Increate on trial

Chris · 26 Mar 2005, 01:35 · from 2005-March.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: rasputin_ at hotmail.com (Chris)
Date: Sat Mar 26 01:35:06 2005
Subject: (urth) Re: Increate on trial
In-Reply-To: <E1DF7Ts-0004EP-Dt at oceanus.uk.clara.net>
Message-ID: <BAY102-F3524F506E42EF37B6AFDF586420 at phx.gbl>

>There is in fact nothing in boTNS to verify the existence of god:  He is 
>not seen, only his servants are.  Presumably their faces are turned to him 
>and we see only their backs, but they might be faking.   It's all faith and 
>instructions transmitted by messengers.

There is an implication that this role is only perceived to be with the 
Hierogrammates/Hierodules because of the particular stage of the cycle that 
humanity was on at the time. That is, at some other time humanity acted as 
the servants as the Increate to uplift the H's; they are returning the 
favor, and in turn presumably humanity will (in its improved state) act to 
improve the H's even further.

>((In boTSS we do of course have a direct divine contact with man.))

I think that this is at best a gnostic sort of divine contact. The scene in 
which Silkhorn feels the presence behind them... if he had turned around 
they would have seen Wolfe's face.

Of course he did not, because that is not what we do. It is not for the 
created to look on the face of the creator. But Wolfe in a way I think has 
to acknowledge his role as a mediating creator between God and the 
characters in Wolfe's novels.

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