do the Hierogrammates care about the megatherians?

Jerry Friedman · 21 May 2011, 05:07 · from 2011-May.txt.gz

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From: jerry_friedman at yahoo.com (Jerry Friedman)
Date: Fri, 20 May 2011 22:07:05 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) do the Hierogrammates *care* about the megatherians?
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> From: James Wynn <crushtv at gmail.com>

...

> Here's the  deal:
> 1)  Abaia is called "Great Beast"
> 2) Megatherian means "of the  great beast(s)" or "like great beast(s)"

Or, in particular, followers or even worshipers of the great beast(s).

> 3) "Megatherian" is not a "different  word". It is the same term in a different 
>language.

Almost the same term.  "Great beast" isn't quite the same as your definitions, 
which I agree with.

> To me, it seems to be  not even much of a puzzle that the 17 Megatherians are 
>names for the powerful  giant aliens that do rule and/or have been ruling Urth.

To me it seems like one speculation, and not the most likely.

> The other options  are that megatherians refers to a line of human rulers that 
>have ruled under  Abaia's authority or a line of human rulers that have 
>fashioned themselves as  being like Abaia or all the undersea powers.

Is there an objection to those options?

> But the various occurrence of '17'  in Ascia and in the Commonwealth simply has 
>to be related.

They don't, though I'd say there's a good chance that they are.

> And I think we have  enough information to put the pieces together:
> 
> There are 17 recognized  "Great Beasts" who are ruling or have ruled Urth.

Part of Urth?  And what makes you say they're ruling?

> The term "Casdroe

(I too mix up "Casdoe" and "Cadroe".)

> of 17  Stones" originates from a time when the 17 alien powers came to Urth and 
>were  actively fighting over territory.

I don't see where you get that idea.

> Ascia's Group of Seventeen was put together  with those Great Beasts in mind. 
>Either the founders originally recognized and  even worshipped all of them or, 
>as Dan'l suggests, each of the original members  represented an alien power (not 
>necessarily 'possessed' them). Now, apparently,  Ascia is wholly dominated by 
>Abaia and Erebus (or perhaps only Erebus's memory).  When the Ascians say "Where 
>the Group of Seventeen sit, there final justice is  done" that refers to a human 
>council.
> 
> Why would people NOT write a  history of the alien powers that have controlled 
>and influenced life on Urth for  millenia?

Because they have no material?  It seems quite possible that people know very 
little of those undersea powers' lives.

> And if you write a history of the activities of a sentient life, then  that is 
>a biography ("The Life of").

Usually a biography called "The Life of" is written when the person's whole life 
is known, from beginning to end.  An example is Suetonius' /Lives of the Twelve 
Caesars/, the title that may have inspired /Lives of the Seventeen 
Megatherians/.  (By the way, that comparison favors your suggestion that the 
megatherians could have been a "line" of rulers over my suggestion that they 
were a "group" of contemporary rulers and yours that they were contemporaneous 
monsters--but I don't think it's conclusive.)

> I think you really have to  understand the literature Severian encounters as 
>having been culled and  translated from ancient literature by persons greatly 
>separated in time,  location, and culture with often very little knowledge of 
>each other. That you  or I would not call an inquiry into the history of a giant 
>sentient sea creature  a biography is irrelevant.

It's that I wouldn't call a biography of a living being a "Life".

It's not an insuperable objection.  Maybe Ultan only gave part of the title, and 
the full one is /Lives of the Seventeen Megatherians from Sprouting to the 
Present Day/.  Maybe, as you say, Blaithmaic's culture differed from ours and 
the ancient Romans' in this way.

As I see it, all that your arguments prove is that your version is 
self-consistent and explains everything.  I agree aside from Cadroe, though I 
think there are minor objections.  But I also think the idea that the 17 
megatherians were human rulers of Ascia is self-consistent and explains 
everything aside from Cadroe, and I don't see any objections.  At this point, I 
think they're both speculations, and we can have our favorite, but I don't see 
how we can say one is right and the other is wrong.  And  maybe there are other 
explanations as well.

> Wolfe is twisting our expectations of language to  give the sense of the eons 
>before Severian's birth.

Unless he's using our expectations to communicate.

> I've tried to argue  this before in the case of The Story of Frog. I think it 
>is really key. Some guy  (somewhere along the line in the Asian subcontinient) 
>is researching  the  story of Frog (Ymir) and says "Look, the story of the Ymir 
>(king = raja = frog)  is the same as this other old story of 'Romulus' that I 
>found. They just use  different names. His own story doesn't mention Raja's 
>mother's name so he uses  Romulus's "Rhea Silvia". He has two names now for 
>Raja's father, so he calls him  "Mars-Typhon" just as the Greeks and the Romans 
>used to combine the names of  foreign gods with their own when they considered 
>them equivalent. Later, another  translator performs some speculative philology 
>and translates the parents names  as "Bird of the Woods" and "Spring Wind". 
>"Raja" gets named Frog. And with that  designation, a new wholly different 
>translator says "Look! this old story 'The  Jungle Book' is actually a 
>mythologized tale of the life this fellow  "Frog".
> 
> Anyway, so it seems to  me.

All of it seems possible to me, but I suspect that whichever of those Wolfe had 
in mind, they were more playing with words than an attempt to create a story of 
scholarship that readers could reconstruct.

Jerry Friedman

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