Notes Ignota: Part the Fourth

Notes on Ignota
A collection of notes and queries on ‘Too Like the Lightning’ compiled by CAMESTROS FELAPTON, at the Request of Certain Parties.

Page numbers and text are from the 2016 Tor US hardback edition. Errors and typos are mine except where indicated. The notes are not authorised by the author or editorialised by the editor. I’m speculating people! Latin translations are my best guess from Google translate and I don’t really know much Latin – corrections welcome.

Page 31 Chapter the Third: The Most Important People in the World
•    Dante’s Purgatory. Dante degli Alighieri 1265 – 1321, Italian poet famous for his Divine Comedy. The Divine Comedy is in three parts, Inferno (hell), Purgatorio (purgatory) and Paradiso (heaven). Purgatory being the place in the Catholic conception of the afterlife where repentant sinners go before being admitted to heaven after atoning for their earthly sins. In the book Dante is guided by the Roman poet Virgil. Dante’s Purgatory is a mountain divided into terraces. Each terrace is assigned a sin and sinners repent that sin under guidance. At the top is the earthly paradise (i.e. another kind of utopia) the final spot before heaven.
•    ‘Krepolsky’s earliest spectacle cities’ – the top hit for the name Krepolsky is the tor.com extract of this book.
•    ‘a butler for his master’ – just noting that theme again.
•    ‘Square and compass’ – a masonic symbol intended to represent the measurement tools of stone workers. It often is shown with a ‘G’ inside, which would be appropriate given Martin Guildbreaker’s surname.
•    ‘Familiaris Regni’ – familiarise regis is a person who is part of a monarch’s entourage. This may include high ranking servants, courtiers and advisors but essentially people who speak to the king and act on his behalf.
Page 32
•    ‘Annus Dialogorum’ – years of dialogue? Actually explained later in the text.
•    ‘Sanctum Sanctorum’ – the holy of holies, the most sacred place inside a temple, in particular within the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem where the ark of the covenant was kept. Masonic tradition claims descent from the builders of Solomon’s temple.
Page 33
•    ‘Black Sakura’ – sakura is the Japanese term for cherry blossom. Blossom keeps cropping up.
Page 34
Page 35
•    ‘set-set nets’ & ‘Cartesian’ – of or pertaining to Rene Descartes e.g. ‘Cartesian coordinates’ refer to his system of rectangular coordinates. More relevantly ‘Cartesian Theater’ is a term coined by cognitive philosopher Daniel C Dennet for a view of the mind in which our we see ourselves as sitting within our minds watching the input from the outside world. Alternatively given ‘set-set nets’ it is possible this refers to the Cartesian product which isa kind of multiplication of sets. For example the cartesian product of the set {a,b,c} and {1,2,3}  is {a1,a2,a3,b1,b2,b3,c1,c2,c3}. Maybe it’s both.
•    ‘It was common in our eighteenth century’ – Mycroft shifts to a dialogue format and says that it was common in the 18th century. Given he has expected us to keep up with a wider ranging set of references, it is odd that he points out how common dialogues used to be. Most famously, Plato’s work are written as dialogues and much later works (e.g. by Galileo) often presented arguments as dialogues.
Page 36
•    ‘Utopians’ – a subset of Mycroft’s society but also a reference to Thomas More again.
•    ‘Eureka’s bed’ – ‘Eureka’ being the famous exclamation of Archimedes the famous Greek mathematician who was later killed by a Roman soldier.
Page 37
•    “Good morning, Nepos’ – nepos was latin for grandchild and then later nephew, from which we get the term ’nepotism’. Julius Nepos was arguably the last of the western Roman emperors.
Page 38
•    ‘There is not no truth in such speculation’ Mycroft claims that this ‘awkward precision’ results from Martin translating from Latin. His statement implies that there is some truth in the speculation but is expressed as a negation.
•    ‘President Ganymede’ – this is another Troy connection. Ganymede was a beautiful youth who was adopted by Zeus to serve the gods on Olympus (there is a sexual implication). Ganymede was the son of Tros, who founded the city of Troy.
Page 39
Page 40
•    ‘cherry tree blooms pink’ blossom again
•    Machiavelli – Nicolo Machiavelli 1469-1527 is of course, well known. Enlightenment thinkers such as Denis Diderot saw his infamous book ‘The Prince’ as a satire i.e. that Maciaveli was attempting to warn people about tyrants rather than write a handy manual on how to be a tyrant.
Page 41
•    ‘Ojiro Cardigan Sniper’ Cardigan is a place in Wales and the Earl of Cardigan led the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean war. The knitted waistcoat of British officers became known as ‘cardigans’. It is not really a name. ‘Sniper’ is another name-verb-name, a snipe is a bird, to snipe was to try and hunt such a bird hence ‘sniper’ for a person who shoots precisely from a distance. I don’t know if ‘Ojiro’ has military significance.