• The Gollancz blog discusses the reissue.
• Then Gollancz author and Wolfe fan Alastair Reynolds talks about the Book of the New Sun in this video interview.
• Gollancz’s parent company also recently launched the SF Gateway to publish ebooks of many classics of science fiction and fantasy, including 3 of the 4 volumes of the Book of the New Sun (with the missing Lictor to follow shortly)

The Guardian previously (2009) ran a discussion of the Book of the New Sun as “Science Fiction’s Ulysses.”

More info @Locus

This is an amended version of an article I wrote almost twenty years ago for the British BSFA magazine Vector.  The original version was entitled Looking Behind the Sun: Religious Implications of Gene Wolfe’s “The Book of the New Sun” and was published in the August 1991 edition.

The Book of the New Sun is one of science fiction’s greatest achievements, and it is generally recognised that the book conceals rather more than is initially apparent. Wolfe, a Catholic, uses his faith to underpin a monumental work. This article looks at some of the religious implications, and hopes to draw comment from other readers.

If Severian is the Conciliator, who then is the Conciliator? Christ seems to be the answer, the Christ of the parousia. There are several clues. The first Conciliator is described as having a shining face, as Christ had during the Transfiguration; one of the Conciliator’s attributes is that he will return to Urth, as the Bible says Christ will; the Conciliator performed healings and miracles in the manner of Christ. Severian’s name may also be a clue to his nature if it is a future corruption of Steven, the name which comes from the Greek word stephane, meaning a crown (the stephane was a fillet of silver or gold worn on the forehead). The crown which the undines saw on Severian’s brow, and which is implied by the hierodules’ use of the term “Liege” to address him, is perhaps mirrored in his name. The name Severian does have another history however, and is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary thus:

“A member of the Encratite or Gnostic sect of the 2nd century which condemned marriage, etc.”

The dictionary goes on to note that the name may be derived not from a founder called Severian but from the austerity of the typical Severian’s life (i.e. from the Latin severus).

There are also clues in Father Inire’s effusive letter to Severian at the close of volume four. Father Inire refers to Severian the Autarch as Surya, the Indian god of the sun, as Helios, the charioteer who pulled the sun on its course, and as Hyperion, the father of Helios. Severian’s nature is also revealed at the end of the fever dream in the lazaret, golden rays pouring from him as he stands with the Cumaean and Master Malrubius, light which falls on all the Earth and gives it new life. There is also a “missing” name in the holy trinity; we hear of the Increate (Holy Ghost) and the Pancreator, but never of any son. The Conciliator, “the greatest of good men,” must be this figure.

During his wanderings across Urth, various mystical events occur around Severian. The most remarkable is the appearance of blood on his forehead when, in the House Absolute, he looks into the mirror-leafed book bound in manskin. It seems that Severian has experienced a book bound metaphorically with his own death; he blurts out that he saw his own dead face in the leather. The eclipse carved in the cabinet door that holds this book refers to this death, the hiding of the sun, and Severian’s blood is then that produced by the Crown of Thorns. Earlier, when drinking with Jonas, water becomes wine. When he drinks with Dorcas, as she is about to leave him, wine becomes water. He carries a sword with a blunt end on his travels – a cross.

Two of Severian’s personal symbols, acquired when a child in the Necropolis, are significant. The ship refers to his voyage to Yesod, but the other two may have religious implications. The fountain, although it seems to correspond to that laid in the House Absolute, is also an ancient symbol of life (sometimes depicted as a waterfall), while the rose is a symbol of Christ dating from the Middle Ages.

Wolfe, then, wrote a parousia in which Severian was either Christ or an equivalent figure (there are in him echoes of the Greek god Apollo, the god of the sun). But if Severian is such a figure there are other figures to account for, most importantly the Antichrist (the Beast) and the False Prophet. It would seem that Baldanders is the former and Dr Talos the latter.

Baldanders, who experiments on the world and spends the proceeds on himself, is an ideal Antichrist, for, despite his brutal nonchalance, he embodies an aversion to humanity; understated, but an aversion nonetheless. He is a direct opposite to Severian. The pair duel at the end of book three, as was foreseen in an underwater dream of Severian’s. Baldanders is the narcissistic boy for whom the world and all its inhabitants are merely constructions of his own imagination, lacking reality, while Severian is the man fully connected with people and the world, who does not need to place himself at the centre of the universe to live sanely. Baldanders is his own greatest work, and his only work; but Baldanders has nothingness within him, desiring power, money and facts, while Severian epitomises all humanity.

Dr Talos seems to be the False Prophet. It is interesting that several times Severian is reminded of a stuffed fox when Dr Talos’ face appears; if the letters F-O-X are taken according to Cabala traditions they make 6,15,24, i.e. 666, the Number of the Beast. This is perhaps the means by which Dr Talos is marked in Severian’s imagination. Meanwhile, Dr Talos’ main task seems to be wandering the Urth performing his ignoble play; that is, misinforming the people about the Conciliator. For example, at the very end of the play it is Baldanders who breaks his own bonds to achieve freedom.

The Claw of the Conciliator is itself steeped in the Roman Catholic tradition. Severian refers to the blue shell as a pyx when he finds the Claw wedged between rocks. A pyx is the box or container in which the consecrated host, the Eucharist, is kept, and it can also mean the container in which supplies of wafers for the Eucharist are kept. Meanwhile, the Pelerines wear scarlet in the Catholic tradition (“Pelerine” derives from the Latin for pilgrim). Angels and archangels make appearances too – Hierodules (holy slaves) are angels and hierogrammates are archangels. The hierodules wear angelic white. Of the latter class, there are two explicitly referred to, Gabriel and Tzadkiel, perhaps paralleling the only two angelic figures referred to in the Bible, Gabriel and Michael. Tzadkiel appears extensively in the final volume showing his shape-changing ability, while in the fourth book there is Melito’s story about birds and an angel who clearly has the same transforming ability.

It is also possible that Wolfe worked the Wandering Jew into his book, although this figure is an invention of later centuries and does not appear in the Bible. According to legend the Wandering Jew taunted Christ as he dragged his cross to Golgotha. Christ responded, saying he would wander the Earth until the time of the Second Coming. Could Hethor correspond to this figure?

Then there is the problem of Mary. Wolfe intentionally presents the reader with an enigma here; there are various candidates for Severian’s true mother, but is it correct to assume that there was one mother? There are two Severians. Using the scene at the end of the fourth book at the Inn of Lost Loves, it seems that Dorcas is related to Severian because of the facial likeness – she is the grandmother of the first Severian. However, she cannot be the mother of the second Severian, the carrier of the Claw; that title perhaps goes to Cyriaca, a.k.a. Catherine, who recognised Severian even though his mask was on, then tried to cover her tracks. Incidentally, Catherine means “pure,” which could be translated as Virginal.

