(urth) Thea's Identity
Lee Berman
severiansola at hotmail.com
Sat Apr 13 21:14:53 PDT 2013
>Thomas Bitterman: Bonus points: the entire autarchial
>line is half-clones of Inire. It calls
>back (forward) to Wolfe's ideas about
>hybridization as expressed in the
>Long Sun (something about crossing lines of corn).
This is along my own personal guess about what is going
on beneath the surface of BotNS. Why is the wizened,
monkey-like vizier titled "Father"? I suspect he fathered
a few of the characters we know. (Not Severian but I suspect
him of siring Severian's father, Ouen).
When the Greek gods interbred with mortals, the results were
called "demi-gods" or "heroes". When Biblical angels fell to
earth and mated with humans, the results were called nephilim
or "men of reknown". I suspect these are cognate myths, reflecting
the same events and it was BotNS (specifically Talos' play) which
made the connection clear to me.
I see Severian written as one of these characters, like the Greek
heroes. A person of mixed parentage who is born unsure of his own
paternity but inexplicably finding himself possessed of mysterious
powers and fighting prowess beyond what regular men have. I think
Silk fits the pattern also.
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