Cirin
From CerebusWiki
Appears in 100, 151-152, 154-156, 158-160, 162-166, 168-189, 194 & 195 Cameos/Mentions in 20, 28, 38, 161, 167, 225.
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Character History
The aardvark known in the series as Cirin was originally called Serna.
Serna and the original Cirin would meet in a library in Unshib where Cirin would study and Serna would ask questions and offer comments. Along with Cirin, Serna introduced their new philosophy to the women of their community of Riverside through the quilting circle.
As the quilting circles become more in number, Serna becomes the de facto Communal Safety officer. She executes any man who is guilty of domestic violence. Serna starts training a "sisterhood of assassins in secret -- calling them Cirinists" (issue 194) in an homage to the real Cirin.
Serna's Communal Safety Officers, now called Cirinists, start growing in number. They stop going to the quilting circles, but still claim a percentage of the resources.
One night Serna shows up in Cirin's bedroom, and calls Cirin by her name, Serna. Serna, now taking Cirin's name, charges the real Cirin with "undermining the five cornerstones through excessive appropriation of resources for communal safety." Serna, now calling herself Cirin, and two other Cirinists find the real Cirin guilty of the charges and sentence her to internment for life.
Cirin goes into to seclusion due to what happened to Serna, the real Cirin, and then institutes a 6th cornerstone of Cirinism.
Author of The New Matriarchy, "Dualism as Fallacy" (issue 20, p. 4), and presumably other works.
She "supported rebellions in Dehrsion, Eshnosopur and Enothas. She's supplying arms and equipment to the Borealan rebels in the Blood Wars and she has solid treaties with the neighbouring Feldwar States." Po. p. 54, High Society.
Traits
Spiritual and Political head of the Cirinists. She is also an aardvark, though not a dwarfish one; if anything, she may be suffering from giantism.
She has a very bad temper when she gets annoyed.
She is very strong, and has an excellent sense of smell (162, p.5).
She communicates with her followers, the Cirinists, at times, telepathically. She is also seen communicating telepathically with Cerebus at various times.
She only has three fingers and one thumb on each hand.
Quotes
Dave Speaks about Cirin
From the Questions on Flight:
Q4. Cirin reveals she wants to keep Cerebus alive (i152). We learn later that the reason for this is she hopes to create more aardvarks through Cerebus' hermaphroditic nature. Is she incapable of giving birth, and if not does this mean that Sir Gerrik is her real son and therefore her proof that she cannot produce an Aardvark?
DAVE: Cirin was infuriated by the fact that she couldn't give birth to another aardvark largely as an element of her overwhelming maternal vanity, the same maternal vanity that keeps mothers from seeing their axe-murderer sons as anything but misunderstood little darlings. It's all a matter of your reaction to being exceptional. As I say, Po's reaction was: if I'm that profoundly different from everyone else, what business do I have interfering? Cirin's reaction was: I'm that much better than everyone else so it's up to me to produce more like me in order to run everything properly because everyone else has made a mess of everything. Even among the exceptional she was exceptional. She knew that aardvarks were spontaneous mutations and that there were few if any instances of aardvarks even passing on limited aspects to their human offspring (i.e. Shep Shep's three toes). She could accept that about others but not about herself. She had to be the Mother of All Aardvarks. The fact that her son was human was a personal affront to her. There hadn't been a lot of female aardvarks if you read between the lines of the story and you don't need much exposure to Cirin to understand why that is. . . The fact that Cerebus might be able to impregnate himself only added to her fury since that seemed a greater likelihood of producing purer aardvarkian offspring. She produced a human infant and called it a day-it would be just too destructive of her over-inflated opinion of herself if she had had any more failures. Cerebus didn't produce any offspring for a long time which served as a kind of salve to her ego and compelled her in the direction of genetic engineering. If Cerebus was going to beat her in the baby aardvark sweepstakes, maybe she could beat him on the inside rail down the home stretch by learning how to grow aardvarks from scratch like plants.
