What's So Great About Ushas?

Roy C. Lackey · 14 Jul 2008, 21:50 · from 2008-July.txt.gz

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From: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2008 16:50:08 -0500
Subject: (urth) What's So Great About Ushas?
Message-ID: <001601c8e5fb$9863f9e0$70cd4a0c at rclackey.stic.net>

Andrew wrote:
>Given all this, I still can't figure out why you believe that the
>Hierogrammates are working directly for the Increate. They weren't
>created directly by him; they display no apparent superiority to
>man apart from wielding greater power; their explicit agenda is
>entirely self-serving with no hint of holiness or whatever. And so
>on ...

It could be summed up as basically what Dave Tallman said last month about a
five-volume heroic epic being turned into a horror story if Ushas was
intended by Wolfe to be viewed as a bad thing. I don't think Wolfe would
have written such a story, and extra-textual comments he has made suggest
that he didn't--the stuff about the "do nothing future" and Severian being,
despite his horrific nurturing and obvious character flaws, a man trying to
do the right thing.

Urth was unique as the birthplace of humanity, both from the perspective of
the Increate and the Hierogrammates, which is why Apheta said that the
Hieros, if they were to be reproduced at all in Briah, would come from that
particular "strand of your race" on Urth, presumably because that is the way
it happened before in that other universe. No other planet would do.

There is no logical justification for Sev, as Epitome, to be truly
representative of Urth's people (he ruled only a small fraction of the
planet's people and was elected by none of them), *unless* he is
nevertheless truly a religious figure, in the same sense that Christ could
take upon himself the sins of all mankind. In practical terms, all the
peoples of Urth would be wiped out by the birth pangs of Ushas, and they
were. So Sev was de facto the Epitome of Urth, and I think that's why Wolfe
put him in that role.

The Hierogrammates had the power to destroy Urth and create Ushas without
bothering with the religious rigmarole that went on in URTH. If they were
simply bad guys, they could have skipped all that stuff and gone on to
pursue their nefarious ends. What would the consent of the condemned matter
to them? But it did matter. I think it mattered because that is the way the
Increate wanted it, just as in Christianity people must accept Jesus as
Savior in order to be saved. I think the Increate imposed the condition of
consent from the people of Urth upon the Hierogrammates, so they had to be
working directly for the Increate.

The destruction of Urth was not just a generic natural disaster that
resulted in great loss of life. It was a deliberate act that rewrote the
Increate's creation. I don't think Wolfe's omnipotent God would have
permitted that to happen to mankind's home unless it served some greater
purpose, whatever that purpose might have been.

(FWIW, I have a hard time fitting the futuristic Green Man into the
prospective Hieros line. He seems to be rather a pacific fellow whose kind
will not even kill to eat. It's hard to imagine his kind will produce the
cruel men who fashion Hierogrammates in Briah. Maybe he signals the end of
the senseless cycles.)

That the Hierogrammates also had their own agenda, lied and manipulated
events and people, doesn't change anything. It just shows that they were
imperfect beings, as are all beings who are not God in Wolfe's scheme of
things, just like the gods in the upper tiers of the Seven Worlds Cosmology
in TWK who pursued their own ends.

-Roy

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