Baldanders' dream

Gerry Quinn · 22 Aug 2014, 10:59 · from 2014-August.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: Fri, 22 Aug 2014 11:59:20 +0100
Subject: (urth) Baldanders' dream
In-Reply-To: <BLU175-W404F9D67004CE88D8AE0B5CFD30 at phx.gbl>
References: <BLU175-W404F9D67004CE88D8AE0B5CFD30 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <53F72288.7050603 at bindweed.com>


On 21/08/2014 17:20, Lee wrote:
>> Gerry Quinn: Echidna is, but the Cumaean isn't, so it hardly ties the two
>> characters.  Snakes and caves do not an Echidna make.
> I find them to be sufficiently linked. It is to be remembered that the Cumaean
> is the leader of the Witches in BotNS. There is a constellation of traits
> including snakes, witchcraft and caves which link such Greco-Roman female
> mythological characters as Echidna, Lamia, Hecate, the Pythian Oracle and the
> Cumaean Sibyl.

Note the plural in "characters".  It seems to bear out what I said; 
snakes and caves do not uniquely identify a character.

>
>> Besides, she's not necessarily a snake:
>
> "Snake-like" or "snake-associated" would be more accurate descriptors. Mythological
>   Echidna was not a "snake" but she had snakey attributes.
>
>
>
>> She shares no obvious personality characteristics with Echidna.
>
> I'm not sure what "personality characteristics" you might be referring to. But,
> Echidna, in Long Sun, clearly has snakey attributes and was quite notably involved
> in an incident of human sacrifice.
>
> The Cumaean also has snakey attributes and is associated with human sacrifice.
> (Hopefully the connection between human sacrifice and Apu Punchau doesn't need
> to be explained; The Cumaean's "s?ance" is not quite what it seems).
Frankly, it does have to be explained - it is certainly not a direct 
link.  In any case, human sacrifice was not unique to a single god in 
Long Sun.

As for personality characteristics, I mean things like the Cumaean's 
interest in witchcraft and archeology, and Echidna's rather prudish 
interest in the virginity of the priesthood, and her killing of Pas to 
preserve her rule over the Whorl.  They don't seem at all like the same 
person.

> Typhon and Scylla from Long Sun are mentioned in BotNS (and Short Sun). Echidna
> is not mentioned in BotNS by name, but given the combination of cave-dwelling, snake
> association, witchcraft and human sacrifice, I think Wolfe has given us enough
> clues to find her in BotNS. Just my opinion, of course. 		 	

It would take a lot more in the way of 'clues' to convince me that two 
seemingly unrelated characters, who never appear in the same series of 
books, are one and the same.

And as so often, I find myself asking: Why?  What purpose of Wolfe's 
would it serve to make them the same anyway?  Even if you identify them, 
where's the moment you say "ah, that's why the Cumaean did X, in order 
to fulfil Project Y of Echidna's?"

- Gerry Quinn

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