Aquastors and Eidolons: A Discussion
> Whoops--in my previous message, "coo coup/fish & fowl," I used the
> word "eidolon" when I should have used "aquastor" (even though I
> think that they might be used interchangably by the commonality of
> the Commonwealth, for my own sense of mental cohesion I like to keep
> them separate: "eidolon" as beam-to-the-brain ghost, and "aquastor"
> as physically manifested ghost of hologrammic silvery dust).
I tried to make this distinction myself once, and I came away with the impression that "aquastor" and "eidolon" were two words for the same technology, or perhaps just slightly different implementations. I don't have the reference here, but I definitely recall Barbatus using the word "tangible" to describe eidolons. There's certainly room for disagreement on this, but my interpretation is that aquastors or eidolons are manufactured from locally available matter, held together for a time by sheer force of mechanical will, and revert (usually!) to the original material when the mind's control lapses.
The material used to construct aquastors should be finely divisible, readily available, and ideally should have interesting electrical properties.
First of all, we both agree that the words seem to be used interchangeably as a synonym for "phantom." And I'll bet I can get you to agree that the originating mind can be organic as well as non-organic ("mechanical" is not quite right, since even our puny present thinking engines aren't mechanical in nature), so we agree there, too. (Next: grappling with the idea that the range of these phantom projecting deus ex machinas is measured in =time= rather than =space=.) As for aquastors being made of water, that's in the Lexicon, but, somehow unsatisfied, I continue to poke around for other layers. (I think Gene Wolfe once mentioned that they were like tulpas--see short story "Melting"--which makes perfect sense. But they aren't called "tulpas," they are called "aquastors," and he doesn't usually make up words. Or so I've been led to believe. <g>)
The bit of Barbatus talking is probably from within the pyramid in URTH, where Severian is =finally= coming to grips with the idea that he died back at the beginning of the novel. Another part is where aged Eata says he thinks the Severian before him is a ghost.
However, for my pointers I took precedence within the text: and the aquastor definition is given in CITADEL on the ride from behind enemy lines to the beach, I believe. In Cyriaca's charming sketch of posthistory, she tells of a time when ghosts that nobody else could see were beamed into people's heads directly as guardian angels--thus, something different from the solidified hologram being assigned to "aquastor."
Back to Barbatus: without the text in front of me, I think you are right in the sense that B is (maybe) saying that an eidolon can become an aquastor, and that a sufficiently powered aquastor can gain more and more substance until it is as independent and as real as humans are. (Kinda like the phantom warriors of Barsoom, if you recall.)
In psychic terms they're made of ectoplasm!
I just re-read BotNS (in preparation for the lamentably lost Disclave discussion) and I've come to think that there is no difference (_pace_ mantis) between eidolons and aquastors. Well, that's not precisely true, so allow me to qualify: the physical manifestations that Severian sees, and for that matter, that Gunnie and Apheta see, are produced by the identical machine in an identical fashion from identical materials. (The aquastor Malrubius speaks of this machine, if you'll recall, when Severian is returned to the seaside below Gyoll in _Citadel_, saying it has a range of only a few thousand years.) The distinction between a common eidolon and the aquastors, I think, is that the aquastors are given a special office (cf. mantis' earlier post linking "aquastor" to Latin _quaesitor_ and the position it indicates) and, almost certainly, special programming and knowledge in addition to that which comes automatically as a result of Severian's memories of their models. Notice that the letter stolen from Severian on the ship Tzadkiel was given to him by "the aquastors for Urth"--that "for" is significant. It suggests that their post is an appointed one. While it might equally well be argued that they are the aquastors for Urth because they were created as specialized, single-purpose instruments for the job, the fact that Wolfe describes their dissolution in terms almost identical to those he uses for the disappearance of the eidolons after the fight in the Hall of Justice on Yesod, and the time that he has Severian refer to Malrubius and Triskele as eidolons (I'm sorry; the book's not with me, so I can't provide a page reference, but I'm pretty sure it's in _Urth_) impose the view that any modifications they may have undergone are minor compared to their similarities with other eidolons.
This in turn resolves the question of whether, when Severian is resurrected on the ship Tzadkiel, he is brought back as an eidolon or as an aquastor. They're the same thing, so the significant differences between his resurrection and the creation of the other eidolons are simply that he is not allowed to disperse, thus giving him time to anchor himself in the world by breathing, eating, etc., and that he is made not from a single person's recollection of him, but from the totality of his own memories of himself, since his brain is available for complete download. (This last point, by the way, echoes something that Wolfe says in "The Other Dead Man". In that story, the protagonist observes that Hap, after his revival by the medical unit, seems to be more like the computer's idea of what Hap should be, rather than what the man himself, his friend, was like. Later, after the protagonist's own revival, he notices that he seems to behave in some cases almost without volition--I submit it's because those particular acts were conditioned by the computer's expectations of him, rather than by his own "natural" impulses to action.)
