(urth) A new mystery ...
Lane Haygood
lhaygood at gmail.com
Tue Dec 2 16:19:34 PST 2008
The areas of my expertise are limited to law and philosophy. ;) So I've just
about reached the limit of my depth. And my specialization isn't in ancient
Greek philosophy, so I can't tell you all that much about aquastors or
Paracelsus, but Platonic idealism I can. At the very least, the way I read
Wolfe was using Plato is more how Plato was received by the Gnostics and
Neoplatonists, who had a decidedly more systematic and mystic bent to their
Platonism than what I guess we could call "orthodox" Platonism.
Lane
On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 6:16 PM, Jordon Flato <jordonflato at gmail.com> wrote:
> Lane,
> Fabulous stuff. Indeed, the etymology of those terms now seems extremely
> important. It is easy to say now that resurrected Severian is an Eidolon,
> and that this happens to him in the perfect place in the myth.
>
> And your point about Thecla is taken to heart as well.
>
>
> On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 4:11 PM, Lane Haygood <lhaygood at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> The etymology of these words shall help.
>>
>> Eidolon is a Greek philosophical term, denoting the abstract reality of an
>> idea. For Plato, these are the universal Forms, the perfect instantiations
>> of a given idea that all particular instances of are imperfect emanations.
>> Aquastor comes from Paracelsus, an entity formed from thought alone. So an
>> Eidolon is a projection from a higher world (the Platonic world of
>> ideals/Yesod) to a lower world (the physical world/Briah). An aquastor would
>> be a created being formed of pure thought (intention).
>>
>> It's also important to note that Severian only absorbs some of Thecla's
>> memory and personality, but not her consciousness itself. While these
>> things may be in some way linked to the brain, the sense of identity, the
>> self-consciousness and transcendental unity of apperception, is not, and
>> thus, Severian-as-intentional-being never experiences a disconnect between
>> his death(s) and rebirth(s).
>>
>> Lane
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On T
>>
>
>
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