Astral travel vs. possession

Adam Stephanides · 18 Feb 2001, 20:30 · from whorl-v0012.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: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Subject: (whorl) Astral travel vs. possession
Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2001 20:30:40
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0287 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0012/0287.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

on 2/18/01 12:32 PM, Endymion9 at endymion9 at mindspring.com wrote:

> I'm assuming the Neighbors could astral travel without any assistance, hu=
man
> or inhumi.  My next assumption is that the inhumi have learned to astral
> travel but only with the assistance of a Neighbor or human.

IIRC, it is Silkhorn specifically who has the power to astral travel,
although only in the company of an inhumu/a.  Since the Neighbors probably
gave him this ability, presumably they can do it too, but I don't recall it
being explicitly stated.  I don't think the inhumi have the ability apart
from Silkhorn.  On the other hand, apparently the inhumi do have the power
of possession, although I don't recall this being mentioned before RTTW.

> And I'm not sure if I'm confusing astral travel with possession.  What
> exactly is the difference.  Is possession just astral traveling into some=
one
> else?

In possession, the possessor's mind takes over someone else's body
temporarily.  In astral travel, the travellers appear in a faraway place in
a separate "astral" body.  (At least, that's how it is in TBOTSS.)

--Adam

*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.
*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.moonmilk.com/whorl/
*To leave the list, send "unsubscribe" to whorl-request at lists.best.com
*If it's Wolfe but not Long Sun, please use the URTH list: urth at lists.best.=
com

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