Oldest altar

Roy C. Lackey · 07 Oct 2010, 04:28 · from 2010-October.txt.gz

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From: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2010 23:28:38 -0500
Subject: (urth) Oldest altar
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Ant?nio Marques quoted and wrote:
> > The Duko admonished Silkhorn, saying "You failed
> > repeatedly to honor the gods as is their right." "You wakers on the
_Whorl_.
> > In Nessus the gods walked among us, lords and ladies of Urth, even unto
> > Shining Pas." (217)
> >
> > Note the plural, gods, flesh-and-blood entities seen by the public in
> > Nessus. By Pas he means Typhon, the man with a single head. As I have
said
> > before, I don't care what religion(s) had been practiced during Typhon's
> > reign or what the state religion may have been. But Rigoglio claimed
that
> > the Typhons had been regarded as gods on Urth, and that helps to explain
> > some of the outrageous behavior attributed to them that I outlined
above,
> > and the sense of fear felt by people who had known them on Urth; gods
can
> > get away with anything, so long as they have the power.
>
> That's not how I read it (that the Typhons had been regarded as gods
> on Urth). Rather, the people he [now] knows as gods walked among him
> and others on Urth. Just as he doesn't remeber their names, he doesn't
> remember their role at the time; wakers take them as gods, so gods it
> is. Mamelta - who didn't have years after her awakening to come to
> regard the wakers' culture as more reliable than her own (a point
> Rigoglio stresses) - doesn't seem to regard Typhon as a god, but as a
> conqueror. Now, it isn't impossible that a god appears as a conqueror,
> but somehow it doesn't look like that to me in her discourse.

Rigoglio had never been exposed to the gods-in-the-machine on the ship, and
the gods could not follow the colonists to Blue. Even if he just gave
lip-service to the ship's gods, just went along to get along on Blue, how
could he recognize the two-headed freak the colonists spoke of back on the
ship as the monarch he had known of on Urth? The people of Urth had known
nothing of the head transplant, and the people on the ship at the time of
the exodus knew nothing at all about Urth. How would he have equated the
girl Cilinia on Urth with the tentacled being the people from the ship had
called Scylla?

-Roy

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