A curious parallel occurs when the Cumaean is considered. This figure seems to echo the sibyls of Roman times, for like them the Cumaean is a prophetess, a seer. But there is a further point, since the Cumaean is “sleekly reptilian” when seen by Severian from his extended temporal perspective; that is, serpentine. In the days before Judaism and Christianity had destroyed the ancient matriarchal religion, that of the Goddess, the snake was the symbol of female potency, wisdom and prophetic ability. Even today, pythoness means prophetess. So it is significant that the acolyte Merryn refers to the Cumaean as “Mother”.

Full article at Locus online.

Find out more at the author’s site: http://www.siriusfiction.com/twk.html

Jeremy published 2 issues of the fanzine, focussing on Wolfe’s two books about Latro, SOLDIER OF THE MIST and SOLDIER OF ARETE. There’s some really interesting commentary on Latro, which nicely supplements the articles Jeremy has written for Ultan’s Library.

We published the PDF versions of the fanzine on our old site, but ran into problems when we upgraded Ultan’s Library to WordPress. Thanks to the sterling negotiating skills of my co-conspirator, Nigel, we’ve resolved these difficulties and are now able to make both issues of THE BOOK OF GOLD available once more.

You’ll need the Adobe Acrobat reader to open the files.

• Issue #1
• Issue #2

Described as “Lovecraft meets Blade Runner”. You can purchase it from Amazon UK using the link below, although Amazon UK seems to think it’s coming out in November. It’s the same ISBN, so this may just be an error, and not a different edition.

This essay was written for John Clute’s proposed book of essays on Gene Wolfe’s fiction. Back in the early 90s, before the Internet as we know it existed, I was posting messages on the Gene Wolfe topic at GEnie (it was a message board system). Before long, Gregory Feeley kindly suggested that I write an essay for John Clute’s proposed anthology of Wolfe criticism. It seemed at the time that the book would be published by 1994. It may well be that my essay killed the whole project with its leaden prose. I once read it aloud at a bookstore and literally put people to sleep–good people, I might add. [Jeremy Crampton's essay, Some Greek Themes in Gene Wolfe's Latro novels, was also written for Clute's collection of essays]

The publication of Lexicon Urthus (1994) was still in the unknown future when I wrote this, but the Lexicon did exist in manuscript form and was looking for a publisher. So in many ways, the essay was intended to be an overture for the Lexicon, showing a bit of the work ahead of time.

Now it serves to celebrate the publication of Lexicon Urthus, Second Edition (2008). In preparing the essay, I initially thought I’d insert commentary in the Clute style, using square brackets, pointing out details where my thoughts in 2008 are different from those in 1992. But upon looking it over, warts and all, I find I’d rather not clutter it up more than it already is. Instead I will put that energy into a new Wolfe essay altogether.

So without further ado, allow me to present the essay itself: hidden for sixteen years, a “lost overture” to lexicons past and present.

Catherine has been getting a lot of attention of late, not merely as the most-likely mother of Severian the Great, but also as the secret identity of the Old Autarch himself, according to John Clute (1986) and Gregory Feeley (1991). Clute and Feeley devised the epithet ‘the Weal’ for this hypothetical autarch Catherine, a term which I will borrow for my own purposes.

One cannot quarrel with the notion of Catherine as mother of Severian, and the family tree now seems fairly clear and straightforward: Dorcas and “Charonus” (if one can label anonymous characters by their role in the text) begat Ouen, Ouen and Catherine begat twins Severian and Merryn, or Severian and the mandragora (if this last is not actually the mandrake root its name suggests), or, least probable, all three. On the other hand, the notion that Catherine is the Old Autarch appears less likely, in spite of the fact that it would seem to solve a central mystery of The Book of the New Sun: the name of the autarch and the motive for keeping it secret.

In the middle of such a quagmire, it is good to go back and re-examine the source of the controversy. From whence springs Catherine the Weal? Largely from the combination of: 1) textual evidence pointing to a biological relationship between Severian and the Old Autarch, and 2) textual evidence that a monial named Catherine is Severian’s mother. Does the evidence regarding the Old Autarch suggest he is Severian’s mother? No, it suggests that the Old Autarch is Severian’s father, but this is a theory shattered for most readers by the later evidence regarding Ouen, so the ‘Old Autarch as mother’ idea puts on an extra twist to maintain the theory of a biological link. Is it necessary that the Old Autarch be a biological parent of Severian? No, a spiritual parent would be sufficient.

That Catherine occupies a central role in The Book of the New Sun is attested to by the original title Wolfe gave to the work (which he supposed would be a novella): “The Feast of Saint Catherine.” In Castle of the Otter, he outlines the original plot:

Severian, an apprentice torturer, meets a lovely prisoner, Thecla, and falls in love with her. He becomes a journeyman . . . but continues their relationship. Eventually, she pleads with him for the means of suicide, and he leaves a knife in her cell. When he sees blood seeping from under her cell door, he confesses what he has done.

Eventually . . . he becomes a master . . . The guild has been forced to forgive him, and he has almost forgiven himself. Then he receives a letter from Thecla. The suicide was a trick, permitting her to be freed unobtrusively. Soon she will be exonerated and restored to her former position in society. She says that she still loves him, though it may be that she only feels guilty about using him as she did. She invites him to join her.

What is he to do?

As an honest man and a patriot–and he is both–he should denounce the whole affair; but if he does so, he will be disgraced again, the guild will be disgraced, and Thecla will almost certainly die. If he does as she asks, he will be reunited with her; but he will be a pariah . . . and he may well make her a pariah too, in which case she will probably come to hate him. If he simply burns her letter and ignores her, she will only come to hate him much sooner, and she will be in a position to exert great political influence, and to blackmail the other masters of the guild as well. (Needless to say, I had a solution–but I will leave it as an exercise for the reader.) (4).

A solution which would tie in with the proposed title would be for this Severian to kill and eat Thecla, using the analeptic alzabo to preserve and imprison his beloved within the citadel of his own flesh. She would ‘live,’ but only inside of him. He would take on this terrible burden to protect her, his guild, and himself. (It is also a nasty thing to do to her, which seems appropriate.) Most importantly, just as the Feast of Saint Catherine marks the elevation of torturer from apprentice to journeyman to master, so does the cannibalism of Thecla represent a further stage, wherein the figurative ‘feast’ becomes grotesquely real: the mystery of communion made concrete. At the moment she is consumed, Thecla becomes Catherine, rendered immortal by her killer, enshrined within a torturer’s cells.

