vanished people=Hieros

Gerry Quinn · 07 Nov 2011, 13:24 · 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: gerry at bindweed.com (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Mon, 7 Nov 2011 13:24:53 -0000
Subject: (urth) vanished people=Hieros
In-Reply-To: <4EB7471F.4020802 at clueland.com>
References: <CAMwAopR2YmGG7+PD8NKxeQUoXor5C2je51kuPZXexjnDZ93Y2g at mail.gmail.com>
	<4EB7471F.4020802 at clueland.com>
Message-ID: <692EFBFC17E744D490BDA6EF7CBA2E4B@Rover>



From: Jeff Wilson 
Restored for context:
[Nick Lee wrote:]
> > > > I think The Green Man may actually be Inire, which makes sense as they
> > > > both are known to change shape, 

[Jeff Wilson wrote:]
> > > When do the Green Man or Inire display their shape-changing ability? Are
> > > they attested to do so in the story somewhere?

> > I should have been clearer. It is Vertumnus who is known as a
> > shapechanger, being the god of seasons and change.
> > Inire-the-shapechanger is an old Borski theory. Certainly Inire must
> > have some method of disguise to pass as human, even a short,
> > monkey-faced one.

> Pretending to be a bent, old man works, since most people don't want to 
> see more. This easily affords him the old shaman disguise, since the 
> covered face and the exposed physique is the complement of his Vizier 
> disguise. And being purpose-made to pose as a human, by beings who can 
> make human-appearing beings, eliminates a specific need to shapeshift.

Indeed. 

As for the Green Man, if he has shape changing abilities they are fairly limited, as reading the section in which Severian first encounters him will make obvious.

- Gerry Quinn
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