Rocket-structure.4

[Terrance]

The Zone-Hereros are mystically oriented, believing that
There may be no
gods, but there is a pattern: names by themselves may have
no magic, but the act of naming, the physical utterance,
obeys the pattern.


Nordhausen means dwellings in the north. They associate the
north with the rocket. 
Zone-Hereros are aware that the act of naming is
significant.
Names can create patterns of association and meaning. Thus,
Enzian is able
through name and association of Bleicherode and Blicker to
provide Weissman (white man) with his SS code
name, Blicero, associated with the death and the whiteness
of the cathedrals of death-dealing Europe, the color
of the hostile rooms of Slothrop's conditioning, and most
particularly with Gottfried's experience as he approaches
death:

Brenschluss, when was Brenschluss
it can't be this soon. ..but the
burnt out tail opening is swinging
across the sun and through the blonde
hair of the victim here's a Brocken
specter, someone's, something's shadow
projected from out here in the bright
sun and darkening sky into the region
of gold, of whitening, of growing
still as underwater as Gravity dips
away briefly. ..what is this death
but a whitening, a carrying of white-
ness to ultrawhite, what is it but
bleaches, detergents, oxidizers, abra-
sives--Streckefuss he's been today to
the boy's tormented muscles, but more
appropriately he is Blicker, Bleicherode,
Bleacher, Blicero, extending, rarefying
the Caucasian pallor to an abolition of
pigment...


In this passage Gottfried brings together whiteness, death,
and the chemistry of control that has figured prominently in
the novel. 
The Hereros also have a rocket and a rocket mandala which is
a technological reference for the launch steps as well as
the essential symbolic components of Herero culture and
cosmogony, as Andreas tells Slothrop:

Andreas set [the mandala] on the ground,
turns it till the K points northwest. Klar, touching each
letter, Entluftung, these are the female letters. North
letters. In our villages
the women lived in huts on the northern half of the circle,
the men on the
south. The village itself was a mandala. Klar is
fertilization and birth,
Entluftung is the breath, the soul. ZUndung and Vorstufe are
the male signs, the
activities, fire and preparation or building. And in the
center, here, Hauptstufe. It
is the pen where we keep the sacred cattle. The souls of the
ancestors. All
the same here. Birth, soul, fire, building. Male and female,
together...Opposites
together.

The opposites are controlled by their mythic association
within the mandala which is the containment of polarities
and represents that paradox  which is able to contain
these opposites.  The preserving effect of the harmony of
opposites is one that Slothrop senses immediately in the
mandala which he hands back to Andreas,
hoping that it will permit trouble to pass over:
"mba-kayere...a spell against Marvy tonight, against
Tchitcherine. A mezuzah. A situation of possible threat is
turned into a rare moment of his feeling that there can be
the kind preterition that preserves life.