Urth Net

← back to the conversation

Tzadkiel's form

Marc Aramini · 12 Sep 2014, 18:34 · from 2014-September.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: marcaramini at gmail.com (Marc Aramini)
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 11:34:11 -0700
Subject: (urth) Tzadkiel's form
In-Reply-To: <BLU175-W2349B9FD26D1646A44291CCFCD0 at phx.gbl>
References: <BLU175-W2349B9FD26D1646A44291CCFCD0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <CAF1072ww0onQmLk-zf_K7OJy_qBgO-Vj+BeUU7327f9X5dSqVw at mail.gmail.com>

There is a statue of Nox/night in the second chapter of Book of the New Sun
after Juturna casts him out, linking that scene directly with Abaia.
On Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 6:08 AM, Lee <severiansola at hotmail.com> wrote:

> >Daniel Otto Jack Petersen: That's a kind of beautiful theory, Lee
>
>
> Thanks, DOJP. Ship's sails as angel wings does work rather poetically.
> Credit to
>
> Wolfe for that.  I am wondering if this theme of large beings being
> mistaken
>
> (or conflated) with ships might be related to the theme of large,
> fish-monster
>
> mouths being mistaken for caves.
>
>
> >james ford: I was always under the assumption that the tale of the
> naviscaput was
>
> >about Abaia.
>
>
> Yes, I think Severian himself muses on that. But here is an interesting
> consideration:
>
>
> The daughter of the Naviscaput, Noctua, reports that her father had taken
> her mother,
>
> "Night" by force. In Greek mythology, Night or Nyx  is mated with her
> primeval god-
>
> brother Erebus.
>
>
> So maybe the Naviscaput is Erebus instead of Abaia? Given the odd ways
> these giant
>
> creatures can reproduce themselves I'm not sure there is quite the
> distinction between
>
> their identities as there would be for sexually produced, born creatures
> such as ourselves.
>
>
> Also of interest (to me, anyway), one of the mythological offspring of
> Erebus and Nyx is
>
> the boatman of the dead, Charon. I think he makes an appearance in BotNS.
>
>
> >The implication of Tzadkiel and the beasts on Urth sharing a common
> >origin is great and well worth looking into. Why would these monsters, as
> >possible offshoots of the Hierogrammates, work against the coming of the
> >New Sun? What caused the schism? Or is it really as simple as the monsters
> >being "fallen" versions of Tzadkiel?
>
>
> For me, it is a general principle for the whole Sun Series that when Wolfe
> has left gaps
>
> in the story regarding mythologically named beings, that the gaps can
> often be filled by
>
> turning to mythology (or religion, as it were).
>
>
> So in trying to understand the opposition of the megatherians to the New
> Sun I think a
>
> good starting point is to understand why Lucifer and the fallen angels
> mutinied and
>
> opposed God (and Jesus) and left heaven and fell to earth.
>
>
> I used that word because a "mutiny" is the primary storyline we see play
> out while
>
> Severian is on Tzadkiel's Ship. Perhaps we cannot understand Ship politics
> any more
>
> than we can understand heavenly politics in the Bible.  We may have to
> just shrug and
>
> say pride, power and control are the issues and these guys decided they
> would rather
>
> reign on Urth than serve in heaven (metaphor- Ship).
>
>
> We are shown one of the mutineers (jibers) resembling Hethor. Given that
> the "old sailor"
>
>  Hethor, in his urthly ramblings, seems to say that he HAD been a mutineer
> on his vessel,
>
> I think we can safely conclude that Severian does see Hethor on the Ship
> but a younger
>
> version of him, from before they encounter each other on Urth.
>
>
> Given Hethor's mastery of mirrors and monsters, I don't find it a stretch
> that he is
>
> associated with the fallen angels/demons who reside on Urth. My guess is
> that, in parallel
>
> to the Biblical story,  all of the monsters fallen to  Urth originated as
> mutineers from Tzadkiel's
>
> Ship. By name alone, this would include Typhon.
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20140912/05d3c21d/attachment.htm>

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