(urth) Oldest altar

James Wynn crushtv at gmail.com
Thu Oct 7 07:45:17 PDT 2010


> Roy-
> Rigoglio had never been exposed to the gods-in-the-machine on the ship, and
> the gods could not follow the colonists to Blue. Even if he just gave
> lip-service to the ship's gods, just went along to get along on Blue, how
> could he recognize the two-headed freak the colonists spoke of back on the
> ship as the monarch he had known of on Urth? The people of Urth had known
> nothing of the head transplant, and the people on the ship at the time of
> the exodus knew nothing at all about Urth. How would he have equated the
> girl Cilinia on Urth with the tentacled being the people from the ship had
> called Scylla?

I would suppose (for supposition is all we have, I think) that when 
Rigoglio thought of the Typhons, he thought of their monstrous versions 
in the Whorl. And though he retained the memory that they were flesh and 
blood on Urth, he had also been artificially conditioned (prior to being 
put to sleep) to think of them as gods deserving of worship. It's not at 
all unlikely that he had _some_ surviving memories of their corporal 
forms. But those memories took a less pre-eminent place in his mind than 
their Whorl forms (just as Silk no doubt sometimes --in the years 
following the Exodus-- thought of Kypris as looking something like 
Chenille and Auk thought of Chenille as being something like Kypris).

This would cause psychological tension and confusion, but it is the sort 
tension between education, belief, and intuition that the human mind 
tolerates all the time.

u+16b9



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