tincture of Pas

Dan Parmenter · 03 Apr 2001, 15:42 · from whorl-v0012.mbox · original

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From: Dan Parmenter <dan at lec.com>
Subject: (whorl) tincture of Pas
Date: 03 Apr 2001 15:42:38
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0531 at digest.urth.net>
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From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>

> Horn can't be literally saying that Pas is in him, because if he knew that
> Pas was in him, he'd know that Silk was in him, and he doesn't.  Inclito's
> gloss is accurate as far as Horn's conscious meaning goes.  Still, I agree
> that this passage is suggestive of Pas being present in Horn, more so than
> anything anyone else has put forward, though I remain unconvinced.
>=20
> If Pas was downloaded into Horn, it was presumably along with the Divine
> Silk, when Pig got his eye.  So do you hold with mantis that Silk's spirit
> was completely absent from Horn until then (which I'm convinced is wrong)?
> Or do you think that after receiving the Divine Silk Horn had both the hu=
man
> Silk and the Divine Silk in him?

I don't know if it's so cut-and-dried as all that.  I guess I'm on the
side that takes note that in a sense, Horn has had something of Silk
in him since LAKE OF THE LONG SUN, where he mimics Silk.  Remember,
those who imitate the gods may start to become them.  It's very
difficult for me to say when each spirit entered another body and when
it became aware of it.  One of these days I, or someone (probably
Mantis!) will come up with a Short Sun timeline that make help make
some sense of what happened when.

Rostrum writes:

> The passage you quote makes me want to reconsider mantis's theory that the
> Narrator got a download of the god version of Silk at some point (At the
> West Pole?  Via Pig?  During the sacrifice at the manteion?  Talking to
> the monitor on the lander going back to Blue?).  But then we have to start
> thinking about the Narrator as an alloy of multiple versions of Silk (Free
> Live Free?), as well as Horn, Typhon, and who knows who else.

That seems par for the course, with the precedent of Severian, even if
as you point out earlier, it's not quite the same.

Shellac

p.s. Can anyone find the place in the text (I'm pretty sure it's OBW)
where a prophet (Gaonese I think) predicts that Horn will lead three
cities to victory?  Horn denounces him as a charalatan (!)  I thought
that this was very significant the second time I read the series as
further proof of Horn's status as possibly the least reliable Wolfe
narrator of all, but I can't seem to find the place in the text to
triple check on it!

D

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