Oldest altar

James Wynn · 07 Oct 2010, 14:45 · from 2010-October.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: Thu, 07 Oct 2010 09:45:17 -0500
Subject: (urth) Oldest altar
In-Reply-To: <002701cb65d8$20d59280$1ad34a0c@rclackey>
References: <001d01cb5172$d6967fa0$9bd14a0c@rclackey><4C8E5FF5.1060109 at gmail.com><003101cb53c3$556e2100$b5cf4a0c@rclackey><4C8FA25B.5040409 at gmail.com><AANLkTimV+bT905WiZycaGhxABTwfucr+k25sGQej0Ek1 at mail.gmail.com><AANLkTinfbAbDcDFvY8kCAQmXW1-brU_y1Ls7-qGDszmf at mail.gmail.com><4C8FAF65.7000505 at gmail.com><AANLkTinx6ybGTS-OkacbWqjWATesWysOGYQjLq4fL_OV at mail.gmail.com><009b01cb5490$5be13220$82d14a0c@rclackey><4C90DF4F.4020301 at gmail.com><004701cb550a$305e2020$2fd34a0c@rclackey><AANLkTikBbS=RUA4CarJ3UxAnnVkyWsKkKt5TTnBFgbGD at mail.gmail.com><006201cb55d5$a173b1a0$aecc4a0c@rclackey><AANLkTikvv+SzCbm2ic_rV6VjotyCfnxGjCy3G4RpVoZQ at mail.gmail.com><4C929176.2010302 at gmail.com><004a01cb651e$6af42300$37d14a0c@rclackey>	<AANLkTinMJ+o6bu1G9z2XA3g+8vo2iE6E4YBauG=rUwve at mail.gmail.com>
	<002701cb65d8$20d59280$1ad34a0c@rclackey>
Message-ID: <4CADDCFD.8000103 at gmail.com>

> Roy-
> 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?

I would suppose (for supposition is all we have, I think) that when 
Rigoglio thought of the Typhons, he thought of their monstrous versions 
in the Whorl. And though he retained the memory that they were flesh and 
blood on Urth, he had also been artificially conditioned (prior to being 
put to sleep) to think of them as gods deserving of worship. It's not at 
all unlikely that he had _some_ surviving memories of their corporal 
forms. But those memories took a less pre-eminent place in his mind than 
their Whorl forms (just as Silk no doubt sometimes --in the years 
following the Exodus-- thought of Kypris as looking something like 
Chenille and Auk thought of Chenille as being something like Kypris).

This would cause psychological tension and confusion, but it is the sort 
tension between education, belief, and intuition that the human mind 
tolerates all the time.

u+16b9

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