vanished people=Hieros

Gerry Quinn · 10 Nov 2011, 20:42 · 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: Thu, 10 Nov 2011 20:42:39 -0000
Subject: (urth) vanished people=Hieros
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W6057C1584E69A294B56FD8CFDC0 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W6057C1584E69A294B56FD8CFDC0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <2C33ADFA45E94EEDB23F5E27B16BCAFF@Rover>

From: Lee Berman 

> I think The Hunter is Orion and the Noose of Light is the Big Dipper. The Sultan's
> Tower is just that. A tall structure in Omar Kayaam's field of vision as he gazes
> at the star-spangled early dawn sky. Also could be an astronomy connection. Kayaam
> was an astronomer as well as poet and the Persians used their towers for that purpose.      

It seems to me that the Hunter of the East is more likely to be the dawn Sun, which is in the East (Orion can be in different directions).  Besides, the stars have been put to flight!

The noose of light around the turret would then be the dawn sunshine lighting the top part of a tower (before the sun rises further and lights the rest).  Of course the noose image is necessary to making the Sun a hunter; the two metaphors only work together.

I agree with James that the stone is Venus in the original, though I think Wolfe is referring to the White Fountain.

- Gerry Quinn
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20111110/5bd9bee0/attachment.htm>

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