The visions and dreams that Severian has, in which he sees Malrubius and Triskele, are perhaps responsible for clouding the issue of the distinction between eidolons and aquastors. I see those episodes as being analogous to communications from Erebus or Abaia, sendings from minds (or mechanical equivalents, as on the Whorl, though this is not necessarily the case; possibly Tzadkiel's mind approaches the power of the others' minds, though he is doubtless more discreet in its use) vastly more powerful than human ones that have little or no objectively verifiable manifestation in the material world. The eidolons are, of course, fully material while being maintained, and can leave footprints in the sand and cuts and bruises on Severian and Gunnie.
A post script: I'd like to address the nature of homunculi too, but I don't think that Wolfe tells us enough about them for me to do so; I'll therefore restrict myself to a few comments. All of Baldanders' work that we hear about is performed on human victims, and I believe the suggestion is that he is rooted in a scientific materialism, indicating that Talos is probably built from parts (though not necessarily ones stolen from living creatures; perhaps he's a pre-fabricated servant) and then animated. Wolfe's descriptions of his face, like that of a stuffed fox, and the immobility of his features that forces him to use the attitude of his head and the placement of the shadows on his face to convey emotion and other non-verbal cues, tend to support this interpretation, as does his scant appetite.
FWIW I agree with you 100 percent. Wolfe uses (or seems to use) "aquastor" and "eidolon" interchangeably. However, at times in the past when I was trying to ferret out the different forms of "ghosts" involved (i.e., hairsplitting) I leaned on "aquastor" as being (1) machine generated (as opposed to biological mind generated), (2) having physical presence; leaving "eidolons" to be the (1) non-physical, beamed directly into the brain, seen by nobody else forms. (In part I derived this from the essentially guardian angel "individual companion/guides that nobody else can see" machine generated ghosts of Cyriaca's tale [leading up to the founding of the Library of Nessus].)
(I don't think that Severian on Tzadkiel was brought back as a beamed-into-the-brain ghost, because I can't imagine whose brain would be beamed-into in this case . . . Zak? Seems circular and redundant. I agree that he was a spirit that became more physical the more he ate and the more time he spent in existence--kind of like the phantom bowmen of Barsoom for sfnal reference, and the underworld shades drinking blood to work up enough energy to slap and tickle, answer questions, that sort of thing, in classical mythology.)
Re: aquastors as agents of Yesodic governors. This is interesting and leads to wondering about how, exactly, Yesod governs all of Briah; most specifically, how Yesod governs the solar system of Urth and Urth itself. Because it seems clear (to me, at least) that Yesod is keeping probationary control over Briah . . . hence the need for the Autarchial Test in Yesod, to lift the probation. But the control that Yesod exerts is not open, rather it is hidden by veils of misinformation (the hierodules would rather be seen/feared as cacogen "demons" rather than worshipped/relied upon as extrasolarian "angels," for example . . . rather like the thinking engines of Cyriaca's tale, again).
There is what =might= be a hint in the one line: "Such rituals are divided into seven orders according to their importance, or as the heptarchs say, their `transcendence'" (IV, ch. 28). The "heptarchs" referred to might very well be the planetary and stellar Yesodic viceroys controlling the key worlds (i.e., Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn) of the Urth system; or they might just be some much more Urthly wandering mystics (who only come to the attention of a fully initiated autarch preparing to take the journey to Yesod--i.e., the "Lamed Wufniks" of Borges's BOOK OF IMAGINARY BEINGS).
- I found this definition of Eidolon in the Oxford English Dictionary on-line. "An unsubstantial image, spectre, phantom". I also put the word Aquastor into Google (it's not in the O.E.D.) and found this link to Urth.net. The writer may just have cracked it. http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0017/0074.shtml
Crom 20091230
Aquastor, or Aquaster, is an esoteric term coined and used by Paracelsus. It denotes an entity formed by the power of a concentrated thought. This being can obtain a life of its own and can even assume physical form. The aquastor is astral in nature and does not possess spiritual characteristics. Rather, it is controlled by the mind of the person exercising willful imagination. If the imagination of the creator is strong, but unbalanced, the Aquastor can still come into being, but cannot be wielded. Examples of such uncontrolled Aquastors are the Succubus and the Incubus.
This suggests that the story of the Student and his Son is an exemplar for the creation of an Aquastor.
By contrast:
In ancient Greek literature, an eidolon (plural: eidola or eidolons) is a spirit-image of a living or dead person; a shade or phantom look-alike of the human form.
Dan'l 20160531