Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2002 11:04:22 -0700
From: maa32 
Subject: (urth) typhon's knowledge

Roy claims that Typhon knows very little about the conciliator or about 
flooding.  However, he hints at several things in his appearance in Sword of 
the Lictor.  He claims that water brings new life and rebirth.  He understands 
the role of the conciliator and his idenitity, promising Severian that if he 
kneels before him, the Conciliator come again will also kneel before him.  And 
what does Severian see when he looks out the eyes of Typhon?  A vast plain of 
water.  This is what Typhon sees from his mountain, with his false eyes.  
As for  the idea of the Conciliator was not unknown in Typhon's time - the 
conciliator was a rewriting of christology - an echo of the promise of a 
savior that MUST have been extent if Buzz Aldron was extent in that distant 
future.  The conciliator became meshed with Christ in myth- and of course 
Typhon knew about that, since he is an allegory of Satan.  He is re-enacting 
the temptation scene - he knows everything about the conciliator and his 
mission.  Even if there was no need for a sun before the age of Typhon, there 
was still need of a spiritual salvation with which the conciliator became 
associated.  Come now.  How can the memory of Buzz Aldron outlive the memory 
of Christ?  You really believe that Typhon, the satan figure of the text of 
New Sun, is ignorant of the role of the savior figure?  He might, after all, 
have had access to the book of Canog that Dr. Talos must have perused to write 
Eschatology and Genesis.  And the whole secret of the future is of course in 
that text, composed from notes Severian revealed at the time when he meets 
Typhon in the past and is incarcerated.  If Typhon lived even another year or 
two, he might have seen that text, with its gnostic eschatology and genesis 
ripe for his analysis. He might have even tried to use it when he took all the 
other writings of ready-made religions and made his whorl.  (if the whorl was 
already sent, then he still had an immense storehouse of myths that would 
become inseparable from the story of the Conciliator, who, before the 
publication of Urth of the New Sun, seemed to be homologous with Jesus Christ.
 Could Sappho and Aurelius outlive the documents of Christ in someplace like 
Buenos Aires?).

Marc Aramini



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