Original Sin and pagan gods

b sharp · 06 Aug 2006, 12:48 · from 2006-August.txt.gz

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From: bsharporflat at hotmail.com (b sharp)
Date: Sun, 06 Aug 2006 08:48:25 -0400
Subject: (urth) Original Sin and pagan gods
Message-ID: <BAY103-F28D18B94BE0204BA083747D7560 at phx.gbl>

Continuing to try to interpret the subtext of BotNS in terms of Christianity 
replacing pagan religions:

The flood was meant to purify humanity from contamination while Jesus 
brought a different way of purifying sin.  The contamination of humanity 
with nephilim and Original Sin were both products of people interacting with 
fallen angels or demons/devils.

What was Original Sin?  Eating of the forbidden fruit from the Tree of 
Knowledge was a disobedience of God's rule but what knowledge was gained? 
Adam and Eve's first act after eating the fruit was not to invent calculus 
or philosophy but to cover themselves with fig leaves.  So the forbidden 
knowledge they gained was a sexual awareness of each other.  Why would sex 
be forbidden when God gave us the equipment and later wanted the Earth 
populated with humans?

The anthropologist's "Universal Taboo" is incest.  From a SF (and perhaps 
Wolfe's) perspective, using Adam's rib to create Eve would be a form of 
cloning.  So Adam and Eve were really the closest of siblings, identical 
twins.  Even if that weren't true, Adam and Eve's children were full 
siblings and their intercourse was all incestuous.  Perhaps the Universal 
Taboo and Original Sin are the same thing and that's what God was trying to 
avoid in Eden.

The pagan competitors to Judeo-Christianity seem to condone incest.  Their 
pantheons of gods and goddesses were all brothers and sisters or otherwise 
close family members and it was normal for them to mate with each other.  Of 
course they didn't have a lot of choices of mates and this religious quirk 
was probably meant to justify the incestuous marriages of ruling dynasties 
which maintained royal blood lines.  Monothesim allows God to remain pure, 
with no incest possible.  This may be why monotheism was first popular among 
nomadic Hebrews and Arabs who didn't have an incestuous ruling class.

In Greek mythology it was common for the gods to go outside their incestuous 
marriages and mate with humans.  Zeus was most notorious for this, though it 
infuriated his sister/wife, Hera.  He had to hide his transgressions by 
appearing to human women in various forms, most notably as a bull, a swan 
and a shower of golden light.  Wolfe mentions a beam of light, a bull and a 
swan in the Play and in a dream sequence after the battle of Orithyia.  I 
think this is Wolfe saying that humanity and specifically, Severian's 
family, have been contaminated by a matings with the Urth equivalent of  
pagan gods.

I think this idea is supported by combining the 5HoC idea of shapeshipfters 
who can imitate humans closely enough to mate and the direct interaction of 
Greek gods and humans we see in the Latro books.  Moreover I was really 
struck recently by this Wolfe discussion about the Latro books in a James 
Jordan interview:

>JJ: Which is another way of saying, do we have fallen angels here or some 
>type of power that >really was operative in the world before the kingdom of 
>God?

>GW: That is my personal belief. I think that the gods of paganism were 
>real. But what I tried to do >was to write about that pagan world as the 
>pagans themselves wrote about it. If we read modern >historians we are 
>reading a very rationalistic viewpoint of this which says that all of these 
>people >were absolutely wasting their time by building temples to Ares or 
>Apollo or you name it. And by >offering sacrifices in worship and all that 
>it was nothing there. Nothing at all there and that >whether it is true or 
>not that certainly is not the way the people who were doing it felt. They 
> >were convinced that there was something there and they had all sorts of 
>legends and so forth >about the appearances of the god and in fact there is 
>one place in the Acts where Paul and >another one of the apostles are 
>mistaken for Zeus and Mercury. Zeus and Hermes, we are mixing >the Latin 
>and the Greek which is what I was trying to get away from. They are 
>mistaken for Zeus >and Hermes in human form because people in those days 
>expected that you could see Zeus and >Hermes in human form. I am not so 
>sure they were wrong. I am not convinced that they were >wrong. We love to 
>think how much smarter we are than people of ancient times or biblical 
>times >or so forth but I am very dubious about that.

-bsharp

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