Typhon's nature

David Stockhoff · 18 Oct 2011, 20:19 · from 2011-October.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2011 16:19:05 -0400
Subject: (urth) Typhon's nature
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On 10/18/2011 11:01 AM, David Stockhoff wrote:
> On 10/18/2011 10:12 AM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
>> 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.

Jerry, I'm glad I brought up PL and that you corrected me on the 
passage. Milton is probably the original fantasist (as well as 
propagandist) of English literature. Even a Catholic wouldn't dare to 
ignore him in building a mythology!

Thinking a little further: Echidna's spawn and Sin's spawn seem to be 
roughly parallel---one may even be an imitation of the other---but one 
is based on a clear moral system and the other is not, or at least not 
on one familiar to us.

I'm not sure what Greek monsters really do except entertain us and 
present us with puzzles about the intractability of the struggle of 
human nature vs itself and the unforgiving universe---gods too. Maybe 
the gods were supposed to humble us by depicting exaggerated human 
weakness and simultaneously inflicting always-inventive punishments for 
them.

But what Wolfe appears to have done is synthesize from these and 
possibly other sources to get a mythology that is comprehensive within a 
narrow context, and as well developed as Roman state paganism in 2000 
A.D. It's flexible enough to serve the goal of stability, in terms of 
social engineering, and just moral enough to highlight the inadequacy of 
its morality and ethics. It's ripe for the Outsider to reveal himself to 
and bring down.

(1) Given that assumption, it is not odd to find Tartarus as Typhon's 
son and the unions of Satan + Sin, Sin + Death, and Typhon + Echidna a 
bit blurred.

(2) Typhon of New Sun shows no sign of becoming Pas, but he was a good 
candidate as an exemplary tyrannical Ruler of Worlds. If we take him as 
Archon of whatever plane of existence Urth is in (Puritans used to see 
Satan as almost the jailer/landlord of the filthy world outside church, 
and Death can be seen as the single truly immutable law of the mortal 
plane, hiding the truth of Eternal Life), then it fits for him to have 
created a kind of tapestry of gods to wrap around the colonists and hide 
from them the true nature of the Outsider and the universe.

(3) Even if this pantheon and the society described by Mamelta were not 
fleshed out at the time New Sun was written, my guess is that they were 
at least conceived of. Typhon's "I send my thought" which is so opaquely 
suggestive without this added information becomes much easier to read 
with it. I no longer see any need for Typhon to be a telepathic sport. 
Telepathic, yes, but not in the way I guessed before Long Sun. Purely 
electronic, definitely not, nor purely genetic.

And yes, it does matter! Typhon's mindnet is as close to magic as the 
series gets; it's beyond analysis. His genes are still superior but not 
to the degree that the Mule's would have been. (IIRC, the Mule was 
sterile anyway.)

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