However, that story was never written, and the mystery of Catherine was driven further beneath the surface, to mingle with the other mysteries, the most prominent being the identity of the Old Autarch, and at first glance, ‘Catherine the Weal’ seems like a most fitting answer to the autarchial question. But the keystone of the Autarch Catherine theory would appear to be a deeply rooted prohibition against dynastic autarchies, as Clute notes: “Autarchs . . . are forbidden to found dynasties” (Clute, Strokes, 171). This, then, is the dark sin Severian’s narrative covers up: that Catherine is autarch and her son inherits the throne. But a passage in The Book of the New Sun rules out this dynastic prohibition, for the Malrubius aquastor tells Severian, “If you fail, your manhood will be taken from you, so that you cannot bequeath the Phoenix Throne to your descendants” (IV, chapter 31, 214), that is to say, if he refuses the test, he can bequeath the throne to his offspring. An autarch can either stay on Urth and hand down the throne to his or her children, or an autarch can take the test, but the punishment for failure is desexing. Malrubius’s threat makes no sense in a world where dynasties are prohibited. Given that the position of autarch is open to either gender (most of the autarchs have been ‘common men and women’ [IV, chap. 34, 236] and then there is the term ‘autarchia’) dynasties in the thousand-year Age of the Autarch have probably been the rule rather than the exception.

Perhaps this reading of the supposed prohibition is a bit too literal, i.e., it is not that all autarchs are forbidden to found dynasties, but only those who fail the test. In this case the prohibition comes from Yesod rather than the Commonwealth, and Catherine has merely hedged her bets by cheating and having a child before taking the test. The Urth of the New Sun seems to discredit this notion:

“Sieur,” I said, “I can remember the examination of my predecessor.” . . .

Tzadkiel nodded. “It was necessary that you recall it; it was for that reason he was examined.”

“And unmanned?” The old Autarch trembled in me . . .

“Yes. Otherwise a child would have stood between you and the throne, and your Urth would have perished forever. The alternative was the death of the child. Would that have been better?” (Urth, chap. 21, 153).

The Hierogrammate Tzadkiel (whose name is that of a Kabbalistic Angel of Justice) alludes to hereditary autarchy, and also suggests that the relation between Severian and the Old Autarch is not one of child to biological parent. It seems unlikely, in a universe where Hierodule agents backtrack through the corridors of Time seeking verification, and even human high priestesses such as those of the Pelerines possess the ability to detect falsehood, that Tzadkiel has been duped.

So then why the big mystery?

To begin with the obvious, there are a few practical reasons why the Autarch is never named. As the top of the power pyramid in the Commonwealth, an autarch should be so distant from the common people as to be faceless. One need only remember Emperor Showa (Hirohito) of pre-War Japan to find a recent case where citizens were forbidden to look upon the face of their leader, in person or in picture, because to see the emperor’s face is to recognize him as human, and he is not human; rather, he is at the very least the embodiment of an institution. In the Urth Cycle, this lofty distance is reflected in the very mountains themselves, each of which has been carved into the likeness of an autarch, such that they border every horizon, ubiquitous yet far removed.

Another point is that names themselves have a great deal of magic: to know a person’s name is to have power over him, and fairy tales are full of cases where this alone is enough to undo a character, or slay a monster. Between text and reader, or ruler and populace, a name gives an immediate sense of mystery-dispelling familiarity, the difference between ‘His Majesty, the King’ and ‘King Mark.’ By knowing the ruler’s name, a pauper becomes a peer of the realm, in a sense. A third point is that names often disclose gender, and gender mystery is one of the main attributes of the Autarch. This mystery hints at the alchemical ideal of the hermaphrodite, where opposites are united, and sets the stage for the alzabo-induced chemical hermaphroditism of Severian (at which point it is seen as an abomination) as well as the Autarch (where it is revealed to be a prerequisite of leadership). The anthropological importance of this notion is clear, as such a revelation is usually the climax of ‘primitive’ male initiation rites around the world, wherein the headman, for example, proves that he has a ‘vagina’ (subincision of his penis) which bleeds when he re-opens it, simulating menstruation and the female-power associated with it. That this institutional position of autarch be faceless, nameless, and genderless is very important to the story, as Severian must first serve it as a torturer, then rebel against it as a Vodalarius, and finally come to terms with it by becoming it. And in the end, the name is nothing, the title (and the myriad lives it contains) is everything. ‘Here Comes Everyman,’ indeed.

Some readers (including Feeley) have made pointed reference to the use of the term “Old Autarch” in Urth as an uncharacteristically clumsy attempt to maintain the mystery of the autarch’s name. To this way of thinking, Severian is the one who should be called the Old Autarch, as Valeria has sat upon the throne for forty years. However, the period in question is still Severian’s reign. While this might seem to be merely a technicality, Valeria does not know the words of power, and there is no doubt that even the common people know this, as Eata tells Severian: “your autarchia, she was Autarch. People talked about it . . . and they said she didn’t have the words” (V, chap. 46, 328). So despite Valeria’s forty years on the throne, her marriage to Dux Caesidius, her title of Autarch, and the presence of Severian’s cenotaph, Valeria is still regent, Severian is still autarch, and his predecessor is still the Old Autarch.

In place of Catherine, consider the autarch Appian of “The Cat” (1983) as the autarch of The Book of the New Sun . He reigns during the scandal which sends Lomer into the antechamber; and since Lomer yet lives when Severian comes to the House Absolute, it is certainly possible that Appian might still rule. (See timeline.)

The informant on this tip is none other than Odilo II, the servant of the House Absolute whom Severian meets on his first visit, an insider who would be privy to all the secrets. His tale “The Cat” mentions no other autarch, yet it covers seventy-odd years of life within the House Absolute. As all of the Odilos seem to have a great love for the pomp and glory of the House Absolute, it would seem strange and out of character for him to neglect mentioning the ascent of a new autarch. Catherine the Weal, had she been autarch, would have to have gone to Yesod and been desexed sometime after the birth of Severian (roughly 20 years PS, or Prior to Severian’s reign) and before Thecla comes to the House Absolute (around 9 PS), since Thecla knows the Old Autarch, but again, Odilo II mentions nothing of the kind in recounting his early years as servant (beginning 16 PS).

It has been established that the Old Autarch spent his childhood in Famulorum village (Latin ‘famulor’: to be a servant), near the House Absolute (V, chap. 40, 284), that he served under the honey steward Paeon, and that he gained the throne by chance rather than design. (I use the male pronoun under the assumption that domestic service jobs are usually gender segregated, at least for novice and supervisor. Another small doubt against Catherine.) One likely motive for his anonymity is that his name harkens back to his humble origins, thus servants and residents alike would look askance at him, remembering him as a lowly servant. As the Autarch says, “I was a servant once . . . That is why they hate me” (IV, chap. 25, 176).

