Appearances of Inire

James Wynn · 01 Jul 2010, 23:12 · from 2010-July.txt.gz

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From: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Thu, 01 Jul 2010 18:12:37 -0500
Subject: (urth) Appearances of Inire
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> Yes.  Gnosticism posits that "the world" is the creation of the 
> demiurge, a debased being posing as the true God, but that a benign 
> God still exists and calls for our loyalty.  Gnostic Christianity (or 
> Gnosticism proper) posits that Jesus Christ was a sort of messenger 
> from the true God, preaching a rejection of the demiurge.  Orthodox 
> Christianity refers at times to the Devil as "the lord of [the/this] 
> world," with much the same significance.
> See C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy for a literalization of this kind of 
> cosmology.  There, Satan is the local ruler--the planetary genius of 
> Earth--and the true God is the ruler of the universe, from whom Satan 
> originally had authority in fiefdom, but against whom Satan has 
> rebelled.  Of course, the scale is different from the 2) hypothetical 
> (planet versus universe), but from the perspective of Earth there's 
> very little different.

At risk of seeming pedantic, Lewis' cosmology is a little different from 
the Gnostic version. In the Gnostic version, the demiurge (or just as 
often, the demiurges) is the genuine Creator. But because he is 
imperfect, --not the Increate-- the world is imperfect.

In Lewis' version, the Satan is, as you say, a local administrator in 
revolt.

Incidentally, I really like the idea in That Hideous Strength in which 
the Earth-facing side of the moon was blasted into a wasteland during 
the war between the Revolutionaries and the Loyalists, but the "Dark 
Side" (which at the time of writing had never been seen) was covered in 
idyllic forests, and was in Loyalist territory.

u+16b9

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