Grand Unified Theory

Mark Lewin · 27 Aug 2010, 15:14 · from 2010-August.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: mark at marklewin.com (Mark Lewin)
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2010 16:14:02 +0100
Subject: (urth) Grand Unified Theory
In-Reply-To: <4C719E1C.2020101 at gmail.com>
References: <SNT123-W45F0C661F47BC0FAEDEE3BCF9E0 at phx.gbl>
	<4C719E1C.2020101 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <AANLkTikO9=gFMQ1P9ugvvmq5SsT=KTUAMrdo0897yH5=@mail.gmail.com>

Apologies if anyone has made this connection already, but there's a comment
by Wolfe in the Jordan
interview<http://mysite.verizon.net/~vze2tmhh/gwjbj2.html#fem> which
would appear to back this up:

*JJ:* I want to ask you about Laura in *There Are Doors*. Having only been
through it once and scanned it yesterday, I'm still not exactly sure about
what Laura is.

*GW:* Laura is my idea of what a pagan goddess might be who survived into
the Christian world. One of the places where I probably split off from
conventional Catholic thinking is that I* believe that the gods of paganism
were real*. I don't think that they are entitled to the worship that they
received from the pagans. I think what many of the biblical writers are
saying is, "Yes, these are real powers, but it is wrong for you to give to
them the honors that are due to God alone." And I think that that is exactly
correct. Now, if Aphrodite were to survive into the contemporary world, what
would she be like? Well, Laura was a shot at trying to show what she might
be like
Best regards,

Mark Lewin
mark at marklewin.com



>> Q. Why is there so much congruence and convergence in the themes of
>> ancient religions and
>> early Judeo-Christianity? Multiple gods with animalistic natures, giants,
>> shapechangers, etc.
>>
>> A. People in the olden days were just as smart and insightful as we are.
>> Chances are they
>> were all seeing something real which gave rise to the similarities in
>> early religions. The
>> gods, monsters and magic of the olden days was based on something people
>> saw then which we
>> are not seeing today.
>>
>> Q. Why do we not see the same mythological inspirations that our ancestors
>> saw?
>>
>> A. They have been cleansed (though perhaps not fully) from the world by
>> two Judeo-Christian
>> events, Judeo= Flood.  Christian= Savior.
>>
>> The Garden of Eden seems to depict forest-dwelling human beings who don't
>> use fire or tools or
>> wear clothing. Anthropology tells us we have ancestors who fit that
>> description. The Original
>> Sin story seems to suggest that these simple human beings were brought out
>> of their idyllic
>> existence through the actions and temptations of non-human intelligence.
>>
>> Trying to retain a  scientific view, there were no other extant
>> intelligent species on earth
>> so the source of this non-human intelligence must be extra-terrestrial.
>> Aliens. That's what we'd
>> call them anyway. Back then they were called gods, angels, monsters,
>> demons, fallen angels,
>> giants, vampires nephilim, etc. etc.
>>
>> Some were relatively good to the simple primates species they found on
>> earth, introducing them to
>> various forms of knowledge and technology. Others were bad, seeking to
>> dominate and enslave us
>> and even interbreed with us.
>>
>> Interbreeding with humans is a common theme in mythology (even in the
>> Bible) but it doesn't sound
>> scientifically possible. But, a very common theme in ancient mythologies
>> is that the gods/demons
>> are  shapechangers. If such a shape change was accompanied by a DNA change
>> then interbreeding
>> becomes possible- with the proviso, as noted in 5HoC, that a shapechanger
>> would not be identical to
>> its model as it would want to retain the ability to change shape. Thus the
>> DNA of a shapechanging
>> alien imitating a human would not be purely human but contain impurities.
>>
>> I suppose there are more details, but that's basically it. I get the sense
>> that this is Gene Wolfe's
>> view of what happened in the ancient world. And I find that by keeping it
>> in mind I can make sense
>> of pretty much everything, including dreams and stories and plays, in
>> BotNS. It helps with Long and
>> Short Sun also and others also.
>>
>>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20100827/e5382503/attachment.htm>

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