{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/316",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 316,
    "subject": "Nod",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1998-01-29T17:07:09+00:00",
    "last": "1998-01-29T17:07:09+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0006-0464@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Jim Jordan",
        "address": "jbjordan at gnt.net"
      },
      "date": "1998-01-29T17:07:09+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Nod",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "I know this is late, but a couple of contributions to the Play discussion.\n\n\tI don't know that we have to run too far afield from the Bible itself for\na lot of the factors. With Wolfe, the imagery is often \"Bible + something\nelse,\" with the Bible as the foundation. In this case, at the least it is\n\"Bible + Persian creation myths.\"\n\tIn this case, we have Adam and Eve (with Persian names). Now, in the Bible\nAdam and Eve are the first humans. Their children married each other. The\nmurderous line of Cain founded a civilization around the city of Enoch in\nthe Land of Wandering (Hebrew: Nod). The faithful line of Seth (Abel's\nreplacement after his murder by Cain) founded another. In the course of\ntime, the Sethite \"sons of God\" started marrying the pretty Cainite girls,\nthe \"daughters of (mere) men.\" This resulted in a lot of \"mighty men,\"\nheroes of a sort (gang leaders, probably), who had the best natural\nabilities of both lines, but who used their power for oppression: the\nNephilim. Eventually, only Noah's family was left of the faithful Sethites,\nand you know the rest. Read it in Genesis 2-6.\n\tJewish myths, and some exegetes, suggest another interpretation, which is\nthat the \"sons of God\" who married the \"daughters of men\" were fallen\nangels (demons) who literally married with human women. There are a bunch\nof problems with this notion, one of the principal being that such an\nelaborate angelology does not factor in the early books of the Bible, like\nGenesis.\n\tThere is a third reading of this material, however, and it is the one\nWolfe is using. It is this. When God made Adam and Eve, He did not really\nmake Adam of dust and Eve of Adam's flesh and bone, but rather took a\ncouple of pre-Adamite apelike creatures and converted them into human\nbeings by imparting a soul to them. This notion is usually found in\ntheistic-evolution writings. God gradually raised up a line of apes until\nthey were almost human, and then transformed them (or two of them) into\nhuman beings. Abel and Seth and the other children of Adam and Eve married\ntheir siblings, but since Cain was driven out, he married with one or more\npre-Adamite she-apes; but the offspring had souls and were human.\n\tSomeone who does not know Hebrew would think, reading Genesis 4, that the\nLand of Nod refers to the land of some person named Nod. In fact it means\n\"land of wandering.\" (Wolfe probably knows this, of course.)\n\tNow we have all the information necessary to unpack this aspect of Dr.\nTalos's play. Nod is the pre-Adamite man-ape who rules the land of Nod. He\nexpects that one of his she-ape daughters will marry Cain when he is exiled\nfrom Adam's land. Notice that Nod describes his own way of acting when\nupset as jumping around, hurling rocks down on people, etc.: all monkey\nbusiness. In Wolfe's Talosian parlance, the man-apes like Nod are the\nNephilim.\n\tAll of this could come very easily from Roman Catholic theistic\nevolutionist writers that Wolfe would be familiar with.\n\tOf course, the ape motif relates to Severian's visit to the underground\nmonkey kingdom.\n\n\tSince it has been nearly a decade since I worked through the Severian\nbooks the second time, I'm probably not going to have much to contribute to\nthe discussion until I can get back to them.\n\nNutria"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}