Gnosticism & Wolfe (was "traveling north")

James Wynn · 04 Jun 2010, 17:07 · from 2010-June.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: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Fri, 04 Jun 2010 12:07:59 -0500
Subject: (urth) Gnosticism & Wolfe (was "traveling north")
In-Reply-To: <4C08ECA9.9080007 at verizon.net>
References: <mailman.24806.1275638231.5093.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
	<4C08ECA9.9080007 at verizon.net>
Message-ID: <4C0932EF.3000205 at gmail.com>

 >>The figurative worlds of Severian and Silk are Gnostic
 >>ones not Judeo-Apostolic ones. Those protagonists act,
 >>and achieve, within their worlds as the Gnostic Christ does.
 >>Not as the Johanine Christ actsJames, you should post this kind of 
stuff more often.

 >Would it be safe to say that the apparent theme or motif of incest 
committed
 >by Severian derives directly from the twinned sexes comprising the 
gnostic God?
 >If so, necessarily, Valeria must be Severian's sister, as has been 
suggested.

There's nothing inconsistent about incest between the important 
characters of Gnosticism (the influence of Egyptian philosphy and myth 
ensures that). Norea was said in some writings to be the wife and sister 
of Seth, while simultaneously half of a syzygy. That said, who Norea was 
depends on who you are reading. For others, she is the wife of Noah (a 
hostile relationship there --like Sev and Valeria-- since she burned 
down his ark three times). The problem with saying "Valeria must be 
Severian's sister" is that Wolfe so happily plays with the definitions 
of terms. In The Book of the Short Sun, the Rajan calls Jahlee (the 
inhuma bearing, I believe, Chenille's soul) his daughter and his sister. 
So you're not just dealing with the twisted and unintuitive world of 
Gnosticism, but also the twisted worlds of Wolfe where little is as it 
seems.

J.

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