{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/5798",
    "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": 5798,
    "subject": "Urth Digest, Vol 76, Issue 14",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2010-12-03T20:07:17+00:00",
    "last": "2010-12-03T20:07:17+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<AANLkTi=Xkvcp_eqjqS3Fg8eg13fZq7LVg-mCRB61ag=q@mail.gmail.com>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Andrew Mason",
        "address": "andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com"
      },
      "date": "2010-12-03T20:07:17+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Urth Digest, Vol 76, Issue 14",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 2,
          "text": "Lee Berman wrote:\nAndrew Mason: ...if Dionysus is seen as a prefiguring of Christ..."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Yes. The direction my own thoughts have been going lately. But if Briah is our\nuniverse, a Christian universe, why do we see a Dionysian figure 30,000\n(or whatever it is) years after the birth of Christ?"
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Well, if Dionysus is a prefiguring of Christ, then there are\nsimilarities between Christ and Dionysus; the imagery does not become\ninappropriate just because Christ has come.\n\nPerhaps we can postulate that"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Christianity died out on Earth/Urth and has to go through certain stages to regain\nit. Or, as Wolfe has said in interviews, we can view this as another, cosmically earlier\nuniverse than ours, perhaps one which has never had a Savior."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "I think it's clear that there was once on Urth something at least\nclosely analogous to Christianity, and this has indeed died out. This\nis so both because of the continuing echoes of it in the religion of\nUrth, and because of the close similarity of the past of Urth to our\nhistory in general - freemen of Lombardy, Fair Rosamund, Lewis Carroll\n- which would hardly be possible if Christianity were missing. So I\nthink there must have been a Jesus-analogue in this world as well.\nWhether he actually was a Saviour, or whether in that world he really\nwas just someone 'possessed and enlightened', I don't know; but in\neither case I think he was a manifestation of the Increate.\n\n(The fact, if it is one, that it's another world does not immediately\nrule out Jesus being in it, in any case. C.S. Lewis imagines Jesus\nmanifesting himself in other universes, though those are parallel, not\nsuccessive. But I've no idea what Wolfe thinks about this.)"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Must I choose? Or can I continue to accept both possibilities simultaneously?\nMust I feel compelled to weigh the evidence, pick a \"most likely\" and commit myself and\nmy eternal faith to that interpretation?"
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "No, of course not. I wasn't trying to provide an answer to that\nquestion in any case.  What I thought you were saying is that it\nseemed implausible that the Outsider was the Increate, because of the\nuse of Dionysian imagery in connection with him. My response was that\nsince Dionysian imagery is applied to Christ, and Christ is, or is\nthought to be, an incarnation of the Increate, such imagery is\nappropriate for him, and should not shake our confidence in the\nidentity of the Outsider (which I think there is an enormous amount of\nevidence supporting). This is so whether Slk's enlightenment comes\nbefore or after the Incarnation."
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}