The Wizard

Lee Berman · 06 Mar 2012, 03:01 · from 2012-March.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: Mon, 5 Mar 2012 22:01:40 -0500
Subject: (urth) The Wizard
Message-ID: <SNT123-W457935D3BDC7D5A9B64451CF510 at phx.gbl>

>Dan'l Danehey-Oakes:  Not to agree with Gerry or anything, but clearly the Christian
>allusions are primary.

Perhaps we can all agree that what we see as "primary" might say more about who we are

than what is clear in the books. Allusions to pagan mythology and Christianity are 

both there. So which is more important?

The pagan and gnostic references do seem more primary to me. As I see it, the references

to Christianity are about the trappings of the church, not Christ himself. There are 

roods and gammdions and signs of addition. There are various forms of the eucharist and 

sermons and confessions and so on.

There is even a guy who resembles Jesus. But I see no Christ. I see no christian salvation

offered by anyone; not Severian, not Silk, not SilkHorn, not even The Outsider. All  these 

guys seem to offer is material salvation not spiritual. Salvation means surviving. Moving 

to a different planet or having your planet reformed or something like that  

And that is the differece between, say, Moses and Jesus Christ. And perhaps the difference 

between the brutal Old Testament demiurge and the forgiving New Testament God. Moses led

the chosen to a Promised Land. Christ led (and leads) to an entirely new plane of existence.

Wolfe talks about the Sun Series taking place in an alternate universe than our own and I

think this is the reason he needed that device. He could not build a futuristic gnostic

monster and horror filled world in a universe where Jesus Christ has already appeared.
Once Christ has been here, that's it. Christian salvation becomes an option. An option 

seemingly unavailable to anyone in Briah.

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