Baptism and Confirmation: Shadow of the Torturer: Chapter I

Lee · 22 Aug 2014, 15:17 · from 2014-August.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee)
Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2014 11:17:51 -0400
Subject: (urth) Baptism and Confirmation: Shadow of the Torturer: Chapter I
Message-ID: <BLU175-W42788C152A59C975716E7ACFD00 at phx.gbl>

>Marco Checchini: Later, in the Claw of Conciliator, Severian will receive

>the sacrament of Eucharist in the form of the flesh of Thecla.


>Marc Aramini: And to some degree the conciliator redeems the diabolical Eucharist -
>Thecla is brought to genuine life not only because of the analept of the
>alzabo, but because of who is consuming her flesh.



I am guessing Marc gets the "diabolical" adjective for this eucharist from the James

Jordan interview with Gene Wolfe back from 1992. An excerpt and a link to that interview

will be found below. I find Wolfe to be at his least guarded and most revelatory in this

interview and would recommend it, in its entirety, to any who are unfamiliar with it.



>JJ: ...There also seem to be images of the eucharist


>GW: There are diabolical eucharists: people who are eating corpses in order to get the 

>memory of the dead person...


>JJ: Now the climax of that inversion seems to be when Severian actually eats the brains

>of the preceding autarch. Did you see that as another form of the diabolical communion? 

>Or something that was necessary? It seems to be necessary to the novel.



>GW: What I was doing was to say that in order to be a good ruler you must be familiar with 

>the tradition of that rule---of that country and of the people in the past who have 

>administered that rule. No, not diabolical in that case. The diabolical thing is more 

>Vodalus and the graverobbers



My own personal favorite Wolfe quote from that interview is:


>JJ: Which is another way of saying, do we have fallen angels here or some type of power that 

>really was operative in the world before the kingdom of God?



>GW: That is my personal belief. I think that the gods of paganism were real. But what I tried 

>to do was to write about that pagan world as the pagans themselves wrote about it.


That opened up worlds of understanding for me. The link to the whole interview is here:


http://members.bellatlantic.net/~vze2tmhh/wolfejbj.html

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