Tzadkiel/Melek Taus

Lane Haygood · 09 Jul 2010, 18:56 · from 2010-July.txt.gz

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From: lhaygood at gmail.com (Lane Haygood)
Date: Fri, 9 Jul 2010 13:56:24 -0500
Subject: (urth) Tzadkiel/Melek Taus
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Aren't we forgetting someone else near and dear to Wolfe's heart that
once used a devastating flood to bring renewal to a world dying,
choked with sin?

Why are we viewing the flood as "bad" or as a punishment?  Floods,
even non-divine ones, are capable of destruction, sure, but they also
renew and refresh and carry things to new places.  I always viewed the
flood as something necessary to the creation of Ushas (esp. given the
use of the term Ushas in a play called "Eschatology and Genesis" and
what is said about it there) because it swept away the things that had
poisoned Urth, like Erebus/Abaia (demons, or in the BOTNS parlance,
maybe some sort of hybrid of creatures with hieros).  At least, that's
what I got from the demons' (in E&G) talk about attempting to "poison
the seed" via Jahi (the serpent? I think Jahi means "serpent of fire"
in Japanese, but my Japanese is rusty).  Anyway, the way I understood
it was that Erebus/Abaia/the other vaguely Lovecraftian baddies of the
BOTNS were the results, like other cacogens, of genetic
experiments/AI/whatever, but that they went "wrong" whereas the
Hierogrammates went "right."  Naturally, the ones that went right
would want to cull the bad lines, and to do that, you've got to wipe
them out.  What better way than a gravitationally-induced flood that
both destroys the old and corrupt and makes way for the new (as well
as renewing the dying sun)?

Or it could be the Benadryll from last night still weighs heavily on my mind.

LH

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