Oldest altar

DAVID STOCKHOFF · 07 Oct 2010, 15:05 · from 2010-October.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (DAVID STOCKHOFF)
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 2010 08:05:08 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Oldest altar
In-Reply-To: <4CADDCFD.8000103 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <363672.67995.qm at web84107.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

In other words, take Rigolio's statement that the gods walked on Urth at face value. For someone with his memories and in his condition, that would be a plain statement of fact, however complicated by other facts.

--- On Thu, 10/7/10, James Wynn <crushtv at gmail.com> wrote:

From: James Wynn <crushtv at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Oldest altar
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Date: Thursday, October 7, 2010, 10:45 AM

> 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
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