Oannes

Lee Berman · 19 Mar 2012, 04:04 · from 2012-March.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: Mon, 19 Mar 2012 00:04:27 -0400
Subject: (urth) Oannes
Message-ID: <SNT123-W37A8FAC722FE3B6DA463F7CF420 at phx.gbl>

>David Stockhoff: SO the Outsider is not the Increate, but a godling?

Like Pig? Argh, surely not so low on the totem pole. Unlike our modern
Christian world where only God and Man exist, the Sun Series seems to 

have a rather well-stocked hierarchy of beings between Man and The Increate.
Size seems to have something to do with one's level. Exultants are taller
than armgers. B, F and O are taller than exultants. Tzadkiel, in full glory,
is taller than B, F and O and is as big as an island in the largest form
we encounter.

Given that The Outsider never incarnates into a material form, I would guess
that he is at a higher level than Tzadkiel. But is the Outsider imbued in
every person and everything, everywhere across all time and all universes? 

I get the sense he is more limited than that (though he has potential).

>>> David Stockhoff: What is it [Jurupari], then? A monstrous mouth? A fish sign..?

>>Summing up the evidence, I think Jurupari is a reference to Abaia

>OK, but what about the sign itself?

Not sure what sign you mean. The sign Agia scratches? Like the chicken for the jungle
sorcerers, I think it is a sign that she is working against the coming of the New Sun.

Do you mean the Christian fish symbol? I think it is no shock to learn that it likely 

has its roots in earlier pagan symbolism. I can imagine that simple wordplay on
"Christ" might not give the symbol the potency it had at the time. An excerpt
from an article on the Christian fish symbol origin:

>In pagan beliefs, Ichthys was the offspring of the ancient Sea goddess Atargatis, and 

>was known in various mythic systems as Tirgata, Aphrodite, Pelagia, or Delphine. The word 

>also meant "womb" and "dolphin" in some tongues, and representations of this appeared in 

>the depiction of mermaids. 

The fish symbol probably also is derived from symbols for an Oannes cognate god, Dagon,
 a Philistine deity who is half-man, half-fish. Also: 

>The fish also appears in another sacred iconograph, the Avatars of Vishnu, where the deity 

>"is represented as emerging from the mouth of a fish, and being a fish himself; the legend 

>being that he was to be the Saviour of the world in a deluge which was to follow..."

In writing the Sun Series I suspect Wolfe was aware of all this. Severian replaces Abaia,
He is the new Oannes...etc.

>>I have suggested that the God of the OT seems to be rather pagan by our modern Christian
>> standards.

>I'm not sure what this means.

I mean the God of the OT recognizes the existence of rival gods, seems to have human emotions
and faults, demands burnt offering sacrifices, toys with the idea of human sacrifice, is 

tolerant even approving of polygamy, engages in genocide of innocents if they are Hebrew

enemies, etc. He isn't much like the God most Christians know and love today. He is more like 

all the other gods of His time. His main distinction (as I see it) is that He is One God 

(allowing him to avoid the sin of incest committed by all the other pagan pantheons).

>Does "gnostic" mean "fearful and suspicious of the demiurge" 

I've been using the word gnostic in the broader sense for a couple years here but I suppose I
still need to qualify it now and then. I mean it to refer to the broad swath of religious beliefs 

which came to exist in the time period between Alexander and Christ. Alexander's empire allowed 

the blending and cross-polination of eastern and western religion and mythology to happen. Judaism
 may have been something of an oasis in the midst of it but, of course, it was not unaffected.

There are Wiccan and satanic cults today which practice some of such pre-christian beliefs 

and rituals. (remember the Wolfe quote, "you could tell me that witches don't exist, but I could
show you one").

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