From: James Jordan <jbjordan4@home.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Re: Digest urth.v030.n132
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 22:50:23 

At 01:19 PM 6/24/2001 -0400, you wrote:
>The thing about the New Sun book that had always bugged me was the whole
>concept of getting a person's memories by eating a piece of them.  Perhaps
>silly in context with some of the other miracles in the book, but it always
>seemed ridiculous to me.  (It also bugged me in Herbert's later Dune books
>that a clone, or ghola, could have its original's memories from just a few
>cells. . .)  Anyway, maybe this has already been discussed, but I found an
>interesting article in a book of "fantastic facts" that pertains to it:
>
>During experiments conducted in 1962 at the University of Michigan,
>scientists successfully extracted memory from one animal and transferred it
>to another. .....

         Wolfe may have had these experiments a bit in mind, but he's 
mainly dealing with the Christian sacrament of Holy Communion, which links 
believers with Christ and through Him with the whole body of saints, dead 
and alive, as believers in a mystery eat the flesh and drink the blood of 
their Savior. There are also a whole slew of baptisms in the New Sun books, 
beginning with young Severian's first death and resurrection. So actually, 
in context of the book, these are the main miracles.

Nutria


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