Typhon and Severian

James Wynn · 10 Mar 2003, 15:31 · from urth-v0303.mbox · original

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: "James Wynn" <crushtv at HotPOP.com>
Subject: RE: (urth) Typhon and Severian
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 09:31:48 -0600
Message-ID: <urth-v0303-3047 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0303/3047.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Don postulates:
The only certainty is that Dorcas is Ouen's mother.  Ouen denies ever
impregnating Katherine, and the only evidence that Ouen could be Severian's
father is that they look strikingly similar in profile. (Sword and Citadel,
p 402).  This is hardly compelling.  In addition, it is thematically weak.
If Dorcas is Severian's grandmother then he is committing incest in a manner
that makes no sense mythopoeicly.  The incest only makes sense if she is his
sister or his mother.   Equally, the archetypes clinging to Severian's
character point in a different direction.  Ouen makes a much stronger
adoptive father in the vein of Joseph the carpenter, or Sir Hector...

Crush tries to speed Don on his way:
Mythopoetically speaking, (if it is applicable here) Dorcas should be
Severian's mother AND sister (as Isis was to Horus).

I'm not sure I see how Ouen works as Hector or Joseph. Malrubius works
better in this role.

Having not read 'King Jesus' my problems with the
Herod-Jesus/Typhon-Severian analogy is mythopoetic:
I do agree that Typhon takes the thematic role of Herod at times - I haven't
decided with Typhon's meeting with Severian in 'Urth of the New Sun' more
closely parallels Herod and Jesus or Herod and John the Baptist.

According to Wolfe, tBotNS is a toying with Sun symbolism. So Severian would
be expected to parallel Jesus to some extent as the 'Sun of Righteousness'
(Malachi 4:2). But how is Severian, as a Sun symbol, a son of Typhon?
According to Graves, Typhon is Set. And both are the dragon that devours
(kills) the Sun during an eclipse and is killed by Horus. Graves also
associates Typhon with the Python of Hera, whom Apollo simultaneously kills
and appropriates as his servant in prophecy.

So whether one views Severian as Osirus or Horus or Apollo, how is he
mythopoetically a son, heir, or descendent of Typhon? Perhaps Graves
justified this association in 'King Jesus'?

* Crush

--=20

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