Pike's Ghost

Lee Berman · 27 Nov 2011, 17:45 · 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, 27 Nov 2011 12:45:42 -0500
Subject: (urth) Pike's Ghost
Message-ID: <SNT123-W151D650A1B6C93609E14E4CFCD0 at phx.gbl>

>larry miller: I think hes an alien mainly because
>of Wolfes naming strategum and some things that he says to Severian.
>When telling him about his grafting to Piaton he mentions the solar
>decay and says "I should have left then."  I think maybe hes refering
>to escaping back to his homeworld.  His comments about "sending his
>thoughts into far places" are a reference to some psychic abilities he
>has (and I know there are those on here that disagree).  And theres
>Severians initial description of the newly resurrected Monarch.
>"...it was as though one of the monstous constellations of the night
>sky had fallen to Urth and clothed itself in the flesh of humankind."

I think your reasoning is spot on, larry. If Wolfe wanted us to think

of Typhon as a normal, Commonwealthy sort of human he would have been 

given a saint name. Other non-human aliens are given Roman names like

Inire, Cumaean, Barbatus and Famulimus. Alien monsters are given monster 

names from mythology like Abaia, Erebus and Scylla. Why should Typhon not 

follow the same rules?

I think idea makes greater sense if we consider that humanity has been

out in space for a long time at the time of Severian's story. Aliens

may well be mutated, evolved humans in origin.

In my understanding, when Wolfe uses mythological names then leaves gaps

in our knowlege about the characters, the gaps may be filled using 

mythology. Gods, demons and angels could never appear to humans in their 

true form. They always had to assume a human (or animal or other) form to

walk among us. Thus with Typhon. (and Scylla/Cilinia?)

The Mandragora (myth Typhon was a mandragora) is a good clue that Typhon has

human bodies with special abilities cloned for his personality to be downloaded 

into. We see this process continued on The Whorl and that feeds into the idea 

that Silk was a clone of Typhon. I think it makes more sense to think that Silk 

and other special individuals were created so that they might become a receptacle 

for the gods.

Another unmentioned hint that Silk was prepared as a receptacle for Pas

is Typhon's mysterious hair color. We are told the two headed guy has

one dark-haired head and one light-haired head but we aren't told which

is Typhon and which is Piaton. There are clues which can tell us that

Typhon was, in fact, the blonde but why would WOlfe make it such a secret

unless it was supposed to be important? For whatever reason, Typhon/Pas seems

to like inhabiting blond guys.

FWIW, I think the original mystery of the blond/dark hair might have to do

with Typhon's (and Spring Wind's?) association with Alexander The Great. He

was a blonde Macedonian commanding an army with many darker coloured Greeks.

(aside from the parallels of Spring Wind/Typhon to Alexander there is the issue

of Alexander's supposed, claimed godhood which resonates).

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