Jordan Interview

Gerry Quinn · 23 Oct 2011, 09:39 · from 2011-October.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: gerry at bindweed.com (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2011 10:39:13 +0100
Subject: (urth) Jordan Interview
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W106CAE9E1436E3823A5920CFEE0 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W106CAE9E1436E3823A5920CFEE0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <6743119799054FF1BDC80D5B23D350C4@Rover>

From: Lee Berman 

> I do think The Increate mentioned in BotNS might be the Judeo-Christian
> god, Jaweh (or perhaps the God of the Trinity, which some consider to be 
> different than Jaweh).

>  On the other hand, I don't think The Pancreator is the Christian God, nor 
> the Outsider. They seem to be more along the lines of demiurge to me 

Why?  Doesn?t PanCreator just mean ?creator of all? while Increate means ?existing without having created??  Both are attributes of the Christian God (and the Muslim God, who is referenced in BotLS, so we know Islam existed in Urth?s past too).  I think PanCreator and Increate both refer to the same monotheistic tradition, though it may well have evolved new scriptures and iconography.

> For those who think The Outsider is meant to be our "one, true God" of all
> universes I would pose a question:
> 
>  Why is the Outsider repeatedly and strongly characterized as a dark god?

I don?t see that he is.  What examples do you have in mind?  Of course Silk does think of him as being linked to the darkness beyond the Whorl;  but Silk is trapped in a decaying microcosm, and the only hope of salvation is to flee into that spangled darkness.  

The descriptions of the Outsider in the casts of characters at the start of the latter three books are interesting:

Lake: the minor god who enlightened Silk.
Calde: the god of the broken and disparaged, whose realm lies outside the Whorl
Exodus: the god of gods

Given that the writer is Wolfe, and taking into account other events such as Silk?s vision of Jesus, I don?t think this leaves very much room for doubt about the identity of the Outsider.  (One might speculatively identify the three descriptions with the Persons of the Trinity, but that is not essential to the main reading.)

- Gerry Quinn

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20111023/4e16bcfb/attachment.htm>

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