A new mystery ...

John Watkins · 03 Dec 2008, 12:20 · from 2008-December.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: john.watkins04 at gmail.com (John Watkins)
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2008 07:20:50 -0500
Subject: (urth) A new mystery ...
In-Reply-To: <001e01c9552b$a5cd0000$88ce4a0c@rclackey>
References: <mailman.28346.1228264770.21489.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
	<4935FD49.8020205 at verizon.net>
	<007001c95506$dc79bbe0$50cd4a0c@rclackey>
	<6168A896-3E7C-4C88-833C-34AB4780F023 at butcherbaker.org>
	<001e01c9552b$a5cd0000$88ce4a0c@rclackey>
Message-ID: <93d4039f0812030420n507a709bs26d77b8989b3f1c1 at mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 4:43 AM, Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net> wrote:

> I don't want to dredge up the tired comparisons of Severian to Jesus or
> Christ to the Conciliator again. But I can't resist something I've pointed
> out before, something that seems to me to quash the whole notion.
>
> In the Christian mythos, Jesus *died* to save the world, so to speak, even
> if that world was in the everafter. He was unique, in the Christian mythos,
> in that he was resurrected. Sure, Severian died a few times and was
> resurrected, one way or the other, and as the Conciliator he brought about
> the renewal of Urth as Ushas. But the people of Urth had to die while
> Severian *lived*, as a petty god, sitting on the beach writing his memoirs
> and watching the girls go by. It just ain't the same.

Another big difference is that Severian's resurrections are explicitly
something that Christ's was not.  Severian either revives after a
moment of death or, if his body is badly mangled, has a new body
created so that his Aristotelian form can be reimprinted upon it.

Not only does this leave out the extraordinarily important Christian
element of the descent into Hades, a/k/a the Harrowing of Hell, but I
think it's probably heretical in the ancient faiths to think of
Christ's resurrection as merely being a "second Christmas"--i.e., that
the divine Form once again joins to mortal Matter, no differently than
it did 33 years earlier.

Again, the comparison is there deliberately, but Severian is meant to
suffer by it.

>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>

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