the prime calcula/his citadel and other quotes

Lee Berman · 19 Jan 2011, 15:35 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2011 10:35:08 -0500
Subject: (urth) the prime calcula/his citadel and other quotes
Message-ID: <SNT123-W237A3771E3A4E33C59105CFF60 at phx.gbl>

>James Wynn: Kypris is running around looking for all those bits (like Isis looking for the parts of Osirus).
>So Kypris gets all the bits of Pas and puts them back together, and the starts thrashing his enemies. But 
>just as it was with Osiris, was a bit of him still missing. He was incomplete.

I think the mythological comparison gains relevance if it is clarified that the one who killed and dismembered
Osiris was his brother, Typhon-Set.

In a cognate Greek story, Typhon defeats Zeus by cutting off his "immortal sinews", rendering his body (like
Osiris) as essentially a bag of bones. It is the pastoral gods, Hermes and Pan who trick Typhon into giving
up the sinews, allowing them to restore Zeus to his full strength and ability to defeat Typhon.

I hope the role reversal (it is Typhon/Pas who is dismembered in Mainframe) does not distract anyone from 
the relevance of this Egyptian/Greek myth to Long Sun. It would be like saying Dr. Talos and Baldanders have
no relationship to the Frankenstein story because Baldanders created Talos.

(FWIW, I do not think Wolfe's choice of name for Horn's oldest son as Sinew is unrelated. Gene Wolfe's difficulties
and estrangement from his own oldest son have been reported in interviews)

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