Claw = Fang?

Lee Berman · 26 Nov 2012, 15:51 · from 2012-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: Mon, 26 Nov 2012 10:51:27 -0500
Subject: (urth) Claw = Fang?
Message-ID: <SNT123-W36AA93D80A1558ECDC76BACF5F0 at phx.gbl>

>David Stockhoff: Typhon was certainly THE Serpent, but was he A serpent?
>Is Severian something like the thorn of the field raised up to the 
>degree that Typhon/Satan is a raised-up serpent of the field? i.e., the 
>better counterpart to him? Are the two of them hammer and anvil in 
>shaping a more morally advanced humanity?
>I'm just spitballing.

Spitballing may be what we are limited to in a story which jumbles Theseus with the
Monitor and Merrimac and Mowgli with Romulus and Remus and Squanto.

As I see it, mythological Typhon was a potentially world-destroying mandragon, partially 
composed of snakes. His wife was Echidna, a cave-dwelling snake woman whose myth is in a 
direct line to the Roman Cumaean Sybil who is known as one of the earliest harbingers of 
Jesus Christ. This all gets jumbled into BotNS, tossing Alexander and others into the mix
as well.

FWIW, in Long Sun, Quetzal the inhumi, tells Remora (fishy stowaway, also an inhumi?) this story:

>"A-man and Wo-man like rabbits in a garden. The--what do you call them?...The cobra persuaded Wo-man 
>to eat fruit from his tree, miraculous fruit whose taste conferred wisdom...It is all in the Writings. 
>Or nearly all. A god called Ah Lah barred Wo-man and her husband from the garden...We seem to have lost 
>sight of Ah Lah, by the way. I can't recall a single sacrifice to him. No one ever asks why the cobra 
>wanted Wo-man to eat his fruit...In order that she would climb this tree, Patera. The man likewise. 
>Their story's not over because they haven't climbed down." 

So, in this Eden story we have a plant (tree) and serpent as featured players. Somehow related to the 
Claw of the Conciliator? This story certainly presages Green, a planet of trees and parasitic reptilian
beings. What might Wolfe's cryptic note to Marc, "GREEN is Urth" mean in an Edenic context?

Dr. Talos' play also features the Eden story and the serpent appears to be represented by a fanged, busty, 
red-haired demoness named Jahi. Then in Short Sun we have an inhuma named Jahlee. Somehow it all has
to be related but perhaps we were never meant to connect it all in a coherent, structured fashion.
Perhaps, as David suggests, intuitive mythological spitballing is all Wolfe intended us to grasp from 
these connections.

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