Gwydiona symbolism sounds Hindu but is schematic rather than chaotic.
A bronze and leather chair is decorated with fylfots and vines called crisflowers. The fylfot is the Burning Wheel, thus both the sun and Time. Crisflowers, blooming during the first hay gathering season, are sacred to the Green Boy Aspect of God. Thus, fylfot and crisflowers together mean Time the Destroyer and Regenerator. The leather, from the wild areas, is sacred to the autumnal Huntress Aspect. Linking Huntress and Boy recalls the Night Faces and their other side, the Day Faces. The man-made alloy, bronze, means that:
"'...man embodies the meaning and structure of the world.'" (pp. 563-564)
("Man, the measure of all things.")
Bronze, corroding to green, means that everything vanishes but into new life.
It sounds as if sometime made it up. Well, the author did make it up but it still sounds made up in the text. The Gwydiona mentality is working unconsciously to counteract and contain its own underlying insanity.
4 comments:
Humans contain and channel instinct through culture -- not least, through myth and legend, operating unconsciously.
Hence we don't kill people whenever we're angry with them, hard though that is sometimes... 8-).
Kaor, Paul!
I think that makes sense, the Gwydiona using desperate myth making in frantic attempts to keep their insanity under some control.
Ad astra! Sean
In Internet exchanges, people sometimes become very unpleasant with each other because the other person is (safely) not physically present. We have to learn how to use each new communications technology. Thus, speaking into a phone, then speaking into an ansaphone, were once new experiences, different from face to face conversation.
Paul: well, we could install a 'punch function' -- at a certain point, a boxing glove comes out of the screen and punches the obstreperous in the face...
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