(urth) vanished people=Hieros

[James Wynn]

On 11/10/2011 8:59 AM, Marc Aramini wrote:
> The passage of time makes it difficult to imagine that the long sun 
> whorl didn't go somehwere, unless it's not 300 but 3000 years as the 
> lost digit in Maytera's ruminations might hint at - not enough 
> information. It seems to have gone somewhere. I always saw it as an 
> ark, too.

(I have a question at the end Marc)

If the Whorl is made to travel at nearly the speed of light, it doesn't 
matter how long the Cargo has been sailing. The relative time of the 
trip is expended speeding up and slowing down. The Time traveling at 
nearly the speed of light is nearly zero.

If the time traveling is 3000 years, that's still not long enough for 
nature alone to cause the dramatic changes we see in Blue and Green. No 
Lune (if Blue is Verthandi). The humanity Severian meets in Ushas (in 
which he and the survivors have become myth) are replaced by or evolved 
into Neighbors.

Considering how blue Ushas is at the end of Urth of the New Sun, Wolfe 
is seriously covering his tracks to have hid those oceans in a morass of 
jungles.

That's not an argument against the Green Urth theory. I'm just saying 
that the non-relative length of time between Typhon in the Age of Myth 
and the Whorl's arrival at Green is probably a dead-end.

Question: Wouldn't the Green Urth theory be easier if Green were in 
Urth's very distant past? That would argue that the Dionysus references 
are a clue to how the myth got there in the first place?*~  I understand 
that you want the City of the Inhumi to be Nessus but the clues are not 
overwhelming. Perhaps the Rajan's seeming parallel description of the 
city and Nessus was only an implied connection because they are both 
cities on the same planet or coincidentally at the same place.

*~ A Greek mythographer (I don't remember which one) attested that 
although Dionysus as the "newest" of the Olympians, he was actually much 
older...maybe the oldest of the gods.

J.