As Urth makes clear, the Old Autarch’s function, both in the story and in the world, is to prepare the way for Severian. His career and his trial mark the road the New Sun must follow. So Appian is a fittingly evocative name for him. ‘Appian’ is close to the Latin ‘apia’ (bee), an apt name for a servant under the honey steward, but it is closer to the Appian Way, the oldest and best preserved of all Roman roads, commenced by Appius Claudius, the censor, during the Roman Republic. There are also two saints Appian, and all three of these Appians can be said to have paved the way for others to follow.

There are a few weak points to the candidacy of Appian. While there is no doubt that there is an Autarch Appian, the question is the length of his reign: he is either ‘Appian the Lesser,’ reigning from 66 to 31 PS, succeeded by an as yet unnamed autarch; or he is ‘Appian the Elder,’ reigning from 66 to 1 PS. A sixty-five year reign might seem impossibly wrong (despite Hirohito’s reign of 64 years) but for the apparent natural longevity on Urth (Odilo I serves for more than 50 years, and even lifelong prisoner Lomer is 95 years old), possibly augmented by stellar-level technology available to the autarch, and the time distortions caused by riding a ship to Yesod. In addition, a long reign makes it more reasonable to think that, by the time of Severian, his name might have been hidden or forgotten, such that nobody in the country could know it but the senior (and needless to say, discreet) servants.

The crisis point in 30 PS, the point at which Appian is decided to be Elder or Lesser, is alluded to in Dr. Talos’s play, Eschatology and Genesis:

Prophet: “I know you for a practical man, concerned with the affairs of this universe alone, who seldom looks higher than the stars.”

Autarch: “For thirty years I have prided myself on that” (II, chap 24, 202).

The theatrical autarch, based in part upon Dr. Talos’s surprising knowledge of the reigning autarch, seems to indicate that he has ruled for thirty years–or that he has been a changed man, a man unconcerned with Yesod, for the same period. The latter suggests the time of the desexing. Another curious little mystery in or around 30 PS is the exile of Journeyman Palaemon, and it is intriguing to consider how this scandal could be related to the autarch’s failure in Yesod, or to the original idea for “The Feast of Saint Catherine.”

Palaemon is an odd duck: his name is both that of a saint and that of a classical god. This is an important signal, because throughout the Urth Cycle, followers of the New Sun are named after saints, while Enemies of the New Sun (Abaia, Erebus, Typhon) are named after mythological figures. Saint Palaemon is rather nondescript, but Palaemon the god bears some looking into: he was originally the mortal Melicertes, and became the marine god Palaemon when his mother Ino cast herself with him into the sea. Ino became Leucothea, the White Goddess who figures so prominently in Wolfe’s Soldier novels and There Are Doors. In any event, like Appian’s way to Yesod, Journeyman Palaemon paves a way for Journeyman Severian, a precedent for having him exiled rather than executed.

As solid as the evidence may be, Appian the Elder in no way addresses the particular elusive mystery of why the Autarch’s name is never written in Severian’s narrative, as Catherine the Weal at least attempts to do by answering “what is being hidden?” with “Severian’s mother is autarch.” Rather than assailing that vast and nebulous region, this paper will now endeavor to speculate upon a few minor mysteries, in the pioneer spirit of both Clute and Feeley, in an attempt to ascertain the hidden identities of Catherine, Thecla, and Juturna.

Catherine the teenage Pelerine

To begin with, let us assume that Catherine was born an exultant (if there is an exultant in Severian’s family tree, this appears to be the most likely spot), perhaps of the same family as Thecla and Thea. The historical Saint Catherine was also said to have been an aristocrat.

At a young age she joins the aristocratic Pelerines (‘professional virgins’ who accept primarily exultants), and travels with them, much as Cyriaca did (III, chap. 5, 37).

At the age of thirteen or fourteen she meets Ouen in Nessus, probably through the by-then defunct cloisonne shop which had sold crucifixes to the Pelerines (as Feeley proposes). Dorcas’s side of the family had made the crucifixes, and the doubtlessly had connections to the Order. Ouen’s mother Cas (aka Dorcas) had apparently died giving birth to him, but when her husband dropped her into the Lake of Endless Sleep, her eyes opened, an event both of them remember. This suggests that Dorcas was a victim of foul play on the part of the Enemies of the New Sun, who saw that her grandson would become vitally important and tried to interfere by putting Dorcas into a deathlike trance. So Dorcas died by drowning, and her husband was an unwitting murderer. The event made a Charon out of him and gave her an intense fear of water.

Catherine either leaves the Order for some unknown reason (as Clute and Feeley suggest), or she becomes pregnant by Ouen and then leaves under threat of expulsion. We are reminded throughout the Urth Cycle that an exultant teenage girl has the stature of a woman: Severian’s fever dream of Thecla at his height (around 6’1″) when she was thirteen or fourteen (IV, chap. 4, 24), and the scandal involving Chatelaine Sancha (14 years old) and Lomer (28 years old) provides a parallel for what might have gone on between Catherine (13 years old) and Ouen (20 years old).

She is taken into custody in order to protect the unborn Severian from the Enemies of the New Sun (who had so nearly gotten Ouen), rather than for any criminal activity on her part. She gives birth in the Matachin Tower, one of the most heavily guarded and secure places on the planet, which also happens to have easy, permanent access to the Atrium of Time. (The Atrium is as much a time traveling building as the Last House is.) The mother of the guild becomes the mother of the man.

After giving birth, Catherine lives in the Atrium of Time complex, coming out once every subjective ‘year’ for the feast day. This is why she is never seen on any other day, and why she never changes: she never ages, and while tall for a commoner she is perhaps below average height for an exultant teenager (in fact, she might be a khaibit). Valeria, Severian’s future bride, is unquestionably living in the Atrium complex, safe from enemies. Severian says of Valiera, “There was an antique quality about her . . . that made her seem older than Master Palaemon, a dweller in forgotten yesterdays,” and then that her family “had waited, at first, to leave Urth with the autarch of their era” (I, chap. 4, 34). Valeria’s family is likely to have entered the complex around the time of Ymar’s successor, a thousand years earlier.

Finally, when the deluge transforms Urth into Ushas, it is quite possible that Catherine takes to the corridors of Time, becoming the Holy Katharine tortured by Autarch Maxentius early on in the Age of the Autarch. She becomes her own sainted namesake, just as her son Severian goes through various ‘incarnations’ as Apu-Punchau, Conciliator, Autarch, and New Sun. The mother of the man becomes the mother of the guild.

While Catherine is the most elusive of all the women in Severian’s life, her namesake St. Catherine is one of the most popular saints of all time, despite the fact that she probably never existed. Like Palaemon, Catherine is a figure with Christian as well as pagan roots. Catherine of Alexandria is said to have been a maiden martyred in A.D. 310 under Maximus Daza, and legend has it that she argued with fifty pagan philosophers before she was to be put to death by means of an engine fitted with a spiked wheel. (She overcame them all, and on this account she is considered the patroness of philosophers.) Then the wheel broke (legend adds roses bursting forth) and she was beheaded instead. Her alleged relics have been enshrined for the last thousand years in the Orthodox monastery of Mt. Sinai, but in 1969 her name was dropped from the liturgical calendar.

