Original Sin and pagan gods

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 08 Aug 2006, 18:43 · from 2006-August.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: Tue, 8 Aug 2006 11:43:26 -0700
Subject: (urth) Original Sin and pagan gods
In-Reply-To: <001601c6bab8$5bfb9140$383ec6d8 at rclackey.stic.net>
References: <001601c6bab8$5bfb9140$383ec6d8 at rclackey.stic.net>
Message-ID: <1f7617370608081143q70b819f7he160bd4b1939de4f at mail.gmail.com>

On 8/8/06, Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net> wrote:
> The Hieros were/will be in no sense angelic. They were the race
> of humans, cognates of our (and Severian's) race, who sinned on
> a grand scale in producing the race of beings known as
> Hierogrammates, of which latter group Tzadkiel is an example.

Yes. With the possible exception of "sinned on a grand scale" -- is
producing the Hierogrammates actually a sin? It's clearly part of
a huge _trap_, but that's another issue -- this is exactly how I
understand the case.

The two "hiero" races, Hierodules and Hierogrammates, are trapped
in a cycle of producing each other. Humans at the peak of their
development are the Hierodules; they "uplift" (to use Brin's term) --
that is, interfere in and guide the development of -- the race that
becomes the Hierogrammates. The Hierogrammates survive the
Grand Gnab/Big Bang cycle and guide the development of
humanity, thus resulting in the creation of the Hierodules, etc.

Unclear:  _how_ do the Hierogrammates survive across the
GG/BB gap: is Yesod immune to it? If so, then why do they need
to repeat the cycle; they already exist, they don't need to ensure
their own creation _again_.

Equally unclear: if the HGs only exist because the HDs caused
them to exist, and the HDs oly exist because the HGs caused
_them_ to exist, then how did the whole damned thing get started?

But what's quite clear is that this is an exercise in self-perpetuating
futility, like the cycle of clones in 5HC.

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes, writer, trainer, bon vivant
-----
http://www.livejournal.com/users/sturgeonslawyer
"Shovels are essential to the fantasy genre.
However, they are primarily used by the authors rather than the
characters." -- Stephen R. Donaldson

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