(urth) vanished people=Hieros

[Marc Aramini]

--- On Sun, 11/6/11, Jeff Wilson <jwilson at clueland.com> wrote:

> From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at clueland.com>
> Subject: Re: (urth) vanished people=Hieros
> To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
> Date: Sunday, November 6, 2011, 7:17 PM
> On 11/6/2011 8:50 PM, Marc Aramini
> wrote:
> > Another thing I wanted to comment on is the scene in
> Urth where Sev looks up and Apheta is peering at him from
> Green[sic].
> > 
> > I'm sure there's SOME cosmological hint there I simply
> have not been equipped to handle; I never paid enough
> attention to the hierogrammates and their tools.
> 
> 
> From the end of Chapter XXII:
> 
> "The sphere was like a wall. At its center, just as I had
> seen it pictured on board, was the ship.
> I have written that I sought to stop. It was difficult, and
> soon I could not resist. It may be that the void held some
> attraction like that of a world. Or perhaps it was only that
> the pressure of the wind on the air held static around me
> was so strong that I was driven forward.
> Or perhaps the ship had some hold upon us both. If I dared,
> I would say that my destiny drew me, yet Gunnie cannot have
> been drawn by the same destiny, though perhaps her quite
> different fate drew her toward the same place. For if it
> were merely the wind, or the insensate hunger of matter for
> matter, why was Apheta not drawn with us?
> I will leave it to you to explain these things. Drawn I
> was, and Gunnie too I saw her flying through the void behind
> me, twisting and whirling as the universe twisted and
> whirled, saw her just as one leaf twirling in a spring storm
> might see another. Somewhere behind or before us, above us
> or below us, was a wide circle of light, spinning,
> frantically spinning, a thing like Lune, if such a thing as
> a moon of the most brilliant white can be imagined. Gunnie
> fluttered across it once or twice before she was lost in the
> diamond-decked blackness. (And once it seemed to me—and
> still seems when I call that frantic memory forth—that I
> saw Apheta's face as she leaned from that moon.) "
> 
> This demonstrates that the Yesodis are able to open
> channels into Briah to faciliate sending and receiving
> massive objects like people as well as light, which
> facilitates spying, even without mirrors at at the immediate
> terminus.
> 
> There's another moon-like apparition of Apheta in XLVIII,
> but Sev admits he's drunk and sleepy, so it's not
> compelling.
> 
> -- Jeff Wilson 

interesting, but the double conglomeration of the moon and apheta must surely mean something.  Thanks for adding the [sic] there, I surely meant Lune, not Green.  (The rajan and his droogs make a similar mistake in their trip to Urth, as far as I remember.)