From: "James Wynn" 
Subject: RE: (urth) typhon's knowledge
Date: Thu, 2 Jan 2003 14:07:37 -0600

I will say this: It has always bothered me that Typhon didn't recognize
Severian since from Typhon's perspective, it had only been a short time
since he saw the Concilliator. IMO this corroborates Marc's argument.

-----Original Message-----
From: maa32 [mailto:maa32@dana.ucc.nau.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, December 31, 2002 12:04 PM
To: urth@urth.net
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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