Fairies and Wolfe

Lee Berman · 02 Apr 2012, 19:08 · from 2012-April.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, 2 Apr 2012 15:08:35 -0400
Subject: (urth) Fairies and Wolfe
Message-ID: <SNT123-W53BAF090D56894D9448FD7CF4C0 at phx.gbl>

>Jeff Wilson: Off the cuff, I'd say magic is characterized as an agency that 
>is similar to divine power except that it can be made to do a mortal's 
>bidding. Magic can be couched in material vessels like charms, fetishes, 
>or talking fish, but has the capacity to do what the the invoker 
>subjectively means to do rather than what the material vessels would 
>otherwise do as judged by objective observers.

To play devil's (heh) advocate, I don't then see the distinction between magic 
and divine power. It seems like Moses drawing water from a desert stone or 
Jesus feeding the masses or walking on water would be forms of magic.

>Dude, it's the Trinity.

It might be a trinity but I'm not sure it's The Trinity. There were divine
trinities in religious belief before Jesus was born. Most pertinent being
the one involving Dionysus.

Discussions of the Trinity here have focused on the Long/Short Sun books. But
my own feeling is that the same pre-Christian trinity concept is invoked in
BotNS through Father Inire. As I see it, both his role and his names imply it. 

His role as creator and caretaker of the Commonwealth could be tied to his role
as Pancreator (it is suggested that he might play a similar role for the Ascians).
The "Father" part is manifested in his implied role as Severian's (the Son, the 
Theanthropos) ancestor. And the "Inire" name connection can be traced through Pan 
to Dionysus.

I continue to acknowledge that my Father Inire theory is idiosyncratic and 
individualized. But for me the various pieces keep fitting together too well to 
discard it.

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