christ, already

Lee Berman · 16 Dec 2010, 05:13 · from 2010-December.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2010 00:13:52 -0500
Subject: (urth) christ, already
Message-ID: <SNT123-W57E6984205C499AB269625CF150 at phx.gbl>

In reading Long Sun, I also got the impression that The Outsider was to be considered
the same as our God, creator of all universes. Even if this Briah universe never had a 
Jesus Christ, the Outsider could enlighten Silk with his story from another universe.

Then I read Short Sun, and specifically, RttW, and my impression got turned on its head.
Wolfe goes through a long and dramatic exposition which dramatically resolves in revealing
that the Outsider is, essentially, Dionysus. It isn't just a hint, he brings the Guy's 
mother (Thyone) into it!

For me this says either Briah has a different God than we do or Gene Wolfe is willing to 
extend the identity of our God to encompass some pagan/gnostic ideas of Him. I say this in 
light of quotes below from the Gene WOlfe-James Jordan interview. 

(Here is the link to the whole thing:  http://mysite.verizon.net/~vze2tmhh/wolfejbj.html#sold)

>JJ: Which is another way of saying, do we have fallen angels here or some type of power that 
>really was operative in the world before the kingdom of God?

>GW: That is my personal belief. I think that the gods of paganism were real. But what I tried to 
>do was to write about that pagan world as the pagans themselves wrote about it. If we read modern 
>historians we are reading a very rationalistic viewpoint of this which says that all of these people 
>were absolutely wasting their time by building temples to Ares or Apollo or you name it. And by offering 
>sacrifices in worship and all that it was nothing there. Nothing at all there and that whether it is 
>true or not that certainly is not the way the people who were doing it felt. They were convinced that 
>there was something there and they had all sorts of legends and so forth about the appearances of the 
>god and in fact there is one place in the Acts where Paul and another one of the apostles are mistaken 
>for Zeus and Mercury. Zeus and Hermes, we are mixing the Latin and the Greek which is what I was trying 
>to get away from. They are mistaken for Zeus and Hermes in human form because people in those days expected 
>that you could see Zeus and Hermes in human form. I am not so sure they were wrong. I am not convinced that 
>they were wrong. We love to think how much smarter we are than people of ancient times or biblical times or 
>so forth but I am very dubious about that.

That was in regard to a question about the Soldier books but as Wolfe talks about his "personal belief" I think
it applies to the Sun series also. It may be relevant that many pagans believe that Christ was an aspect of
the One True God, Dionysus/Pan, but Jahweh of the Old Testament is more of an evil demiurge.

Okay more from that interview:

>JJ: ....Okay, you do seem to have some symbolic overtones in The Soldier of Arete. Certainly with Latro, or 
>Lucius,' I guess that was a real name and that means wolf, there is a wolf aspect in him being from Rome being 
>a descendant of Romulus or at least in some way and then Ares being primary agricultural and marshall god of Rome, 
>Marias. He actually seems to incarnate Ares on occasion. 

Impressive actually. In one paragraph, James Jordan (in 1996) manages to pre-sage Borski's werewolfe theory and
hint at James Wynn's ideas on Typhon, Mars, Romulus, etc. Wolfe does not comment in his reply.

Also perhaps a clue to BotNS: 

>GW: We vastly underestimate the importance of Jesus. We think we don't. We have all these churches and we say how 
>can we be underestimating Jesus? We don't **until we start trying to figure out what it would be like if he had never 
>lived**. 

It's a shame James Jordan doesn't contribute to this Board anymore. I enjoyed a few conversations with him. The whole 
long interview is SO worth reading. I think he got more out of Gene Wolfe than all other interviewers combined.

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