Tzadkiel's form

Mark Millman · 20 Sep 2014, 00:39 · from 2014-September.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: markjmillman at gmail.com (Mark Millman)
Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 20:39:28 -0400
Subject: (urth) Tzadkiel's form
In-Reply-To: <BLU175-W47A2BDFF64F83332A9F4B4CFB40 at phx.gbl>
References: <BLU175-W47A2BDFF64F83332A9F4B4CFB40 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <CAD2109dgLddHyXfH3NnWM54EnACMz_cHzAcc9KDEy8sJZ_qNXw at mail.gmail.com>

Dear Lee,

On Thursday 18 September 2014, you wrote:

> . . . I will disagree with one of your interpre-
> tations . . .
>
>> . . . [W]e at least know . . .
>> Wolfe . . . distinguished
>> Typhon . . . from Typhoeus . . .
>
>
> I disagree that Wolfe is truly distinguishing
> these two. . . .

Well, fair enough.  It's also possible that Wolfe distinguished
between them while writing New Sun, but later changed his mind and
decided to conflate them in Long Sun and Short Sun.

> I truly think Wolfe used the idea of elec-
> tronic cards to represent Whorl gods as a
> metaphor meaning that gods are able to be
> shuffled and redealt as history progresses.
> Thus the pagan gods the ancients worships
> were not just imaginary or entirely discon-
> nected from the Judeo-Christian God. They
> were, in some way, an earlier version of Him.

Or, at least, the impulse to worship them was a step toward
worshipping the true G-d, as you go on to suggest:

> If the ancients made the mistake of worship-
> ping fallen angels/demons instead of Jeho-
> vah, Wolfe appears sympathetic and finds
> it an easy mistake for them to have made.
> They were large, supernatural beings who
> demanded to be worshipped. The Flood and
> the coming of Jesus were steps toward
> helping humanity recognize the true God.

I disagree with you on many, many issues in interpreting Wolfe, but I
agree that Wolfe sees progress toward religious enlightenment (and
probably most other desirable ends as well) as incremental and
contingent (in the historical sense; i.e., that actions and events are
shaped by and reflect their environments).

Best,

Mark Millman

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