"False" Gods
The Whorl list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 18 Jun 1997
https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/355

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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

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