(urth) A new mystery ...

John Watkins john.watkins04 at gmail.com
Wed Dec 3 04:20:50 PST 2008


On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 4:43 AM, Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net> wrote:

> I don't want to dredge up the tired comparisons of Severian to Jesus or
> Christ to the Conciliator again. But I can't resist something I've pointed
> out before, something that seems to me to quash the whole notion.
>
> In the Christian mythos, Jesus *died* to save the world, so to speak, even
> if that world was in the everafter. He was unique, in the Christian mythos,
> in that he was resurrected. Sure, Severian died a few times and was
> resurrected, one way or the other, and as the Conciliator he brought about
> the renewal of Urth as Ushas. But the people of Urth had to die while
> Severian *lived*, as a petty god, sitting on the beach writing his memoirs
> and watching the girls go by. It just ain't the same.

Another big difference is that Severian's resurrections are explicitly
something that Christ's was not.  Severian either revives after a
moment of death or, if his body is badly mangled, has a new body
created so that his Aristotelian form can be reimprinted upon it.

Not only does this leave out the extraordinarily important Christian
element of the descent into Hades, a/k/a the Harrowing of Hell, but I
think it's probably heretical in the ancient faiths to think of
Christ's resurrection as merely being a "second Christmas"--i.e., that
the divine Form once again joins to mortal Matter, no differently than
it did 33 years earlier.

Again, the comparison is there deliberately, but Severian is meant to
suffer by it.




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