For the pre-Christian Catherine, a closer examination of the rosy/fiery Catherine Wheel is in order. Roses and fire are iconically nearly identical (a fact that Wolfe is well aware of: note how Frog calls fire ‘red flower’ [III, chap. 19, 136], and at the original center of Catherine’s cult in Sinai, the Asiatic Goddess was once depicted as the Dancer on the Fiery Wheel at the hub of the Universe. In the 8th century A.D., a Greek convent of priestess-nuns at Sinai called themselves kathari, meaning ‘pure ones,’ but this name is also akin to the kathakali temple-dancers of India, who performed the Dance of Time in honor of Kali, Goddess of the Karmic Wheel. A group of medieval Gnostics known as Cathari had great reverence for the wheel symbol, and considered St. Catherine almost as a female counterpart of God. Catholic prelates made efforts to have St. Catherine eliminated from the canon in the 15th and 16th centuries, after the Cathari were exterminated. So if Saint Catherine has a hidden name, it might well be ‘Kali.’

Thecla the nocturnal huntress

Allusions have been made to the correspondence between Thecla and St. Thecla, but no note has been made of the fact that St. Thecla is one of the most spurious saints in the canon. The legend of St. Thecla comes from an apocryphal document, the Acts of Paul (c. A.D. 170). It says that she was converted to Christ by St. Paul. She broke off an engagement to marry and dedicated her maidenhood to God, whereupon she was subjected to much persecution, in the form of attempts to kill her by fire and wild beasts. She retired to a cave where she lived for many years (recall the mine at Saltus). At the age of ninety she was again persecuted, by local medicine men who were jealous of her healing powers; she was saved from their hands by being swallowed by her cave, ending her martyrdom.

‘Thecla’ (meaning ‘famous one’) was a title of the Maiden Moon Goddess Artemis at Ephesus (now western Turkey), where she was worshipped in her second aspect as Nymph, an orgiastic Aphrodite with a male consort. Her shrine in Seleucia (Mesopotamia) was a popular pilgrimage center in pagan times, and remained so even after the goddess was Christianized as a saint. Tertullian (3rd century Roman theologian) knew she was nothing but an epithet of the Great Goddess, and he denied the legend connecting Thecla with St. Paul, hinting that Paul might have been honored by the connection. So Thecla’s hidden name might be ‘Artemis,’ and with this in mind, the unbelievable trials of St. Thecla can be recognized as the same sort of goddess rites that Inanna, to give an early example, had to perform.

So in Wolfe’s Thecla, with her memories of hunting both beasts and humans (the attacks on the prisoners in the antechamber), we find another disguised goddess.

Juturna of the deep

A third mother-figure for Severian is the undine Juturna, and hers is the name of a Roman water-goddess, responsible for putting out fires. Her name gives no pretense at being anything but an Enemy of the New Sun (a mythological name and a water-related one as well), and as concubine to Abaia, Juturna’s motives for sporadically helping Severian are obscure: she gives rebirth to him at the beginning of The Book of the New Sun, but later tries to lure him into drowning. She seems unique among her kind in being able to travel the corridors of Time, and she survives the deluge: these two points may form her motive (i.e., she has seen the future and is picking the winner). Aside from a cameo in a corridors of Time episode (IV, chap. 4, 25), Juturna appears four times in the Urth Cycle: 1) rebirth of Severian in volume one, 2) attempted drowning in volume 2, 3) her warning of deluge in Urth, and 4) pointing out the way to Brook Madregot in Urth. From her point of view as a time traveler, the order should probably be rearranged as 2-3-1-4.

Juturna is important for showing the link between what might be too readily termed ‘Good’ and ‘Evil.’ Just as the Djinni of The Arabian Nights can convert to the True Faith, so can the Other People of Urth come over to the side of the New Sun. The undines claim that they can swim between the stars, which is just what the Hierogrammate Tzadkiel does. This should come as no surprise: devils are just fallen angels, after all.

Goddesses of Urth

Thus, Severian’s mother-figures form a trinity of goddesses, each one an aspect of the Great Goddess: Catherine, or Kali, the fiery one, the absent mother; Thecla, or Artemis, the nocturnal huntress, the teacher (a little bit of Athene, here) who becomes the indwelling goddess; and Juturna, the frightful aquatic guide. One could take this further, and consider the nine women with whom Severian is intimate (Thecla’s khaibit, Thecla, Dorcas, Jolenta, Cyriaca, Pia, Daria, Valeria, and Gunnie–Apheta in Yesod is not human) as nine muses or aspects of the Great Goddess, or add them to the trinity to form a solar calendar group of twelve goddesses, with Agia as the spurned, unlucky thirteenth member (like Eris/Hecate).

But that would be another essay.

A Timeline of Events (Chart)

(PS = Prior to Severian’s reign)
(SR = Severian’s Reign)

Bibliography

Campbell, Joseph. Primitive Mythology, Viking Penguin, New York, 1987.

Clute, John. Strokes, Serconia Press, Washington, 1988 (paperback).

Feeley, Gregory. “The Evidence of Things Not Shown: Family Romance in The Book of the New Sun,” The New York Review of Science Fiction (#31 and #32), Dragon Press, New York, 1991.

Walker, Barbara G. The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, Harper & Row, 1983.

Wolfe, Gene. The Shadow of the Torturer, SFBC edition, 1983.

–. The Claw of the Conciliator, SFBC edition, 1983.

–. The Sword of the Lictor, SFBC edition, 1983.

–. The Citadel of the Autarch, SFBC edition, 1983.

–. The Urth of the New Sun, Tor, 1987.

–. The Castle of the Otter, SFBC edition, 1983.

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1. The Strange Bear Man at the Threshold

The first time I read The Urth of the New Sun, one scene tantalized me more than any other. I could see just enough to know that there was a great deal I could not see yet. The symbols were there, I just could not understand them. It was in chapter 14, “The End of the Universe”, where, in the rigging of the starship, Severian has single combat with a mutineer who has claws:

I paused for a moment to look at him, with some vague notion that the claws I had seen might be artificial, like the steel claws of the magicians [in The Sword of the Lictor] or the lucivee with which Agia had torn my cheek, and if artificial, they might be of some use to me.

