Five Severians -- Severian-as-Clone

Lee · 20 Dec 2013, 16:35 · from 2013-December.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee)
Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2013 11:35:01 -0500
Subject: (urth) Five Severians -- Severian-as-Clone
Message-ID: <BLU175-W3C63ABED3D0A3FB574480CFC40 at phx.gbl>

I have not seen in the speculations on the Mausoleum and Severian as
a clone is a mention of the end of RTTW, in which SilkHorn and his retinue
travel to Urth and end up in the Necropolis and in a mausoleum (not
Severian's) to inter the remains of the girl Cilinia.

Cilinia is associated with Scylla of the Whorl and also to Great
Scylla, the giant sea creature with female buds on her back, each wearing 
an "abaia".

I find the Urth scenes in RTTW to function as the final Urth of the New Sun,
written to give us hints to mysteries in the previous story that nobody has
solved. So I think Scylla/Cilinia's mausoleum scene is meant to tell us
something important.

My guess is that it tells us that Severian has an ancestry similar to Scylla's
in some way. Somehow, someway he is, at least partially, a product of the 
process that produced these giant, alien sea creatures and and electronic gods
of the Whorl.

Severian is a Hero. And the BotNS is modelled to a degree on the mythological
tales of epic heroes. I find that Severian, like Heracles, Perseus, Theseus, etc. 
is a guy who grows up thinking he is human, but secretly has "divine" parentage.
He finds himself to have superhuman powers and miraculously able to live
through anything (even death). He is inexplicably risen to power and ends up
interacting with the highest of beings across time and universes, and in the 
end finds himself to be worshipped as a god.

Thus when the question of cloning Severian comes up, I suspect the answer, (as
we see for the creation of his eidolons) will not be the same laboratory process
that we might expect for the usual cloning of normal human beings.

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