H'mmm

Lee Berman · 18 Nov 2011, 14:04 · from 2011-November.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: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2011 09:04:35 -0500
Subject: (urth) H'mmm
Message-ID: <SNT123-W536253C5D90517C726DD2ECFC40 at phx.gbl>

>Marc Aramini: It's not that they grow up to be animals, its that they hybridize 
>with a genetic template to survive and pass on the conjoined genetic material, 
>something which IS seen in the mating of inhumi....vegetable become animal through 
>transubstantiation, the meaning of the eucharist: grapes become blood.

I'm completely with Marc on this. Brilliant analogy. The connection between inhumi and 
lianas (and trees and Neighbors) is primarily spiritual. There is a biological connection 
implied because the entire Sun Series has a devotion to the premise that there is a 
scientific level of understanding to all spiritual things. Think Dr. Crane's burst blood 
vessel explanation for an epiphany. Crane may be right but he misses the point: the flesh 
participates in experiential events but the spirit is what matters most.

It is unfair to try to pin Marc down to explain the specifics of the biological connection 
between vines and inhumi when the text obviously doesn't supply them. This is akin to the
dismissive strategies of our resident Atheist Warriors in here. If there is no hard science
explanation for something, it doesn't exist.

Wolfe has called the Thecla feast in BotNS a "diabolical eucharist". He has also said that
evil only exists as a distorted form of good. Traditional vampires pass their essence to
their victims but Wolfe adds the reverse process to his inhumi, showing that he recognizes
the power of the vampire myth resides in its nature as a diabolical eucharist.

Wine to blood, vines to inhumi, Dionysus to Christ. The comparisons are not so hard to see.
And, if we are attuned to Wolfe's deeper message, we are not to dismiss spirituality or its
basis, just because current scientific knowledge does not explain it.

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