They were not…. The claws of an arctother had been shaped from his fingers — ugly and innocent, incapable of holding any other weapon. (p101)

The combatant he faces is a modified human who has bear claws instead of fingers, in contrast to the metal hand weapons used by both the magicians (at the foot of Mount Typhon) and Agia (at the jungle court of Vodalus). Severian triumphs against this bear-man and soon thereafter the starship passes from his home-universe of Briah into the higher-universe of Yesod. The bear-man is thus in some sense a guardian of the threshold, even though as a common mutineer he is not tagged as such.

For a succinct definition of threshold guardians, I employ J. E. Cirlot:

Just as the powers of the Earth must be defended, so, by analogy, must all mystic, religious and spiritual wealth or power be protected against hostile forces or against possible intrusion by the unworthy…. From the psychological point of view, guardians symbolize the forces gathered on the threshold of transition between different stages of evolution and spiritual progress or regression. The ‘guardian of the threshold’ must be overcome before Man can enter into the mastery of the higher realm. (Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, “Guardians” entry)

This definition captures much of what I saw in that first glance: while it is clear that throughout his narrative Severian is undergoing a process of change through which he evolves from a torturer into the Conciliator (and beyond), the combat with the bear-man marked a distinct threshold, beyond which lay the higher realm of Yesod (if we take Yesod to be a kind of hyperspace).

Identifying the threshold and the guardian was all I had initially. I did not know why the guardian in this case was a bear, or better, why it had to be a bear. So I began to investigate what “bear” means in the text.

2. The Atrium of Time Provides a Key

In tracking down the bears in Severian’s narrative, I found myself back at the beginning again, where I discovered an important clue.

In The Shadow of the Torturer, chapter 4 (“Triskele”), Severian chances upon the Atrium of Time, an enclosed garden hidden deep within the Citadel complex. Emerging from the underground maze that had led him to the place, he takes in the scene:

Statues of beasts stood with their backs to the four walls of the court, eyes turned to watch the canted dial [of a multifaceted time piece]: hulking barylambdas; arctothers, the monarchs of bears; glyptodons; smilodons with fangs like glaives. All were dusted with snow. (p43)

Severian finds a garden where four types of statues are focused on a central clock that is tipped over and broken. All these statues are of animals extinct in our time: the barylambda was a cow-sized, primitive herbivore of Palaeocene North America; the arctother was the very large bear of North and South America; the glyptodon, which possessed a carapace like an armadillo, was a cow-sized herbivore of South America; and the smilodon was a sabre-toothed tiger. (A “glaive” is a pole-axe with a head like the blade of a sword.)

The placement of the statues suggests an opposition between arctothers and smilodons: while we do not know the orientation of the garden, opposing sides will be North/South and East/West. I tend to think that the bear/cat sides are North and South. Because the garden is literally focused on a timepiece, there is a hint that the four types of animal statues represent the seasons. As will become clear, I think that the bear represents winter and the cat summer.

The bear/cat polarity has already been alluded to just two pages earlier when Severian describes the beast handlers of the Bear Tower. Among them, “at some point in life each brother takes a lioness or bear-sow in marriage, after which he shuns human women” (The Shadow of the Torturer, chapter 4, p41). The big cat and the bear seem to be sacred animals, paired and yet in opposition.

3. Many of Severian’s Foes Are Bear-like

Initially it seemed as though the bear-man on the starship was the first bear-like opponent that Severian fights, but as I began to look closer, many intriguing details began to emerge: Severian faces a series of ursine opponents, nearly all of whom are killed.

The first bear is Agilus. Severian’s combat with him is at the Sanguinary Fields of chapter 27, but the build-up to this begins 10 chapters earlier: at the rag shop (The Shadow of the Torturer, chapter 17, “The Challenge”), Severian is challenged to a duel by a hipparch of the Septentrion Guard. (The challenge is given by Agia in disguise. Her twin Agilus later wears the same disguise for the duel.) Agilus is a bear in that he is disguised as a Septentrion Guard, where “Septentrion” is another name for the constellation of the Great Bear (it became a term for the North in general). Agilus cheats at the duel, but when the dead Severian rises up from the ground Agilus panics and kills several spectators in his attempt to flee. Ironically the magistrate orders Severian to execute Agilus for his crimes against the spectators, so while Severian kills Agilus it is a legally sanctioned execution.

The second bear is Hildegrin. Hildegrin is often referred to as “the Badger”, due to his digging up of corpses, but he is introduced in the first chapter of The Shadow of the Torturer as being like a bear: when Thea takes the laser pistol from Hildegrin it seems to Severian “as if a dove had momentarily commanded an arctother” (The Shadow of the Torturer, chapter 1, p14). So 22 chapters before we are given his name or his sobriquet, Hildegrin is described as being like a bear. At the end of The Claw of the Conciliator (chapter 31), Hildegrin calls for Severian’s aid as he wrestles with Apu Punchau in the revived Stone Town. As Severian enters the fray, the time-warp scene implodes (due to Severian’s physical contact with Apu Punchau) and Hildegrin is never seen again.

The third bear is the alzabo. This ghoulish monster animal of Urth is based upon medieval legends concerning the hyena, and yet when the alzabo appears in The Sword of the Lictor it clearly has bearish traits: “Its fur looked red and ragged in the firelight, and the nails of its feet, larger and coarser than a bear’s, were darkly red” (The Sword of the Lictor, chapter 16, p128). When Severian later sees the alzabo by daylight, he notes: “It was so large and moved so swiftly that I at first thought of it a red destrier, riderless and saddleless” (p135). The alzabo has a bear’s claws, a bear’s body mass, and bear-like fur that is red like the colour of the dying sun. Severian’s combat with the alzabo is complicated by the manoeuvrings of Agia (who wants to kill Severian) and Casdoe (the one whom the alzabo is after), so in the end Severian pledges a truce with the monster. The next day the alzabo is killed by zoanthrops (wild men), and Severian looks upon the corpse with some compassion.

The fourth bear is Decuman, one of those sorcerers alluded to in the quotation about the bear-man.  Shortly after the death of the alzabo, Severian encounters the sorcerers (The Sword of the Lictor, chapters 20 and 21), and finds them to be unmodified human males who use steel talons as hand weapons. The sorcerers kidnap Little Severian and Severian enters a duel of magic to ransom them both, but his opponent Decuman is killed by a monster (sent by Agia’s agent Hethor to track and kill Severian).

Up to this point, the bear traits have been physical (claws, fur, size) or in the name (Septentrion). But bears are famous for hibernating, for going into their caves to sleep out the winter. With that hint, perhaps you will not be as surprised as I was to recognize the fifth bear in Master Ash and his Last House in The Citadel of the Autarch.

Severian takes on a mission from the Pelerines to force Ash from his hermitage (allegedly to save him from the advancing Ascian forces), but once there, Severian discovers that the house is a time portal, with different ages visible from different floors, and that Ash is a man (perhaps the last human on Urth) who is watching the final ice age (“winter”) from the safety of his house (“cave”). Severian sleeps in the Last House, a detail that locks in with the hibernation theme. Severian has to use force to get Ash out of the house, and when that is accomplished, Ash fades away. The next person Severian meets reminds him that it is New Year’s Day.

