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

[Gerry Quinn]

From: "James Wynn" <crushtv at gmail.com>

>>> James wrote:
>>> Gerry, I think your responses to Lee's points were argumentative without 
>>> touching on
>>> the point he is making.
>>   Jerry:
>> Quite different from my impression.
>
> I think it was this that sort of irked me:
>
>> Gerry:
>> Megatherian = a large extinct ground sloth.  Doesn't tell us much
>> IMO.  And surely any gigantic evil-intentioned sea monster might
>> reasonably be called "Great Beast".  While I don't see him being
>> called "Ground Sloth"!
>
> So should we assume that "The Lives of the 17 Megatherians" refers to 17 
> very famous giant sloths?

Okay... but my other points were all pretty cogent!


> Here's the deal:
> 1)  Abaia is called "Great Beast"
> 2) Megatherian means "of the great beast(s)" or "like great beast(s)"
> 3) "Megatherian" is not a "different word". It is the same term in a 
> different language.

You can't really identify them so exactly.  No one term or word means just 
one thing, so you simply can't have the same connection as if it were the 
same word in the same language.  Even with very simple words like 'black' 
and 'noir' only the simplest meaning is exactly the same.  With a compound 
words that refers to some attributes of a certain entity... they are not the 
same at all.  You can postulate a connection, but it can be *nowhere* near 
as strong as if Abaia were referred to anywhere as a megatherian.


> To me, it seems to be not even much of a puzzle that the 17 Megatherians 
> are names for the powerful giant aliens that do rule and/or have been 
> ruling Urth.
>
> The other options are that megatherians refers to a line of human rulers 
> that have ruled under Abaia's authority or a line of human rulers that 
> have fashioned themselves as being like Abaia or all the undersea powers. 
> But the various occurrence of '17' in Ascia and in the Commonwealth simply 
> has to be related. And I think we have enough information to put the 
> pieces together:

Come on... an ancient library in an ancient world has a history of the 
seventeen megatherians.  There are lots of options!  They might have been 
musicians of the last and largest heavy metal band.  They might have been a 
cult consciously modelling themselves on huge ground sloths.  They might 
have been rulers of some unknown polity.  Even in our cycle, there was one 
reasonably well-known individual who referred to himself as 'The Great 
Beast'.

The various '17's are odd, I agree.  But the problem is, they certainly 
can't all be the same thing, and they do not have obvious connections 
either.


> There are 17 recognized "Great Beasts" who are ruling or have ruled Urth.

Maybe.  There's no evidence from the book title that they ruled Urth, but 
it's possible.


>  The term "Casdroe of 17 Stones" originates from a time when the 17 alien 
> powers came to Urth and were actively fighting over territory.

I don't buy this at all.  Casdoe is an ordinary name (one of the few 
repeated names in the texts I think).  The cognomen 'of the seventeen 
stones' sounds much more like the name of an individual rather than a family 
surname.  And Casdoe is apparently young enough to fight with an avern. 
Seriously, I find it a great stretch to make a connection here.  Even if we 
suppose your theory is true, how could the name arise?  One thought is that 
there was some kind of conference between the monsters to decide the 
territory of each monster after they conquered the Urthlings, and syymbolic 
stones were somehow involved, and Casdoe's family came from the place where 
the stones were - but even this fails.  The monsters never ruled the 
Commonwealth - and if they had a conference it would be in the ocean depths!


> Ascia's Group of Seventeen was put together with those Great Beasts in 
> mind. Either the founders originally recognized and even worshipped all of 
> them or, as Dan'l suggests, each of the original members represented an 
> alien power (not necessarily 'possessed' them). Now, apparently, Ascia is 
> wholly dominated by Abaia and Erebus (or perhaps only Erebus's memory). 
> When the Ascians say "Where the Group of Seventeen sit, there final 
> justice is done" that refers to a human council.

Again, this depends on (1) there being exactly seventeen sea monsters, and 
(2) their joint - seventeenfold - rule of Ascia.  The first is possible but 
unsupported by the text.  The second is in some contradiction of it.


> Why would people NOT write a history of the alien powers that have 
> controlled and influenced life on Urth for millenia? And if you write a 
> history of the activities of a sentient life, then that is a biography 
> ("The Life of").

I'm okay with that as a reasonable possibility.

> I think you really have to understand the literature Severian encounters 
> as having been culled and translated from ancient literature by persons 
> greatly separated in time, location, and culture with often very little 
> knowledge of each other. That you or I would not call an inquiry into the 
> history of a giant sentient sea creature a biography is irrelevant. Wolfe 
> is twisting our expectations of language to give the sense of the eons 
> before Severian's birth.

I'm okay with this too.  It is an ancient history, and it could just as 
easily have been about sea monsters as rock stars.  The thing is, though, 
people know about the sea monsters.  But they don't ever call them 
megatherians, not in the Commonwealth anyway.   One may somewhere else be 
called a similar thing in another language.


> I've tried to argue this before in the case of The Story of Frog. I think 
> it is really key. Some guy (somewhere along the line in the Asian 
> subcontinient) is researching  the story of Frog (Ymir) and says "Look, 
> the story of the Ymir (king = raja = frog) is the same as this other old 
> story of 'Romulus' that I found. They just use different names. His own 
> story doesn't mention Raja's mother's name so he uses Romulus's "Rhea 
> Silvia". He has two names now for Raja's father, so he calls him 
> "Mars-Typhon" just as the Greeks and the Romans used to combine the names 
> of foreign gods with their own when they considered them equivalent. 
> Later, another translator performs some speculative philology and 
> translates the parents names as "Bird of the Woods" and "Spring Wind". 
> "Raja" gets named Frog. And with that designation, a new wholly different 
> translator says "Look! this old story 'The Jungle Book' is actually a 
> mythologized tale of the life this fellow "Frog".

But when you propose that something like this was intentionally designed 
into the story, don't you need to have some criterion for detecting false 
positives?  I mean, in principle one can make infinitely many random flights 
of fancy based on any text, but not all of them can have been intended, and 
even if unintended meanings may sometimes be better than the intended, we 
must impose some criteria or there is no point in art at all - we might as 
well listen to white noise and see what patterns we create in our heads from 
it...

- Gerry Quinn