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On Tue, 17 Jun 1997, Kevin McGuire wrote:
Silk's paganism (though certainly more technological than Latro's) strikes me as similar in some ways to the Soldier books, in that Gene seems to be making Silk at the start of the Long Sun a "virtuous pagan." Which is to say a good person who died before Christianity, and thus without the salvation of the Church - these were the folks that Dante consigned to the first (and not altogether unpleasant) circle of Hell. Wolfe believes that those who came before us were intelligent people whose ideas about their world were entirely reasonable given their circumstances, and in the Whorl, what could be more reasonable than believing in gods who actually appear. Silk is the transition state from Latro's vivid pagan world-view to Severian's christian one.
Both Latro's and Silk's pagan gods are false not because they don't exist or because they aren't very powerful, but because they aren't good.
-Rostrum