Appearance of the Gods

Gerry Quinn · 19 Jan 2011, 14:07 · from 2011-January.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: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2011 14:07:42 -0000
Subject: (urth) Appearance of the Gods
References: <SNT123-w32DBBB4ADC50302B661EAECFF60 at phx.gbl>
	<4D36EA07.5080506 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <BA1A273EAF1B49AC8DA3F1CBC7D7EBFE@jill>


From: "James Wynn" <crushtv at gmail.com>

>> Lee Berman-
>> Pas appears as two-headed
>> in the window. Kypris is a beauty. Echidna is snake-haired I think. 
>> Scylla, snakey too?
>>
>> So my question is, why? Why do they look like that? I don't have a clear 
>> answer in mind so I
>> was interested in the opinions of others.
>
> Are you looking for practical reasons? I'm not sure there are any.
> To some extent, they draw their appearance from monsters whose name they 
> bear, but not especially. To a large extent, there's a tip of the hat to 
> the Olympians they parallel. As as demonic version of Hera, Echidna is 
> associated with the Python that encircles the Earth. Molpe, the demonic 
> Athene, is crazy as opposed to wise and is more a version of the gorgon 
> whose stretched out face embellished Athene's shield. Scylla is the 
> demonic Poseidon and very similar to the Storm King. Actually, Scylla 
> _does_ have a practical reason for her looks. She's a follower of the 
> Megatherian Scylla, and I guess chooses her appearance based on that.

Tartaros tells Auk that their appearances are the self-images of the gods. 
He gives the specific example of Kypris:

"You say that you could nearly make out the face of my father's concubine. 
The face you nearly saw was her own image of herself as she imagines that 
self to appear.  I feel confident that it was a beautiful face.  I have 
never met any woman more secure in her own vanity."


- Gerry Quinn

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