Damn filthy Hiero-wasp-creatures

Jeff Wilson · 09 Jan 2008, 07:48 · from 2008-January.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: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Wed, 09 Jan 2008 01:48:56 -0600
Subject: (urth) Damn filthy Hiero-wasp-creatures
In-Reply-To: <000c01c851c0$f2be7d40$38ca5a42 at rclackey.stic.net>
References: <000c01c851c0$f2be7d40$38ca5a42 at rclackey.stic.net>
Message-ID: <47847C68.4050404 at io.com>

Roy C. Lackey wrote:
> Andrew wrote:
>> One of his functions no doubt is to take the burden of guilt for
>> the coming destruction away from the Hiero-dudes. As T says in his
>> parting words, Urth will be destroyed at *Sev's* command - not T's.
> 
> And just before saying that, Tzadkiel said, "The death agonies of the world
> you know will be offered to the Increate. [. . .] Much that is beautiful
> will perish, and with it most of your race; but your home will be reborn."
> (153) And that seems to be the point of it all. Bad-ol'-Man needed to be
> slapped down -- again. That's how the god-game works. Sacrifice in an
> attempt to placate a wrathful god, a conciliation made by a conciliator.
> Only Sev isn't the one who had to pay the price, no matter how bad he said
> he felt about it all after the fact. After all, torturers are famous for
> their sympathetic qualities.

But Severian is also the Autarch, the Epitome of Urth - so it's a 
willing, self-sacrifice as far as that goes. (Severian survives, but is 
no longer Autarch or epitome of anything.)

Or not. All of this, with the "higher" creatures knowing no better the 
Increate's wishes, and with "evil" men actually serving the greater good 
by their parts in the Increate's plan - it makes a pretty good case for 
moral relativism.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson >

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