The final bear in The Book of the New Sun is an unnamed “ursine man” who sets up Severian for the horse-taming test to join the military unit (The Citadel of the Autarch, chapter 19, p151). Severian does not kill this man, though it is quite possible he dies in the battle against the Ascians in chapter 21.

The prominence of these bear guardians diminishes as the narrative of The Book of the New Sun progresses. Agilus is the central foe of The Shadow of the Torturer, and his victory would have kept Severian from the Gate of Nessus. In order to triumph, Severian must die and resurrect himself. Hildegrin is trying to kill the promise of the Past in the form of Apu-Punchau, yet he is a lesser opponent than Agilus in that he is not the primary obstacle in The Claw of the Conciliator. The threshold that the alzabo is guarding is Fatherhood, while the sorcerers guard Sacrifice at the base of Mount Typhon, yet in The Sword of the Lictor Typhon himself is a much more imposing monster, as is Baldanders after him. Master Ash of The Citadel of the Autarch is an unarmed hermit who offers little real resistance, but beyond his threshold lies the threatening Ragnarok future. The destrier-trainer guards the awful world of War, but he himself, while literally marked as “ursine,” plays a slight role compared to all the other “bears”.

When the bear-man appears in The Urth of the New Sun he is diminished to the point of being a mere mutineer who is more bear than man, but the threshold he guards has grown to be the Universe itself, and for the first time Severian knowingly kills his ursine opponent.

4. Severian’s Dealings with Cats Are Compassionate

Having established this pattern regarding bears, I turned my attention to the big cats in the text, searching for a possible pattern there. The cats are more elusive, their presence often showing only through a distant roar or a recent track: Severian hears a smilodon’s roar when he is with Agia in the Jungle Gardens (The Shadow of the Torturer, chapter 20, p179); near the war front, Severian finds fresh smilodon tracks (The Citadel of the Autarch, chapter 1, p11); in the Age of Myth, Severian hears a smilodon’s cough (The Urth of the New Sun, chapter 44, p345).

When a smilodon shows up in an embedded story, the protagonist (who is linked to Severian) twice avoids combat with the cat. In the mountains Severian reads a story from the Brown Book to his newly adopted Little Severian, and in that story, “Tale of the Boy Called Frog”, there is a confrontation between a smilodon and a wolf family that has just adopted the boy called Frog (The Sword of the Lictor, chapter 19, p153). Combat is avoided, however, and when the smilodon appeals to the Senate of Wolves to attempt to get the boy by legal means, combat is again avoided when another animal (a big cat) ransoms Frog with gold.

Two times in the text Severian encounters big cats face-to-face, and both times they are bound creatures: while crossing the pampas with Dorcas and the dying Jolenta, Severian frees an atrox (a type of ice age cave lion) that is tied to a tree to scare off other atroxes (The Claw of the Conciliator, chapter 29, p270); in Typhon’s Era on Urth, Severian frees a smilodon that had been tied to a post to torment a prisoner (The Urth of the New Sun, chapter 34, p276). When a wounded Severian encounters cat-people they are the women-cats of the Old Autarch, who act as nurses for him, and their hidden claws remind him of the Claw of the Conciliator (The Citadel of the Autarch, chapter 24, p195).

The contrast between Severian’s interactions with the “bears” and the big cats is plain: the bears are foes who must die, and the cats are foes to be avoided or friends to set free. In dealing with the bears, Severian shows severity; in dealing with the cats, he exhibits mercy and compassion.

It occurs to me that Agia may be a hidden cat. After all, I have identified her twin brother Agilus as a bear, which in the scheme I have sketched would make her a cat. In addition, Severian shows mercy in not executing her outside the Mine at Saltus (The Claw of the Conciliator, chapter 7), which ties into the mercy-towards-cats I have traced, and Severian first hears a smilodon roar while he is with Agia (The Shadow of the Torturer, chapter 20). Finally, while Agia uses an athame (poisoned witch’s dagger) against Severian at the Mine (The Claw of the Conciliator, chapter 7) and a crooked dagger against him at the widow’s house in the mountains (The Sword of the Lictor, chapters 15-16), she only scores a hit on him with the aforementioned lucivee (The Citadel of the Autarch, chapter 26), a type of metal “cat’s claws” (the name in French means “lynx”). There is also the chapter entitled “The Mercy of Agia” (The Citadel of the Autarch, chapter 25) wherein she rescues Severian from behind Ascian lines.

5.  The Meanings of This Pattern

I think this pattern of bear and cat has applications to both ecological niches and ice age mythology.

Habitual readers of Gene Wolfe have noticed that he often marks his protagonists as wolves or wolf-like, from the obvious example in the story title “Hero As Werwolf,” to the more subtle case of The Book of the Long Sun, where Silk’s pet bird is “Oreb”, a biblical name for a raven associated with a wolf.¹ It is well known that Severian is so marked: when Severian’s adoptive son asks him for a story from the Brown Book, he specifies that it must have “wolfs” [sic] in it; the story, as mentioned before, has the wolves adopting a human boy, just as Severian has adopted the new orphan; Severian later remarks, as he is trying to find his way out of the underground maze of the sorcerers, that, “My nose is by no means the sensitive one of the he-wolf in the tale” (The Sword of the Lictor, chapter 21, p167).

In writing about wolf-heroes, Gene Wolfe takes a number of different approaches, depending on the story. Generally speaking, his fiction paints hunters in an unfavourable light, in part a reaction, perhaps, to the hunters that kill the wolf in such stories as “Peter and the Wolf” and “Little Red Riding Hood”. Another approach is the wolf as predator in an ecological system, as in his “Hero As Werwolf”. There is also the beast fable, such as “The Tale of the Boy Called Frog”, where beasts or beast-men are relating to each other in satire of human society, that is, with little or no basis on ecological niches. In The Book of the New Sun as a whole, however, Wolfe seems to be taking an ecological approach at a deep level, in the same way that perhaps the Old English epic Beowulf is “really” about a bear (“bee wolf”) who goes into a cave to fight a fire-spitting monster (bee venom as “fiery”) and finds “gold” in the form of honey.

Bears are animals of the northern forests, from the temperate zone to the arctic. Wolves are also native to these areas, and in such ecological niches the bear (a large omnivore) is just above the wolf (a carnivore), sometimes preying upon it.  So in ecological terms the bear and the wolf are enemies, with the bear having an advantage in single combat.

