From: "Roy C. Lackey" 
Subject: Re: (urth) DOORS: perhaps the last note thereon, this round
Date: Sat, 8 Feb 2003 02:04:13 -0600

mantis wrote:
>THE MYTHIC PATTERN
>Chapter 22 outlines religious stages, paraphrased here:
>
>Stage 1: no "father," only rival "twins" for the love of the goddess.  One
>is Star and the other is Serpent.
>
>Stage 1.5: with the invention of fatherhood, men begin to take many of the
>roles previously denied them due to gender.
>
>Stage 2: enter Thunder-child, who kills the twins (or castrates/slumbers
>the Star, usually kills the Serpent).
>
>With this in mind, if North really is the Thunder-child I've been thinking
>he is, then yep, he wants to kill Klamm and Green, remake the world in the
>Olympian mode.

In an earlier post you thought North wanted to kill Lara. (He had his
chance, btw, in the locker room before the big boxing match. He was armed.)
Rivals in such mythological struggles usually battle one another for the
affection/possession of the goddess. I don't get the impression that North
was interested in Lara, one way or the other. Liddy, and by extension North,
may be off-center ideologically, but he is intelligent and practical.
Reaching the summit of political power would not alter biological fact. Men
may have the _cojones_ in Otherworld, but if they use them they die. This is
the emasculation ritual of the priests of Attis writ large.

>New thought: Are any Visitors accidental?  Upon reflection, it seems like
>all of them are "invitation only" (with the addition that some of Lara's
>lovers might not have been given the invite at all, e.g., Attis and the
>Knight); but if this is true, then North was loved and invited, too, back
>in 1972.  Which certainly puts his situation in a straightforward context.
>To me it would somewhat soften his "Hitler in Oz" feel.

Green's first passage seemed accidental to me; he didn't know he had done
it, and Lara certainly didn't invite him. His second, brief, crossover (in
the arcade) was accidental. I don't think Lara invited _any_ of her lovers
to Otherworld, for the reasons she gave Green at lunch. The secret
government policy of institutionalizing Visitors seems to indicate they were
undesirable aliens.

North is a problem either way. If he had been Lara's lover, I find no hint
of it from either of them. If he had loved the Goddess, why would he have
been tempted by an ice queen as he claimed? Why would he have feared sex
with an Otherworld woman if he had survived sex with Lara? If North was an
accidental visitor, how did it happen? Did he just happen to pass through
the same 'door' as another man who had been close to Lara (as almost
happened to Fanny at Mama's)? If Klamm is somehow Kissinger, and North is
Liddy, was there more hanky-panky going on at the Watergate than political
shenanigans, and North just went through the wrong door at the right time?

-Roy


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