Original Sin and pagan gods

Roy C. Lackey · 10 Aug 2006, 04:45 · 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: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2006 23:45:40 -0500
Subject: (urth) Original Sin and pagan gods
Message-ID: <007601c6bc37$d94c0960$d53ec6d8 at rclackey.stic.net>

Dan'l quoted and wrote:
>> Somewhere is a statement to the effect that with each cycle there is some
>> slight improvement made. Maybe, given enough repetitions, something
>> approaching heavenly perfection will be achieved. Eternity can't get any
>> longer. <g>
>
>I don't recall such a statement, but I've often wondered about this. It
>implies a structure not unlike that in Stapledon's STAR MAKER, in
>which the Star Maker creates successively more complex and successful
>universes (ours being somewhere in the middle) until It creates one which
>achieves a level of universal sentience and perfection that allows that
>universe to become, well, the Star Maker. Import that construct to the
>Christian framework and you get a Creator whose "practice" universes
>gradually get better and better until finally one is "good enough" for the
>Creator to be born in it as Christ.

The statement is one page earlier than the other quotes I gave from chapter
XXXIV in CITADEL.
------------------------------------------
    "Just as a flower blooms, throws down its seed, dies, and rises for its
seed to bloom again, so the universe we know diffuses itself to nullity in
the infinitude of space, gathers its fragments (which because of the
curvature of that space meet at last where they began) and from that seed
blooms again. Each such cycle of flowering and decay marks a divine year.
     "As the flower that comes is like the flower from which it came, so the
universe that comes repeats the one whose ruin was its origin; and this is
as true of its finer features as of its grosser ones: the worlds that arise
are not unlike the worlds that perished, and are peopled by similar races,
though just as the flower evolves from summer to summer, all things advance
by some minute step.
     "In a certain divine year (a time truly inconceivable to us, though
that cycle of the universes was but one in an endless succession), a race
was born that was so like to ours that Master Malrubius did not scruple to
call it human. It expanded among the galaxies of its universe even as we are
said to have done in the remote past, when Urth was, for a time, the center,
or at least the home and symbol, of an empire."
-------------------------------------------

-Roy

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