Gnosticism in BotNS

David Stockhoff · 08 Apr 2009, 18:24 · from 2009-April.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Wed, 08 Apr 2009 14:24:15 -0400
Subject: (urth) Gnosticism in BotNS
In-Reply-To: <mailman.9442.1239206788.12296.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
References: <mailman.9442.1239206788.12296.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <49DCEBCF.8040601 at verizon.net>

The topic of gnosticism has come up before, but I couldn't recall some 
of the other clues to its conscious presence as an underpinning to 
BotNS. I stumbled on it in looking into the tribade matter.

Claw, chapter 10, Vodalus:

" ... No, we are not diminished in wisdom. We are diminished in power. 
Study has advanced without letup, but even as men have learned all that 
is needful for

mastery, the strength of the world has been exhausted. We exist now, and 
precariously, upon the ruin of those who preceded us. While some skim 
the air in

their fliers, ten thousand leagues in a day, we others creep upon the 
skin of Urth, unable to go from one horizon to the next before the 
westernmost has

lifted itself to veil the sun. You spoke a moment ago of checkmating 
that mewling fool the Autarch. I want you to conceive now of two 
autarchs?two great

powers striving for mastery. The white seeks to maintain things as they 
are, the black to set Man's foot on the road to domination again. I 
called it the black

by chance, but *it would be well to remember that it is by night that we 
see the stars strongly; they are remote and all but invisible in the red 
light of day*.

Now, of those two powers, which would you serve?"

This is classic gnostic imagery. Since gnosticism posits a false local 
Creator and a true universal Creator, Vodalus seems to align himself 
with true knowledge. However. his knowledge is probably to be regarded 
as false, if not Satanic, even though the true god is more like the 
hidden one than like the light-of-day one. We could probably usefully 
compare the libertines' anticipation of sexual experience through the 
alzabo with Severian's mastery of self through the alzabo. Severian 
supplants and supercedes both autarchs by conciliating between their 
desires for Man.

Remember the inscription in the mausoleum: Look, and See. God must be 
sought, not received. The Conciliator also is associated with gnostic 
imagery (the Black Sun). Silk, in promoting the Outsider, plays a 
similar role. So Wolfe basically uses gnostic imagery, I think, to 
create a tension between failed approaches to the Increate that is 
resolved by the "proper" approach. Something like that.

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