Baptism vs. Resurrection

Ouroboros · 05 Nov 1999, 21:23 · from urth-v0028.mbox · original

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: Ouroboros <ottofaij at yahoo.com>
Subject: (urth) Re: Baptism vs. Resurrection
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999 21:23:19
Message-ID: <urth-v0028-0398 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0028/0398.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

<<<<Nessus? I can be mistaken, but I think you mean
the
river Gyoll (is this the correct spelling?). This
could be a Christian paralel, anyway: not with the
resurrection of Christ -- wich, anyway, marks the end
of Jesus's "career" on Earth --, but the Baptism by
John.>>>

Oops! Thanks for the correction, Carlos.=20

However, the Baptism of John is a not a good match
IMO. The bottom of the Nessus represents death. The
nenuphar represents death because "under flower and
leaves are black roots...reaching down in to the dark
waters" at the bottom of the Gyoll (where the
life-giving sun's rays do not reach). Also, Severian
makes a straight-forward comparison between the
necropolis with it's roses and the Gyoll with it's
nenuphars. The Gyoll=3Dgrave.=20

Now, I know the Jordan river has also been a symbol of
death, but the symbol is in *crossing* the river, not
sinking to the bottom of it. Later Severian will cross
the Gyoll but that's the death of Balder not the
baptism of Jesus. And Christian baptism does represent
Jesus' death, burial, and resurrection, but that's not
the kind of baptism John did and a symbol of a symbol
of burial and resurection is top heavy.=20

Finally, in orthodox theology it is at his
resurrection when Jesus' *real* career began. When
Christian's are baptized at their conversion or as
infants it is representative of Jesus' resurrection.
Of course, for Catholic children there is a 13 year
period between baptism and confirmation, but now I'm
chasing rabbits because that's not how Wolfe became a
Christian.

I suppose it's possible both things symbols are being
used simultaneously, but the resurrection of Christ
seems to fit better than his baptism by John.

--Ouroboros
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Bid and sell for free at http://auctions.yahoo.com

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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