# "False" Gods *The Whorl list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 18 Jun 1997* > 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. --- ### Michael Straight *18 Jun 1997, 08:40* > 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 ---