<div>This is my first post to the list. Having discovered The Book of the New Sun and developed an almost fanatical devotion to Wolfe, I quickly gobbled up The Urth of the New Sun and then The book of the Long Sun. I read too quickly, paying too little attention to detail, and so I am left with many questions about all these books, with which I won't inundate the list all at once. But until Powell's ships me my Short Sun trilogy, I hope to be able to pick the list's brain on a couple points. First:
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<div>The pateras carry the "voided cross" and make the "sign of addition." They also carry a "gammadion" (whose gammas detach to become tools for the sacred windows). Each of these symbols is highly suggestive for the Whorl and its culture in ways that I'm sure have occurred to you. Are "cross" and the "gammadion" supposed to be the same thing, or are they separate symbols?
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<div>In my too-fast reading of the series, the impression I got is that the "voided cross" and the "gammadion" were one and the same. But this simply can't be right -- a cross is not a gammadion. (I can make a rather clumsy voided cross out of *two* voided gammas by rotating one 180 degrees and then aligning their stems vertically, but this would not be truly "voided," and it is certainly not what anyone would really call a "gammadion.") If someone can reassure me that there are two separate symbols carried by the pateras, then I'll be most grateful.
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