(urth) Resurrections

[Jeff Wilson]

On 7/31/2010 1:27 PM, David Stockhoff wrote:
> What's the reference to Joseph's dream?

In URTH XXXVIII, while Severian is also a seer imprisoned by the 
authorities, there is a literal biblical reference to it, immediately 
followed by a dream with Revelations imagery, or maybe Peter's:

"In those moments I knew my power, that could draw whole worlds to me 
and incremate them as an artist burns his earths for pigments. In the 
brown book, now lost, that I carried and read so long that at last I had 
committed to memory its whole contents (though they had once seemed 
inexhaustible) there is this passage: 'Behold, I have dreamed a dream 
more; the sun and the moon and eleven stars made obeisance to me.' Its 
words show plainly how much wiser the peoples of ages long past were 
than we are now; not for nothing is that book titled The Book of the 
Wonders of Urth and Sky.
"I too dreamed a dream. I dreamed that I called the power of my star 
down upon myself, and rising, crossed (Thecla as well as Severian) to 
our barred door, and grasping its bars, bent them until we could easily 
have passed between them. But when we bent them it seemed we parted a 
curtain, and beyond it beheld a second curtain and Tzadkiel, neither 
larger than ourselves nor smaller, with the dirk afire. "

> And who is the Old Leech everyone is talking about?

He appears early in CITADEL XXVI; while treating Severian for his 
injuries at the ziggurat, he mentions being from Nessus and seems to be 
a medical researcher ministering to the rebels' steady supply of trauma 
cases presumably for the opportunity to experiment on the otherwise 
hopeless patients. Maybe some not so hopeless, since he seems to have 
produced a boy that can be used to transfuse a full-gown man and recover 
in a day or less. Mantis seems to think it's possible he sacrifices 
children for for ritual benefit.

He's really old, and might be an Inire disguise except that in XXIX an 
old, bent and deformed shaman in a mask with a monkey-headed staff shows 
up in the same precession at the same time, and who appears to be the 
person Severian is thinking of later when he tells Rudesind he knows his 
master was with him in the jungle.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
IEEE Student Chapter Blog at
< http://ieeetamut.org >