(urth) Severian / Christ / Logos / Apocatastasis

Craig Brewer cnbrewer at yahoo.com
Wed Nov 26 10:22:41 PST 2008


_The Lathe of Heaven_ is a decent encapsulation of LeGuin's taoism, methinks.



----- Original Message ----
From: Son of Witz <sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org>
To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2008 12:20:19 PM
Subject: Re: (urth) Severian / Christ / Logos / Apocatastasis


>-----Original Message-----
>From: David Stockhoff [mailto:dstockhoff at verizon.net]
>Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2008 09:47 AM
>To: urth at lists.urth.net
>Subject: Re: (urth) Severian / Christ / Logos / Apocatastasis
>
>I guess one way to sum this up is to say that the theme of BotNS is not morality but myth itself and its ability to approach the Divine. Once you accept that, then the "slippery" questions about Christ/not Christ go away completely. And you're left with a literary retelling of Christian myth---which, as pointed out, is an old tradition, though probably never pulled off with such, as you put it, balls. But the "balls" are really just deep understanding and affection of myth.

Yes.  This is how I feel. I don't care much about the moral questions that the Christ issue brings up.


>Maybe Wolfe sees myth as being in some way higher than religion, because he believes the Divine is most accessible through it. In that case, rather than recasting pagan myth as Christian, as he usually does, in this book he recasts Christian myth as science fiction---the highest form of myth, obviously. ;)

Truly.  At least it's the highest form our Scientific Materialist culture can accept at this point.

>Science fiction has been observed to be the last refuge of theological speculation, as Atwood observed in a review of a Le Guin collection: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15677.

Phillip K. Dick's works shines in that regard.
Whats a good starting point with Le Guin?  Something about that Earthsea title makes me want to avoid it. but I haven't read any of her work.

~witz


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>Message: 1
>Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2008 22:24:27 +0000
>From: "Son of Witz" <sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org>
>Subject: Re: (urth) Severian / Christ / Logos / Apocatastasis
>To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
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>having not read LS, I did my best not to read the first part. (but dang I can't wait to sink my teeth in)
>
>
>> >It is indeed striking that Wolfe is willing to recognize that Christian myth is still myth, and just as subject to reconfiguration and reorganization as any other set of myths---as long as they ultimately point toward a just, monotheistic presence in the universe.
>>  
>
>THANK YOU.
>that's exactly what I'm saying. (not about monotheism or morality, but about Christian myth being myth, and Wolfe's reconfiguration of it)
>I'm not saying he's limiting himself to any exact correspondence with new masks. How boring is that. We've all seen enough of that low grade stuff.
>but that he's mixed all these myths together to arrive at similar (fairly similar or strikingly similar, depending on your take)
>
>Frankly, I've met very few Christian's who consider it myth.
>yet it is most evidently myth. It's our modern conception of myth that's screwed up. Myth does not mean "Old incorrect legend" AT ALL (yes, I'm yelling there)  The plot of the bible could be all literal fact, and it would still be myth. It's a myth about God in the language symbols of Man.  A HUGE portion of the Christian myth is about Resurrection and Death, the reconciliation of debased man with divine God, and Exile and Return.  All the same can be said of Book of the New Sun.
>
>It really matters not if the conflation of the flood and the saving of Urth (and Briah, right?) from death makes it different from the myth of the flood and the myth of salvation.  In fact the conflation is one of the more interesting aspects.  
>
>here's the deal. anyone who's looked at comparative religion with an eye towards understanding the energies that inspire the myths (as opposed to the common goal of disproving myths by finding earlier examples) will tell you that these ideas are expressed again and again and again and again and again.
>Pheonix, Kali, Mithras, Vedic Yugas, Hermes, Zoaraster, Christ etc. Christ is NOT a unique story, unless you want to focus only on plot specifics.
>
>I'm not as well versed in those myths as many here are, but one thing I sense is (not limited to my tossed off examples) they are talking about similar beings, events, concepts even though the mapping of the cosmologies is different.  The most dogged person I know in this regard has studied major religions, their sects and heresies in unbelievable depth. No matter whether he was looking at Qaballah, Tarot, the Koran, Gnosticism, Greco-Hermetic Mysteries, or Philip K. Dick he kept coming up with symbols and pointers to that energy labeled Christ or Logos.  He eventually became a Christian, though it's the last place he expected to find himself given his starting points.  I'm not saying he's right,  but these Archetypes and beings that exist in the vertical dimension have shone through our various times and cultures and said extremely similar things. 
>
>Given the question, Is Christ in the Urth timeline. I'm not sure it matters. He's talking about cyclical universes, such that there could be an endless sucession of Earths, Urths, Aerths, Oorths, etc.  regardless of all those HORIZONTAL timelines and names, there are energies that come from the source that inform each time.  I think of time, generally, as a horizontal line all coiled up into a spiral.  at the center is the Increate (or whatever you like to call "him"), and it's energies spread out in all directions like spokes of a wheel (or masts of Tzadkiel's ship).  From the perspective of those timelines, this is a vertical penetration. but if you look at it all spiraled up, you'd see that the 'spoke' cuts through several timelines.  such that one spoke could be a story like "Christ" at one level in the timeline spiral, and "Severian" in another.  yet it's the same spoke.
>
>None of this should be looked at lightly.  There is a numinous intelligence that is penetrating our world and shining a light on us.   Wolfe has done his own twisted macabre packaging, but the end result is quite numinous indeed.
>
>I say Bravo to Wolfe for having the balls to do something this audacious. Risking Christian disapproval and secular disinterest/rejection at the same time is no safe game.  He stands to alienate either audience at the outset.
>Perhaps that's why he's so sly about it all.
>
>~witz
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