In contrast, lions and tigers are generally found in the tropics, where they occupy a niche similar to that of wolves, but as they are not in competition with them, the big cats are not enemies of wolves. Severian’s reign as autarch begins with Agia as the new Vodalus, and thus she is twinned to Severian in a way that is not big cat to bear (as it was with her brother), but big cat to wolf (two equals who will keep out of each other’s sphere).

So it seems to me that in this pattern of bear, cat, and wolf, Gene Wolfe is exploring the wolf within an ecological niche, where the bear is a superior foe that threatens the wolf, rather than focusing on the wolf as a predator of creatures in the niches below itself.

In addition to this personal/ecological level there is also a powerful set of mythic symbols from the ice age period of around 30,000 years ago. In Primitive Mytholog, Joseph Campbell writes about an ice-age burial skeleton with necklace and girdle of lion teeth and bear teeth, discovered in the Landes region of southwest France:

The bear and lion teeth are interesting, because these two animals, in the northern bear and African lion-panther rites, respectively, are, as we have seen, equivalent in form…. A mythological association is thus suggested of the bear and lion with the sun, solar eye, slaying eye, and evil eye, as well as with the animal master and the shaman. This must have been for millenniums one of the dominant mythological equations underlying the magic of the Palaeolithic hunt. (Part 4, Section 4, p379)

The bear and the big cats are solar symbols, and despite the different geographical habitats of the animals (and their cults), it is fascinating to see that the cults did overlap in Europe to the point where the burial site would have both bear and cat represented. This clearly has some bearing on Severian’s narrative, with its central solar focus.

The bear and big cat cults come from the Magdalenian period of Cro-Magnon Man (circa 30,000 to 10,000 years ago), but the bear cult seems to be older, arising in the time of Neanderthal Man (circa 200,000 to 25,000 years ago). The Neanderthals also had the curious practice of ritualistic cannibalism in which they ate the brains of their human victims. This grisly detail is re-enacted in The Citadel of the Autarch, where the Old Autarch’s forebrain must be eaten raw by his successor, Severian (The Citadel of the Autarch, chapter 29). So Gene Wolfe is using mythic material that predates Homo Sapiens Sapiens.

But the rites for both bear and cats involved placating the spirits of the slain animals; that is, there was no pattern of killing one and sparing the other, as I have depicted in the text. This would appear to be a departure from what is theorized, and shows Wolfe working with ice-age symbols to tell a different story.

Speculatively, I offer the following interpretation. The bear, because it hibernates, represents the inconstant sun of the north; the big cats, because the winter is mild in their climes, represent the constant sun of the tropics. With a little magical thinking one can easily change cause and effect to determine that it is the bear going into a cave that causes the sun to grow weak (rather than the coming of winter that makes a bear hibernate), so that if one could only keep the bear from the cave, the sun would not weaken. Likewise, if the bear is already in the cave, if it can be driven out then a new sun/new year will begin (as seen in the case of Master Ash).

In the setting of Urth, the bear is unequivocally linked to the Old Sun, the swollen, red, dying sun that will finally go cold and leave the world in a permanent ice age, termed “Ragnarok the Long Winter” in the text. The big cat is identified with the revived New Sun, golden, strong, and undying.

With all of this in mind let us return to the Atrium of Time:

Statues of beasts stood with their backs to the four walls of the court, eyes turned to watch the canted dial: hulking barylambdas; arctothers, the monarchs of bears; glyptodons; smilodons with fangs like glaives. All were dusted with snow. (p43)

The arctother is the waning sun of Northern Winter, the smilodon is the constant sun of the tropics. The central time piece is broken, meaning that the solar “engine” is no longer working, the axis of time is out of alignment, the cycle of seasonal change is coming to a halt. There will no longer be a waxing as the Old Sun is really dying. That all the statues are “dusted with snow” points to the Final Winter that will arrive if the New Sun does not come. Contrast this with the second time Severian visits the Atrium of Time, in the final pages of The Book of the New Sun:

The snow I recalled was gone, but a chill had come into the air to say that it would soon return. A few dead leaves, which must have been carried in some updraft very high indeed, had come to rest here among the dying roses. The tilted dials still cast their crazy shadows, useless as the dead clocks beneath them [in the underground maze], though not so unmoving. The carven animals stared at them, unwinking still. (The Citadel of the Autarch, chapter 38, p312)

Before, the Atrium seemed locked in time; now it seems that the machine of seasonal change has been at least partially repaired; the Ragnarok Winter is not longer a certainty.

Severian is cast as a wolf fighting a series of bears, each guarding a different threshold. Most of these bears die, but Severian only knowingly kills one (the final one) in combat.

The bears are linked to severity, whereas their polar opposites the big cats are linked to mercy/compassion. Once its gem casing is shattered (The Sword of the Lictor, chapter 38), the Claw of the Conciliator is revealed to be a claw indeed, a claw which, by one account, appears to be that of a cat or bird (The Citadel of the Autarch, chapter 8, p63), even though it is ultimately shown to be a rose thorn, still there is this linking of Conciliator to cat. And when Severian becomes the Conciliator, he practices healing (like the Pelerines who carried the Claw and the women-cats who carried Severian) and mercy, with fewer outbursts of severity, thus becoming more catlike (as opposed to being just anti-bear).

Because Severian (the wolf) is becoming the Conciliator (the cat), it is fitting that each threshold guardian be a bear (the polar opposite of the cat and the superior enemy of the wolf). This bear threshold is less a station of the cross than a position on the clock: an “hour of the bear” that is repeated over and over again. But this repetition is not that of a closed circle of stasis, nor an inward spiral of regression, instead it is an expanding spiral of progressive evolution.

Starting from the resonances of one puzzling scene I have traced a hidden structure to the Urth Cycle, a series of bearish threshold guardians who recede into the background, yet continue to mark the personal growth of Severian. The inclusion of both the magicians and Agia within the initial quotation for this essay seems far more than merely an allusion to the bearers of claw-like weapons, rather, it is a powerful link to the polar opposites of bear and big cat.

Footnotes

1. “Oreb” is a biblical name originally belonging to one of a pair of Midianite leaders captured and killed by the Ephraimites in Judges 7.25. The other leader’s name was Zeeb. “Oreb” means “raven”, while “Zeeb” means “wolf”. (return to essay)

Works Cited

Campbell, Joseph          The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology Viking Penguin, New York, 1976 [paperback]

Cirlot, J. E.                    A Dictionary of Symbols Philosophical Library, New York, 1962

Wolfe, Gene

The Shadow of the Torturer Simon & Schuster, New York, 1980

The Claw of the Conciliator Simon & Schuster, New York, 1981

The Sword of the Lictor Simon & Schuster, New York, 1981.

The Citadel of the Autarch Simon & Schuster, New York, 1983

The Urth of the New Sun Tor, New York, 1987.

Copyright © Michael Andre-Driussi 2003