Perspective and answers to open questions

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MSJ

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« Reply #75 on: May 18, 2018, 08:20:01 pm »
Quote from:  ThoughtsofThelli
ThelliI thought we didn't know what had happened to it after Kellhus pulled it from his chest. Guess I completely forgot about it being burned, then...

When Kellhus is cut down from the Circumfix, he pulls "a heart" from his chest and it burst into flames. Now, many have said it was Serwe's. All kinds of speculation on this on here. But, consensus seems to be, he realized that everything was everything, and kinda went to the Outside and actually grasped Serwe's heart. Theres way better explanations than that, just the gist.
“No. I am your end. Before your eyes I will put your seed to the knife. I will quarter your carcass and feed it to the dogs. Your bones I will grind to dust and cast to the winds. I will strike down those who speak your name or the name of your fathers, until ‘Yursalka’ becomes as meaningless as infant babble. I will blot you out, hunt down your every trace! The track of your life has come to me,

ThoughtsOfThelli

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« Reply #76 on: May 18, 2018, 11:29:24 pm »
When Kellhus is cut down from the Circumfix, he pulls "a heart" from his chest and it burst into flames. Now, many have said it was Serwe's. All kinds of speculation on this on here. But, consensus seems to be, he realized that everything was everything, and kinda went to the Outside and actually grasped Serwe's heart. Theres way better explanations than that, just the gist.

I agree with the theory that it was Serwë's, I just didn't remember the part where it burst into flames (that's what rereads are for, when we get there!). :)
"But you’ve simply made the discovery that Thelli made—only without the benefit of her unerring sense of fashion."
-Anasûrimbor Kayûtas (The Great Ordeal, chapter 13)

"You prefer to believe women victims to their passions, but we can be at least as calculating as you. Love does not make us weak, but strong."
-Ykoriana of the Masks (The Third God, chapter 27)

Yellow

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« Reply #77 on: March 05, 2020, 06:11:05 pm »
I've always had this weird feeling that Onkis is Serwe, due to the description of Onkis from the TTT glossary, which reminds me of the way that men fetishize Serwe:

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The Goddess of hope and aspiration... she is portrayed as a prophetess, not of the future, but of the motivations of Men...

and from this entry in the PoN wiki on Onkis:

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Her idol depicts the severed head of a beautiful woman upon a copper tree.[3]

In the Irreüma in Sumna, her idol is described as:

“The idol worked in white marble, eyes closed with the sunken look of the dead. At first glance she appeared to be the severed head of a woman, beautiful yet vaguely common, mounted on a pole. Anything more than a glance, however, revealed the pole to be a miniature tree, like those cultivated by the ancient Norsirai, only worked in bronze. Branches poked through her parted lips and swept across her face—nature reborn through human lips. Other branches reached behind to break through her frozen hair.”[2]

Emphasis is mine. The description of being "beautiful yet vaguely common" completely describes Serwe in my mind, since she was a slave. Also, isn't the Copper Tree the symbol of the Kuniuric Anasurimbor (as well as Siol, of course), and wasn't Serwe sacrificed on the Circumfix (i.e. Kellhus' "tree"), and didn't the vision that comes to Kellhus while he's on the Circumfix involve the figure sitting beneath a tree? I'm not saying Serwe was the figure, just that Serwe, Kellhus, the figure, and the tree (and therefore Onkis?) are all linked.

Also, the link to the head on the pole is incredibly frustrating. I asked Bakker whether Onkis was the head on the pole in TGO, but he said it wasn't. It must, surely must have something to do with it though, right?

Quoting my own zombie post here, but just wanted to add that I'm currently re-reading TJE and there's a Kelmomas section 27% of the way through where he thinks about trees:

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He would very much like to be a tree, Kelmomas decided.


Coincidence? I think not! Still don't know what it means, of course. But there's definitely a connection between the NG and trees.
« Last Edit: March 05, 2020, 06:12:41 pm by Yellow »
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Wilshire

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« Reply #78 on: March 05, 2020, 07:19:55 pm »
No-God = Yggdrasil?
One of the other conditions of possibility.

H

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« Reply #79 on: March 09, 2020, 01:05:52 pm »
Well, let me start this off with a preface saying this is highly speculative.

However, by "accident" I came across an allusion, one that follows Derrida' sort of formulation on language.  We already know that Bakker was very much a "Derridian scholar" of sorts, so even if this was not exactly the explicit intent, it also probably is not an accident exactly.

So, if we start here, with Derrida's critique of language, giving rise to a notion of Logocentrism, you can actually see, at the bottom of that page, that the notion is directly liked with the notion of a sort of transference of this directly to Phallogocentrism.  That is, to place the phallic symbol at the center of an ordering of things.

Now, for example, we can then draw the allusion further.  For example, from C.G. Jung:

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Another equally common mother-symbol is the wood of life (ξύλον ζωή), or tree of life. The tree of life may have been, in the first instance, a fruit-bearing genealogical tree, and hence a kind of tribal mother. Numerous myths say that human beings came from trees, and many of them tell how the hero was enclosed in the maternal tree-trunk, like the dead Osiris in the cedar-tree, Adonis in the myrtle, etc. Numerous female deities were worshipped in tree form, and this led to the cult of sacred groves and trees. Hence when Attis castrates himself under a pine-tree, he did so because the tree has a maternal significance. Juno of Thespiae was a bough, Juno of Samos a plank, Juno of Argos a pillar, the Carian Diana was an unhewn block of wood, Athene of Lindus a polished column. Tertullian called the Ceres of Pharos “rudis palus et informe lignum sine effigie” (a rough and shapeless wooden stake with no face). Athenaeus remarks that the Latona at Delos was ξὺλινον ᾂμορϕον, ‘an amorphous bit of wood.’ Tertullian also describes an Attic Pallas as a “crucis stipes” (cross-post). The naked wooden pole, as the name itself indicates (áλη, palus, Pfahl, pale, pile), is phallic (cf. pl. XXVIII). The ϕαλλóς is a pole, a ceremonial lingam carved out of figwood, as are all the Roman statues of Priapus. Φáλο means the peak or ridge of a helmet, later called κῶνο, ‘cone.’ Φáλληνοs (from ϕαλλós) means ‘wooden’; øaλ-áγγωμa is a cylinder; øáλaγξ, a round beam. The Macedonian shock-troops when drawn up in battle array were also known as a phalanx, and so is the finger-joint. Finally, we have to consider øαλó, ‘bright, shining.’ The Indo-European root is *bhale, ‘to bulge, swell.’ Who does not think of Faust’s “It glows, it shines, increases in my hand!”

This was not unknown in Alchemical texts, where the tree either sprouts from the head or from the phallus:



In either case, we get the allusion back to the parallel between Logcentrism and Phallogocentrism.  I don't think it really has anything to do with the No-God, per se.  In any case, I think this is a different line of thinking that might be wrong, of course, yet still worth looking at even so.

Maybe FB can come and clear some thing us for us though along these sorts of lines though.
I am a warrior of ages, Anasurimbor. . . ages. I have dipped my nimil in a thousand hearts. I have ridden both against and for the No-God in the great wars that authored this wilderness. I have scaled the ramparts of great Golgotterath, watched the hearts of High Kings break for fury. -Cet'ingira