Merger

Andrew Mason · 02 Feb 2011, 00:08 · from 2011-February.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: andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com (Andrew Mason)
Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2011 00:08:04 +0000
Subject: (urth) Merger
Message-ID: <AANLkTikQr0FLxKEFyvamAq9=NDiTH5DaCWHkg8G_v-Y9 at mail.gmail.com>

Lee Berman wrote:

>
>>Presumably every cosmic cycle was created by the same entity, including that of Urth and our
>>own if it is different. ?This entity is known on Urth as the Increate or the Pancreator. ?No special
>>characteristics are ascribed to him; in particular there is no suggestion in the text of androgyny.
>
> Unless you know where to look. You may think of God as an incorporeal, distant being who never
> gets personally involved in human affairs but not everyone does and in the mythological past almost
> everyone assumed there were godly appearances on earth in human form. I think this happens in BotNS.

Christianity certainly holds that there have been divine appearances
in human form. Such appearances are referred to in the _Sun_ cycle, at
least in Silk's visions, if nowhere else. I don't see any
contradiction with the idea that the creator of every cycle is the
same.

>
>>It's also suggested that Ah Lah is an alternative name for the Outsider. ?It can hardly be doubted
>>that Increate and Pancreator are also alternate names.
>
> Correct. However the name "Jahweh" or even "God" is suspiciously absent.

It would be odd to use 'God' as a _name_ for the creator in a world
where it is assumed (at least in popular religion) that there are many
gods. The Outsider is called 'the God of gods', and both Silk and
Severian claim that there is only one real God. As for 'Jahveh', that
name is traditionally treated as unspeakable.

Present is the suggestion that
> The Outsider is the God of Wine, Son of Thyone. Can't get a more direct reference to Dionysus than that.

True. However, there are precedents (C.S. Lewis and Wole Soyinka, at
least) for identifying Dionysus with the Christian God. That his
identity as god of wine is emphasised is significant; he has other
aspects which it would be harder to interpret in Christian terms, but
as god of wine it is not unreasonable to associate him with a God who
is reputed to have turned water into wine, and who is regularly
celebrated in a ritual involving wine, through which his followers
attain communion with him (all of which are referred to in the _Sun_
cycle).

> And you correctly deduce that he and the Pancreator are one and the same. I'm not so sure about the
> Increate who was "not created". But Pancreator and demiurge are synonymous enough for me.

In the original, Platonic sense of 'demiurge', in which it simply
means 'maker', undoubtedly the terms are similar. But the Christian
God can also be called a demiurge in that sense. I don't see any
reason to identify the Pancreator with a demiurge in the more specific
gnostic sense.

_Long Sun_ seems to me to be, among other things, an allegory of
gnosticism; but in that the figure who corresponds to the demiurge is
not the Outsider but Pas. The Outsider stands in that story in the
place of the true God, who is outside the world and hidden from it.

The cycle contains clear, massive and pervasive references to the
Christian God. There are quotations from scripture (Joseph's dream,
the sign from the belly of the fish, the vision of Elijah). There  are
rituals of Christian inspiration - not only the eucharist, but the
paschal candle and the Angelus. There is the use of the cross as a
symbol, with definite implications that it is in origin the Outsider's
symbol. There are saints like Katharine and Barbara. (Wolfe's
discussion of Holy Katharine in _Castle of the Otter_ makes it clear
that he does identify her with the - perhaps mythical - Christian
saint of that name.) There visions derived from the life of Jesus.
(I'm not saying that Jesus is literally present within that cycle of
the universe; I am suspending judgement on that. But he is
symbolically present; if the visions are in fact of another person,
that person is being symbolicaly identifed with Jesus.)

Wolfe has said both that Severian is a Christian figure and that he is
a form of the Outsider.

The cycle unquestionably contains many references to pagan traditions,
including, probably, gnostic ones. But I don't see that as a reason
for thinking of the whole universe as a gnostic one; the Christian
imagery seems clearly dominant to me.

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