resurrecting a 2002 thread that posits an alternative lineage for Sev

Marc Aramini · 02 Oct 2014, 13:47 · from 2014-October.txt.gz

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From: marcaramini at gmail.com (Marc Aramini)
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2014 06:47:02 -0700
Subject: (urth) resurrecting a 2002 thread that posits an alternative
 lineage for Sev
In-Reply-To: <BLU175-W4D7E8F9A23D86B224C9C7CFB90 at phx.gbl>
References: <BLU175-W4D7E8F9A23D86B224C9C7CFB90 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <CAF1072zt+0144vGvT83BudxXpTy-BumU58XXnzwUJ5A1q1XzBw at mail.gmail.com>

This is obvious, but for me the miracles make him pretty explicitly a
Judeo-Christian wonderworker/savior with a little sin and torture thrown in
for good measure (bleeding from the forehead when he sees the many
eye-winged butterfly, turning water to wine, resurrecting the dead,
healing, carrying a huge cross shaped torture device which is occasionally
planted in the ground, being tempted by Satan almost verbatim (but never,
say, transforming into an animal like a Pagan god)) - my earliest
impression when I was a young boy was not that he was a normal person but a
Christ.  The pagan gods are the unnatural creatures in New Sun whose
mythologies are incorporated and transformed into Christian stories [such
as the flood and the story of Genesis]. (At least throughout The Book of
the New Sun).

I never fancied Sev ordinary. While clearly Wolfe loves playing with
mythical creatures, the importance of his Catholicism to his works
shouldn't be understated.

On Thursday, October 2, 2014, Lee <severiansola at hotmail.com> wrote:

> >On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 7:35 AM, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> Severian is a (pagan) god. He has a presentiment of it at the beginning of
> his story but by the end
>
> of Citadel, we are meant to understand that he was The Conciliator and he
> will be The New Sun.
>
>
> By the end of Urth of the New Sun we also understand that in addition to
> his superhuman healing
>
> powers, he was also worshipped as Apu Punchau, he can breathe underwater,
> he can travel through time
>
>  he is immortal (though not invulnerable), and at the very end he once
> again finds himself worshipped as
>
> a god.
>
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