Typhon's nature

David Stockhoff · 18 Oct 2011, 15:01 · from 2011-October.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2011 11:01:38 -0400
Subject: (urth) Typhon's nature
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On 10/18/2011 10:12 AM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
> From: David Stockhoff<dstockhoff at verizon.net>
>> On 10/17/2011 7:51 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
>>> *From:* David Stockhoff<mailto:dstockhoff at verizon.net>
> ...
>
>>>> Wolfe is already necessarily picking and choosing among disparate
>>>> mythologies. I see Milton's Satan in there plain as day, because Satan
>>>> raped his daughter to produce all the sins of the world. I could go on.
>>> I never heard that myth, and I also don?t know that Typhon raped Cilinia. Maybe he did, but I don?t see it in the book,
>> What am I supposed to say here? Gerry, you need to read more of what Wolfe has read. Milton's Satan is a
>> character in Paradise Lost. I won't cite it further.
> ...
>
> I admit I haven't read Paradise Lost, but I took a quick look at Book 2, lines 740-850 or so, which seemed promising.  I saw where Satan had consensual sex with his daughter, Sin, and got her pregnant.  Death was born (tearing through Sin's entrails) and later raped her, producing monsters.  Does Satan rape her or some other daughter at some other point?
I too must admit I'm a little foggy on that point---I may have conflated 
the rape with the sex and thus skipped a generation. But you get the 
general idea.

This is allegorical in a way I do not expect to find repeated in Long 
Sun. I'm not sure why Death + Sin = monsters, beyond that the whole 
reason Adam and Eve were kicked out of Eden is that they sinned and thus 
found mortality. Cue Pandora and her box. So this is in a sense a recap 
of the apple story with sex as the central act or event.

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