What's So Great About Ushas?

John Watkins · 17 Jul 2008, 15:28 · from 2008-July.txt.gz

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From: john.watkins04 at gmail.com (John Watkins)
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:28:50 -0400
Subject: (urth) What's So Great About Ushas?
In-Reply-To: <1176.72.171.0.149.1216302834.squirrel at brunians.org>
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Message-ID: <93d4039f0807170828q33478ec2u5daf01f8dfc4f7d5 at mail.gmail.com>

I think we're just discussing the finer points of the role of planetary
intelligences in Ptolemaic cosmology.  It's pretty far afield from the
original point about the nature of the Hierogrammates.

While I think it's obvious that the Hierogrammates occupy a position
"higher" than human beings, it's also fairly clear that they are not
literally angels, unlike Lewis's eldila or Tolkien's Ainur or even Wolfe's
own inhabitants of Kleos--they are not spirits, they are not direct
creations of God, they are not eternal, etc.  As such, I don't think they
have the innate moral authority to bring the catacylsm of the New Sun.  The
mere fact that Christianity in most of its forms assumes the existence of
angelic beings doesn't establish that the Hierogrammates are such beings
anymore than it establishes that the Overcyns or gods of Latro's world are.


On 7/17/08, brunians at brunians.org <brunians at brunians.org> wrote:
>
> The concept of 'the planet Earth', is very new. Planets are lights that
> wander around in the sky. Earth is either the ground or the plane of the
> ecliptic (cf "Hamlet's Mill" for this last one). Celestial objects are
> thought of as having intelligences and spirits, which are integrated into
> the pseudo-Dionysian hierarchy.
>
> What are we arguing about? Since the ancients didn't have a concept of
> 'the planet Earth' I don't have any problem admitting that they did not
> attribute the characteristics of a celestial body to it.
>
>
>
> .
>
>
> > Are we talking about a literal personality for the Earth, or for the
> > universe?
> >
> > Lewis actually explicitly notes in The Discarded Image that the Earth was
> > not classically given a guiding intelligence.  This is because, in the
> > Ptolemaic system, the Earth is stationary while the heavens move.  Being
> > stationary, the Earth obviously needs no intelligence guiding its
> > movement.
> > According to Lewis, the first person to propose that the Great Chain of
> > Being including the Earth possessing a distinct "persona" in the sense
> > that
> > Saturn and Jupiter do was Dante (Discarded Image 139, if anyone has it),
> > who
> > proposed that the governing intelligence of Earth was Fortune.  Lewis
> > tweaked that idea to make the governing intelligence of Earth a Satan
> > analogue in the Space Trilogy.
> >
> > Nevertheless, despite the (very debatable) commonality of "great chain of
> > being" theories (and conflating them all into a single system is kind of
> > sloppy), the "people who came up with Christianity" did not typically
> > ascribe some sort of "literal persona" to the planet Earth.  The Great
> > Chain
> > most just posited that there must be a bunch of interesting spiritual
> > beings
> > "higher" than man and "lower" than God.
> >
> > As for the universe as a whole, the closest thing the ancients and
> > medievals
> > had to such a concept was the Primum Mobile.  It's true that philosophers
> > tended to talk about the Primum Mobile as though it had a persona, but
> > Lewis
> > is quick to point out that that's just how people spoke back then--to say
> > "the Primum Mobile revolves because it loves God" is no more literal than
> > to
> > say "water desires to run downhill," which is exactly how medievals (and
> > Tzadkiel, for that matter) did in fact talk.  Lewis actually mocks
> moderns
> > for taking this literally by pointing out that we use an even more
> > personalizing metaphor--"Water runs downhill because it must obey the
> laws
> > of physics."
> >
> > So I'm far from convinced that the ancients or medievals as a rule
> > ascribed
> > a "personality" to the "World."  A necessary obedience to what we'd now
> > call
> > metaphysical laws, sure.
> >
> > On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 2:39 AM, David Duffy <David.Duffy at qimr.edu.au>
> > wrote:
> >
> >> On Thu, 17 Jul 2008, Jeff Wilson wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>> I don't see anything about the world having a literal persona distinct
> >>> from God, and I don't recall seeing anything like that in Aristotle's
> >>> elementalism, either.
> >>>
> >>>
> >> A more recent SFnal realization is in CS Lewis's _Space Trilogy_.  Earth
> >> is
> >> (or has :)) a silent planet.
> >>
> >> David Duffy.
> >>
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