Subject: (urth) Yesod and Heaven

From: Nicholas Gevers <potto at webmail.co.za>
Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1999 09:25:38 +0000

Following on fascinating remarks by Ori Kowarski and mantis, re the
Hierogrammates as secular conspirators (fallible or not):
1) Even if one views the Hierogrammates as conspirators in their own
secular/evolutionary interests, they can, and in my view should, still
be viewed as instruments of the Increate. Their Yesod is part of a
hierarchy of universes that culminates in Heaven, the pleroma, or
whatever: the home of the Increate. Elsewhere, mantis has speculated
that the immediate cosmic environment of Urth is a hierarchy of three
universes as follows:
                     Yesod
                     Briah
                     Abaddon,
these linked by black holes and White Fountains. But given Wolfe's
Cabbalistic terminology, one should invoke the Sefiroth above Yesod,
to produce a wider scheme of universes as follows:
      The Pleroma (Heaven, the Increate, the Ein Sof)
                       Keter
                  Binah    Chokmah
                 Gevurah     Hesed
                       Tiferet
                    Hod       Netzah
                        Yesod
                      Briah (Malkuth?)
                        Abaddon
If Abaddon is a cognate of Hell, then Yesod is much closer to Hell
than it is to the Increate, whose major Sefiroth or emanations lie
above it in the hierarchy. No wonder, then, that despite their place
in this divine hierarchy, the Hierogrammates of Yesod are readable in
biological terms a la Wright and Kowarski, as scheming, flawed, part
of a cosmic reproductive mechanism, etc; theirs is a universe only
somewhat less carnal than ours. But the Increate still acts through
them, as He does through the denizens of Briah and no doubt Abaddon.
2) I contend that Wolfe's primary challenge to the reader is that of
reading the presence of the Divine in the Mundane, be the Mundane
scheming Hierogrammates or anything Briahtic. Wolfe's characteristic
plot, as I've argued elsewhere, is zig-zag and helter-skelter, with
constant bizarre twists of plot (eg. the Old Autarch in his flier
being the lord of all he surveys, only to be brought low the next
moment), with copious and conflicting casts of characters and bodies
of symbols, for good reason: Wolfe wants both to represent the
distracting, confusing illusion of the carnal world and to intimate
the mastery of God over that confusion. If you attempt to perceive the
pattern behind the chaos, the Divine Will becomes evident, if very
darkly, in the imperfect form thal lies within our comprehension. That
we cannot see the higher (Divine) purpose behind the evolutionary
manoeuverings of the Hierogrammates is no indication that it is not
there.
//--------------------------------------
Nicholas Gevers
potto at webmail.co.za
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