus) to kill fifty or a hundred children to attract her attention if Kypris made
> another theophany.

It appears that the Whorl gods cannot monitor all behavior at once--but 
the Mainframe is designed to flag sacrifices in front of Sacred Windows 
and monitors based on type...human sacrifices are major flags, large 
human sacrifices are not likely to go unnoticed.

> [snip]
> The Typhons' names were changed when they became digitized entities in
> Mainframe, became gods with as much or more power than they ever had on
> Urth, now over a captive congregation rendered meek and unable to even think
> about opposing them, but that was *after* the first people on the ship had
> been taught how to worship them by burning animals on a sacrificial altar.
> So, again, what really changed when the Cargo was made to forget?

You seem to have answered this question. They were digitized and the 
were gods with the power over their subjects souls as well as their 
minds and bodies. But most importantly, the gods existed on the Whorl 
only. Thus, their identities were not useful for the the Wakers and 
Sleepers to reconstruct their old memories.

> Rigoglio came to realize that some of his memories were false. If you want
> to argue that his memory of the Typhons as gods on Urth was false, then that
> directly contradicts the idea that Typhon wanted both sleeping and waking
> Cargo to forget him and his family.

I think you are making this more complicated than necessary.

Pas is a god on the Whorl and Rigoglio is well aware that he was a 
flesh-and-blood entity on Urth. So the gods walked among them on Urth. 
Before being put to sleep, Rigoglio undoubtably was taught and 
conditioned to worship the gods just as the original Wakers were. That 
is why, when he woke, he had the same inclination to worship the Nine as 
did the inhabitants of Viron.
If the Urthlings actually, _religiously_, worshiped the Typhons, why 
teach them new rituals?

Typhon couldn't remove the memory of himself and his family (who even to 
the youngest he had implicated in his terror over his subjects), so he 
chose not to try. Just as Lemur explained. Instead he distorted the memory.

u+16b9

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