Urth Net
Wolfe's errors
↰ answers Adam Stephanides
· by quotation
Well, one anyway:
Adam wrote re:Crowley:
1 quoted line
Okay, so Crowley didn't deliberately change the number of "suit cards" to 52, as I had thought. There's a more general lesson here, one that applies to Wolfe too. I'm no expert on the history of cards, playing or Tarot, but the books I have consulted give a history that differs from Crowley's. We shouldn't assume that the information we find in reference books--even standard ones--was necessarily what the author had in mind when he or she was writing.
In Soldier Wolfe has Latro sleep with Venus, since after all she is married to Mars and Mars is the god of Rome, so it is appropriate. But in fact, Venus was not married to Mars but to Vulcan, and only had an affair with Mars. Big crisis there, and I was surprised that Wolfe had forgotten it. I asked him about it, and he became a bit confused and said that he thought Mars and Venus were married, and then fell back into saying that perhaps in some versions of the myths they were. Well, that's possible I guess.
And after all, none of us knows everything! But this does show that sometimes when Wolfe is playing with myths and perhaps also with the Bible, he may get some details wrong. Worth bearing in mind when exegeting and interpreting him!
Jim Jordan NUTRIA