The poor Aelf

thalassocrat at nym.hush.com · 29 Sep 2007, 07:36 · from 2007-September.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: thalassocrat at nym.hush.com (thalassocrat at nym.hush.com)
Date: Sat, 29 Sep 2007 17:36:59 +1000
Subject: (urth) The poor Aelf
Message-ID: <20070929073700.8E97FC3821 at mailserver10.hushmail.com>

On Sat, 29 Sep 2007 08:15:56 +1000 "Roy C. Lackey" 
<rclackey at stic.net> wrote:
>Rostrum wrote:
>>But to take a completely different tack, maybe we need to 
>question
>>this idea that the Aelf have no souls.  How do we know that?  Who 

>told
>>them that?
>
>It was Able who delivered the info (WIZARD, p-46), but it seems to 

>be common
>knowledge. Its validity is apparently corroborated by Able's view 
>of Disiri
>while wearing the magic helmet. The Aelf are granted very long 
>natural lives
>in compensation.

Well, to be precise, Able only says that Aelf spirits are mortal, 
whereas human spirits are immortal. I guess it may be reasonable to 
assume that a mortal spirit doesn't count as a "soul", in the sense 
you intend, in this universe - but the point is debatable. 

I think one of the questions in the background for many of Wolfe's 
books is: "Where's Jesus & what difference will he make?". The 
heroes are sometimes kind of clunky Jesus-prototypes, dimly 
foreshadowing the real McCoy. Able's little personal salvation 
effort, driven by his personal little love, prefigures the 
salvation of all creatures which will be driven by all-embracing 
divine love - etc etc etc.

Why Jesus hasn't impinged on Mythgathr so far - dunno!

But something like that is IMO the only way of making sense of the 
entirely valid points you raise.

>> In the Sun books, Wolfe is constantly giving us robots,
>>animals, vampire leeches, etc. that people treat as soul-less, 
>but
>>turn out to show evidence of a soul.  And in many of those cases, 

>the
>>souls seem somehow derived from contact with human beings.  So 
>maybe
>>the truth is that the Aelf have no souls if they are untethered 
>to the
>>human beings above them through whom they would derive a soul?
>
>This was discussed in the last quarter of '05. Disiri is the only 
>Aelf to
>receive a soul (if she did) we are shown in the text. Able's blood 

>*seemed*
>to be the medium. Baki got Toug's blood, but I don't see that she 
>gained a
>soul by it. The only differences I can see are love and Able's 
>status as a
>god. If there is a rational explanation of this Aelf/soul 
>business, I think
>it has to be largely in that chapter four.

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