TWK: 7 world cosmology

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 10 Dec 2005, 21:20 · 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: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2005 13:20:18 -0800
Subject: (urth) TWK: 7 world cosmology
In-Reply-To: <15827904692.20051210145053 at poczta.fm>
References: <000a01c5fd70$2b785cc0$dc3ec6d8 at rclackey.stic.net>
	<15827904692.20051210145053 at poczta.fm>
Message-ID: <1f7617370512101320y295fbb5v570b5d4194b5ca78 at mail.gmail.com>

Stanis?aw Bocian wrote:

> Why do you expect all Wolfe's books to be Christian? When pagan gods
> do fit into Christianity?

As I've said before, Wolfe's major project since at least _tBotNS_
seems to be creating situations in which a non-Christian cosmology
is embedded into a larger, ortho-Christian context. The most blatant
example of this is _tBotLS_: the _Whorl_ is a perfect Gnostic kosmos,
embedded into a larger Universe in which there is only one true God
of Christianity (whom Silk knows as 'the Outsider'). We know this
because in Silk's "enlightenment" vision at the beginning of
_Nightside_ he  is shown the Gospel, though he can only understand
the theoanthropos as "a man who has been both enlightened and
possessed by the Outsider."

> This is the best
> orthodox neoplatonism. According to it, any contact between two levels
> needs mediators.

Actually, it isn't so much Neoplatonic as Pagan (in my etc.). It is a
deliberate representation of the world-Ash of Norse myths, with its
higher worlds and its lower worlds, in the form of the later Edda
(which was influenced by both Christianity and Neoplatonism, and
had a High God above all). Similarly, the world of Latro is an
embedding of the Greek myth-world into a larger Christian
context.

--Dan'l

--
I do not fear Satan half so much as I fear those who fear him.
                        -- St Teresa of Avila
http://www.livejournal.com/users/sturgeonslawyer

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