TWK: 7 world cosmology

James Wynn · 10 Dec 2005, 16:31 · from 2005-December.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: thewynns at earthlink.net (James Wynn)
Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2005 11:31:36 -0500
Subject: (urth) TWK: 7 world cosmology
References: <000a01c5fd70$2b785cc0$dc3ec6d8 at rclackey.stic.net>
Message-ID: <003d01c5fda7$314f3f10$0201a8c0 at wdw.disney.com>

>To say that it is "just a story" isn't good enough, not for Wolfe. He could
>have left the High God out of this cosmology and avoided the issue, maybe.
>Then it would have been "just a story". There were "gods" in the Sun cycle,
>too, but God was always around the corner, never out of touch. I recall no
>instances of prayer, not even an oath, directed to God in TWK. The concept
>doesn't even seem to exist, and there are two levels of beings between man
>and God. Am I missing something?

Acts 17:29-30
"Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that
the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man's
device. And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commands all
men every where to repent."

What's my point? That even if Wolfe would *not* write a story set in a world
where the worship of created beings was not only accepted but required (and
I doubt he would not), Mythgarthr and above might exist during such a "time
of ignorance" in which God "winks" at such things.

On the other hand, before humans in Mythgarthr were "raised" from animals,
they presumably did not worship anything at all. So now they worship the
Overcyns. When they are further "raised" to Skai, they will worship Parka
and Michael, and when they are further "raised" they will worship The Most
High God. Disiri was also "raised" from gathered detritus.

++++++++++++++

Probably, the reason I don't find the theology of TWK troubling as you do,
is that I don't believe that the Seven Worlds exist in the same categorical
sense that ours does (or in the sense that Urth is presumed to).

For example ONE: There might have been an Arthur who led a temporary and
failed alliance in the area around Hadrian's Wall in the 5th or 6th century,
but the King Arthur we know of from Le Mort d'Arthur et al is not that
Arthur. HE is an 11th century king, and the stories surrounding him are of
mythological and cosmological origin and predate him. He has been "raised"
to another level beyond mundane history.

For example TWO: I still believe that Art Ormsby is in that ambulance Able
saw. The Seven Worlds exist in a world of metaphor in which, Wolfe *might*
be illustrating, we ALL partake; so possibly, it "pre-existed" Art's
abduction (if pre-existed is the right word for a place outside of Time and
"Reality") . It is not just *in* Art, but it is *in* Art for the purposes of
this story.

It is not Narnia. It is not Oz. It more like Alice's rabbit hole, and it is
at least more like Tolkien's Middle Earth, which is described as existing in
human Earth's pre-history, but an utterly implausible history.

In conclusion, the physics of the connection between the Seven Worlds and
ours are those of "Story and Poetry."

(all of which doesn't explain Mag and Mother and such, but I think it might
help avoid wandering down some blind alleys)

J

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net