Silk's Cross

David_Lebling · 21 Jan 1997, 10:58 · from whorl-v0002.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: David_Lebling at avid.com
Subject: (whorl) Silk's Cross
Date: Tue, 21 Jan 97 10:58:58
Message-ID: <whorl-v0002-0059 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0002/0059.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

[Posted from Whorl, the mailing list for Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun]

A few minutes with the encyclopedia both illuminates and obscures.
Silk's cross is referred to as a "gammadion," and as a "voided cross."
As it happens, and has been already pointed out, the swastika or
"fylfot" is a gammadion (because it is made up of four gammas). (A
voided cross is one with a hole in the center of it.)

However, there's another definition of a gammadion (from the OED):
"voided greek cross," where the gammas are "back-to-back."=20
Unfortunately, there is no picture. However, a greek cross is one where
the arms of the cross are equal in length (a roman cross, more commonly
seen, has the lower arm longer).

Silk's cross has an "X-shaped void" in it, according to _Nightside_.=20
So, there are several possible looks one could imagine. The only one I
could come up with that matches all the criteria is:

     | |
     | |
_____| |_____
_____   _____
     | |
     | |
     | |

This looks rather like the cross one used to see on German warplanes
(WWI vintage, for example).

It has the problem that the gammas aren't attached to each other, but
that's a small drawback, easily cured by a small connector at the end of
each arm.

     Dave Lebling
     (david_lebling at avid.com)

Questions or problems to whorl-owner 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