(urth) Tzadkiel and Severian and the Holy Trinity

[Cliff Judge]

Where I am in my re-read of UotNS, it is clear that Tzadkiel is the ship
itself and when the sailors refer to "the Captain" they mean the disembodied
voice that speaks in their heads and that Severian has a conversation with
at one point, I believe after he comes back from the dead when Sidero pulls
his unconscious body out and, as it is implied, bangs him on the noggin hard
enough to kill him.

I found myself intrigued by that conversation - Tzadkiel was asking him if
he would fight for him, and Severian kept calling Tzadkiel "Master."

We also know that, though mortals beleive that there are many such ships as
Tzadkiel, most sailors seem to understand that, as impossible as it seems,
there is only one ship, and she may well be infinite. Presumably she would
have to be infinite inside (logically, eventually people would run into each
other no matter how big the ship was otherwise, and there is also the
statement "there were many more than seven holds.")

Thinking about the idea that Severian is a Christ-figure, could Tzadkiel be
a sort of God figure? Or perhaps there is a trinity at work here, Severian,
Zak, and the ship as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? I confess to being an
ex-Catholic who didn't pay enough attention to his Catechism to know what
else to look for to verify this. Or even who is who.

I don't know exactly why, but I felt that, when Severian lies dead and the
first-person narrator is suddenly somebody other than Severian, saying how
"I was going to tell him what he must do (find another? or something else?)
but he was cold and dead," to seem to blur the distinction between Severian
and Tzadkiel. There may not be a strong link there, might just be my
imagination.

Then of course during the initial part of the judgment ceremony we have
Tzadkiel being more like Christ and Severian being more like God the Father
- Tzadkiel is a proxy, led in chains to a rock where there is a loop with a
sliding link. Along the way, Severian steps into his role of Torturer with a
little judo action, then suddenly takes his place.

I'm going to digress for a moment because this isn't coming together as
coherently as I had hoped when I started writing it. But at the end we do
have the ship blotting out the sun to legitimize Apu-Punchau's divinity.
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