(urth) TWK: 7 world cosmology

[Chris]

Are we sure that the banishment is permanent, or could there be some process 
of redemption unique to that realm?

I cannot help but think that there is an element of "gathering the sparks" 
here. Once you've gathered enough "goodness" on a lower level, when its 
concentration reaches a high enough level you can uplift it to the next, 
more pure, level. And the inhabitants there are presumably trying to gather 
enough to uplift them to an even higher level of purity.

One possible wrinkle to this, though, is that there is a certain atemporal 
nature to this whole process. That is, in a sense, the slaying of Ymir is 
*always still happening*. The descent and uplift are contemporaneous, and so 
from a strictly temporal perspective the inhabitants of Kleos will appear to 
be static.

>I wrote:
> >Michael didn't meet Able in Kleos, so clearly he had come down from his
>high
> >place. Presumably he was able to return, unlike his brother 
>servants/angels
> >who went down to Skai. What's the difference?
>
>hartshorn wrote:
> >I suspect the thing that bound the descended angels to Skai was probably
>the
> >slaying of Ymir and the shedding of Ymir's blood.
>
>That's the answer I was looking for and the direction I wanted to take this
>thread. People seem to accept the idea that the inhabitants of Kleos are in
>fact angels of one stripe or another; at least none have argued against it.
>The exact wording in the text regarding those descended angels is "they
>could never go back." The question then becomes, *why* couldn't they go
>back?
>
>Was there something related to the shedding of blood that physically (if
>such a word applies to angels) prohibited them from getting back to Kleos,
>or was it that they were not *permitted* to return, presumably by the
>Highest God? I suspect the latter.
>
>Why would God punish them for doing what they did? Remember, they were
>trying to cast out the inevitable imperfection of the world God had created
>for them, to make that world as near as possible to God's perfection. And
>they did succeed in casting out much of the imperfection, personified as
>Ymir in Skai.
>
>Able was a hero, a man who sacrificed his life in the course of killing a
>monster, Grengarm. He was rewarded by being elevated to Skai and becoming a
>god to men. Some angels voluntarily gave up their places in Kleos to go 
>down
>and kill a monster, Ymir. They were punished by being demoted permanently 
>to
>Skai and forced to accept their brethren who stayed at home as gods. What's
>the difference? Why was the one rewarded and the other punished for doing
>the same basic thing?
>
>-Roy
>
>_______________________________________________
>Urth Mailing List
>To post, write urth at urth.net
>Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net