(urth) Gnosticism in BotNS
David Stockhoff
dstockhoff at verizon.net
Wed Apr 8 11:24:15 PDT 2009
The topic of gnosticism has come up before, but I couldn't recall some
of the other clues to its conscious presence as an underpinning to
BotNS. I stumbled on it in looking into the tribade matter.
Claw, chapter 10, Vodalus:
" ... No, we are not diminished in wisdom. We are diminished in power.
Study has advanced without letup, but even as men have learned all that
is needful for
mastery, the strength of the world has been exhausted. We exist now, and
precariously, upon the ruin of those who preceded us. While some skim
the air in
their fliers, ten thousand leagues in a day, we others creep upon the
skin of Urth, unable to go from one horizon to the next before the
westernmost has
lifted itself to veil the sun. You spoke a moment ago of checkmating
that mewling fool the Autarch. I want you to conceive now of two
autarchs—two great
powers striving for mastery. The white seeks to maintain things as they
are, the black to set Man's foot on the road to domination again. I
called it the black
by chance, but *it would be well to remember that it is by night that we
see the stars strongly; they are remote and all but invisible in the red
light of day*.
Now, of those two powers, which would you serve?"
This is classic gnostic imagery. Since gnosticism posits a false local
Creator and a true universal Creator, Vodalus seems to align himself
with true knowledge. However. his knowledge is probably to be regarded
as false, if not Satanic, even though the true god is more like the
hidden one than like the light-of-day one. We could probably usefully
compare the libertines' anticipation of sexual experience through the
alzabo with Severian's mastery of self through the alzabo. Severian
supplants and supercedes both autarchs by conciliating between their
desires for Man.
Remember the inscription in the mausoleum: Look, and See. God must be
sought, not received. The Conciliator also is associated with gnostic
imagery (the Black Sun). Silk, in promoting the Outsider, plays a
similar role. So Wolfe basically uses gnostic imagery, I think, to
create a tension between failed approaches to the Increate that is
resolved by the "proper" approach. Something like that.
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