do the Hierogrammates care about the megatherians?

Jerry Friedman · 23 May 2011, 04:43 · from 2011-May.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: jerry_friedman at yahoo.com (Jerry Friedman)
Date: Sun, 22 May 2011 21:43:14 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) do the Hierogrammates *care* about the megatherians?
In-Reply-To: <4DD98E28.1030403 at verizon.net>
References: <SNT123-W220B7E3214FF82B9BAC2DDCF710 at phx.gbl>
	<AE83B76DDD3A4DCCB4C28DABF86BA1B5@jill>
	<4DD6C327.5090406 at gmail.com>
	<535089.18349.qm at web114704.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
	<4DD6EBE4.5000407 at gmail.com>
	<630092.30979.qm at web114707.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
	<4DD74F67.8000504 at gmail.com>
	<299575.42228.qm at web114711.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
	<4DD90ECE.4010607 at verizon.net>
	<404096.12922.qm at web114710.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
	<4DD98E28.1030403 at verizon.net>
Message-ID: <646642.46492.qm at web114701.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>

> From: Ant?nio Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com>
> No dia 22/05/2011, ?s 20:55, Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com>  
>escreveu:
> 
> > I have to say there is another 
> > connection that  people have stressed: Severian calls Abaia a "great beast", 

> >  "megatherians" means entities connected to the great beast(s) somehow, and 
> > Father Inire says the Ascians are the "slaves of Abaia".

I keep saying that, but saying it doesn't make it true.  He refers to  the 
attacks from Ascia as "Abaia's incursions".  Still, Abaia seems to  rule Ascia, 
which is what's needed for the connection.

> > That  makes it 
> > considerably more likely that the two 17s are  connected
> 
> The part where that argument doesn't work is where there is no  evidence at all 
>that the great beasts are 17, and in fact that looks like an  impossibly large 
>number for us to only hear about two. 
>

No, you're rebutting other people's argument.  I'm the one saying the 17 
megatherians might be the Group of 17.

By the way, LU says we know about four giant enemies of the New Sun, though 
Arioch and Scylla are mentioned only once each.

> From: David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>

> On 5/22/2011 3:55 PM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
> >> From: David  Stockhoff<dstockhoff at verizon.net>
> >  ...
> >
> >> I  have my own theory.
> >>
> >>  I  always assumed that the form of the title  "Lives of the  Megatherians" 
>was a
> >> simple imitation of Butler's "Lives of the   Saints." Based on this, one 
>would
> >> think that the Beasts are the  opposite of  saints in a world even more 
>fallen
> >> than our own:  human beings who are evil  rather than saintly, and who are 
>in
> >>  some sense "exalted" by their evil, thus  deserving such treatment. But  
>the
> >> saints are not numbered. And we don't know  from this what  evil the Beasts 
>did
> >> except that it must have been   great.
> >>
> >> Upon googling, I found that another precedent is  Suetonius' "Lives  of the
> >> Twelve Caesars"---which I always knew  as simply "The Twelve Caesars."
> > ...
> >
> > Wikipedia says the  original title was De vita Caesarum, with no number.
> Even better.
> >>  I don't see anything to connect the Beasts with Ascia or  Abaia except  
the
> >> number 17, and again I think the whole significance of "17"  is  that it is 
>not
> >> "12." It is the thematic opposite of 12. 12  is the "complete"  number 
>because it
> >> is highly divisible. 17 is  "very" prime, i.e., highly  indivisible.
> > I think that may be part  of it, though 17 is no more prime than 13 or 19.
> >
> > [added  later]
> 
> Depends how you look at it. There are patterns among primes that I  don't 
> pretend to understand. But some primes may be rarer than  others.
...

I see you meant that some have rarer properties than others.

> > Also, this is  fiction,
> > not history.  I don't think Wolfe anticipated what  significance readers 
>would
> > find in every tiny detail, but this one seems  to have a good chance of 
being
> > purposeful.
> 
> I agree this is  fiction, and that is my point. My theory is derived 100% 
> from available  books. Not history. Mine is a literary argument, not a 
> historical  one.
>
> I think the connection you describe is speculation and must remain  so.

I agree.  However, the speculative connection I described is entirely from the 
books.  The one you described also involves history (Butler's /Lives of the 
Saints/, Suetonius' /On the Lives of the Caesars/--or is that what you meant by 
"available books"?).

Jerry Friedman

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