M&D, the Internet&W.A.S.T.E

[Bill Burns]

At 09:40 AM 3/7/97 -0800, David C. wrote:

>Seems so to me too, but it worries me that as far as I know Hermes, 
>belonging to the seafaring Greeks, was associated with all the things you 
>mention but not with boats.  I was going to say that his counterpart 
>Anubis was associated with boats even thought the Egyptians didn't go to 
>sea much, and then I remembered that of course the Egyptians were 
>river-folk, and their funerals ofetn involved literal river travel, and 
>*crossing* a river is a big-time symbol for dying.  So the Greeks gave 
>that job to Charon and put the river underground, having no really 
>impressive rivers in their own land.

Yes. I think the parallel relationship between Anubis and Hermes is
interesting in light of the use to which this allusion is put, but I noted
Hermes' other associations more because of the general connections Pynchon
readers might find between the Hermetic qualities and Pynchon's themes.

<snip>

>This gets a bit far afield from Gravity's Rainbow, but it shows the 
>shiftiness of these symbolic systems, which of course were not intended 
>to be systems, after all.  

Sometimes the symbolic systems develop new signifieds to stand for vestigal
signifiers. What I mean is that dieties, such as Hermes, who have
relationships to dieties in other mythologies often have residual symbols
that express similar mysteries. Anubis mediates the course of souls between
life and death (or transfers them after death). Hermes's sceptre could be
seen as a vestige of this concept (the continuum between life and death
similar to the continuum between those things which are life giving or life
preserving--pharamcopeia--and those things which are life
destroying--toxins). Anyway, I haven't fleshed this relationship out yet
(obviously), but I find the variations and similarities between Hermes and
Anubis compelling.

In a side thread with someone named Denny (denpatt at sjm.infi.net), I posed
the following question: In *what way* are the foax on the Anubis dead? 


wdburns at micron.net
"There are three kinds of people in this world: those who can count and
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