(urth) do the Hierogrammates *care* about the megatherians?

[David Stockhoff]

I failed to complete a thought in the below. I'll answer a question with 
a question:

Q: Why are there 17 Megatherians and 17 Ascians in their ruling Group? 
Are they the same?

A: Why are there 12 Apostles and 12 Caesars? Are they the same?



On 5/22/2011 9:25 AM, David Stockhoff wrote:
>
> On 5/21/2011 8:52 PM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
>> I think we'll have to disagree about what "Lives of" could mean.
>> Jerry Friedman
>>
> I have my own theory.
>
> I  always assumed that the form of the title "Lives of the 
> Megatherians" was a simple imitation of Butler's "Lives of the 
> Saints." Based on this, one would think that the Beasts are the 
> opposite of saints in a world even more fallen than our own: human 
> beings who are evil rather than saintly, and who are in some sense 
> "exalted" by their evil, thus deserving such treatment. But the saints 
> are not numbered. And we don't know from this what evil the Beasts did 
> except that it must have been great.
>
> Upon googling, I found that another precedent is Suetonius' "Lives of 
> the Twelve Caesars"---which I always knew as simply "The Twelve 
> Caesars." This example introduces (1) number (but a nice round 
> "complete" and "lucky" number) and (2) long-past imperial status (and 
> even godly status, at least since Augustus).
>
> If "Lives of the Megatherians" is the kind of significant joke we 
> expect from Wolfe, and it plays off both these titles, then the 
> Megatherians must be (a) twisted, "unholy" perversions of saints (b) 
> past rulers known to everyone (c) human or at least semi-human, 
> because this is common to both books.
>
> This last point is key: humans are evil because they choose to be; 
> evil monsters are evil simply because we say so, or because they were 
> made that way---they don't make a choice to be evil. Therefore, no 
> one---writer or reader---would care about the "life" of Cthulhu, 
> because all he ever did was eat and sleep, and more knowledge of his 
> life would just make him more human.
>
> My vote is for Typhon as the sole Megatherian given a name by Wolfe. I 
> believe the Megatherians to be otherwise lost to history the same way 
> Severian knows nothing of the Caesars or the Good Caliphs or any other 
> king list from our time. I believe they are meant to indicate a long 
> and dark future political history of Earth/Urth, something on the 
> scale (and containing the horror) of the Beast of Revelations arising 
> many times over without any relief from a divine being or an End 
> Times. Perhaps Typhon himself was the last of these rulers.
>
> I don't see anything to connect the Beasts with Ascia or Abaia except 
> the number 17, and again I think the whole significance of "17" is 
> that it is not "12." It is the thematic opposite of 12. 12 is the 
> "complete" number because it is highly divisible. 17 is "very" prime, 
> i.e., highly indivisible.
>
>
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