vanished people=Hieros

Lee Berman · 07 Nov 2011, 03:23 · from 2011-November.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: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Sun, 6 Nov 2011 22:23:19 -0500
Subject: (urth) vanished people=Hieros
Message-ID: <SNT123-W51A60E538C265DFA4374BECFD90 at phx.gbl>

>Nick Lee: The Green Man is Vertumnus, the "changing one." "Vert" also 

>happens to mean "green."

>I think The Green Man may actually be Inire, which makes sense as they both
>are known to change shape, and that he is trying to influence Severian to
>create a future in which his race evolves from humanity.

A good call Nick. Vertumnus is another rustic Roman nature god joined to the

cadre of Bacchus, Faunus, Fauna, Flora etc. who all seem at least tangentially 

referenced in the Sun Series under the Dionysus umbrella.

I still think that wiccan/pagan carved wooden figure called The Green Man is

also referenced, perhaps under the same umbrella since he is closely associated

with the Great God Pan. A certain carved wooden mask which appears in Long Sun

has been discussed here in regard to that...maybe last winter.

I think your understanding of the Inire character is correct. We see various

versions of....someone in the story. Some seem "good", some seem "evil". But

working together as hammer, anvil and tongs, they forge humanity or at least

drive it (via Severian) along the proper, necessary path.

>Jeff Wilson: When do the Green Man or Inire display their shape-changing ability? 

>Are they attested to do so in the story somewhere?

Since the topic has been discussed at length before, I'll take that as a rhetorical

question not really designed to elicit an answer or reflect a desire for knowledge.

As has been demonstrated in here before, if you don't see the old woman and/or don't

especially want to see her, no painstaking effort to show the lines which create

her image will ever allow her to be seen. 

http://www.askix.com/avav/images/optical_illusions/woman.gif

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