(urth) Appearances of Inire

[António Pedro Marques]

John Watkins wrote:
> I"m confused by this too.

I'm confused as to why you don't write your remarks below the part of the 
message whcih they address.

> Certainly Pas is evil. Certainly many of his servants (Silk) are good.

But I didn't say evil masters can't have good servants. I said that in the 
books, if Tzadkiel were evil, you'd have an evil master whose servants would 
be better than his opponents - i.e., those who oppose the evil master are of 
a quite lesser moral standing than those who serve him - and would actually 
consider the master to be good. I don't recall Silk ever considering Pas 
good, nor actually any of the Whorl gods. In fact, from what I recall, the 
people in the Whorl are fed up with their gods.

> And of those servants who aren't very good, they tend to be improved
> by greater service (Incus). Wolfe seems to believe and in fact very
> nearly states in canon that good service to even a false god is
> sanctifying.

Quite sure, inasmuch as the false (here the issue is 'evil', not 'false') or 
evil god is also ultimately bound to God's plan for the world. It's not 
because of Pas's evilness that Auk or Incus improve (I'm not even certain 
their Incus shows much of an improvement, but that's another matter).

What salvific elements are there in the Whorl's religion are due either to 
the community's appropriation and improvement by serious reshaping 
(motivated by individual episodes of englightenment or not) of the basics 
they were primed with, or whatever of the originals shows through the 
transvestite. It's not from Scylla's demand of 50 children that the good 
people of the Whorl got their morals.

> On 7/1/10, António Pedro Marques<entonio at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> I mean, it's not the parallel between BNS and gnostic christianity that
>> fails, it's the parallel to a BNS in which an evil Tazdkiel had wide moral
>> control over mankind, such that those who opposed him were of dubious moral
>> stature, that does. For such is the option offered by 2 - it hypothesizes
>> that Tzadkiel is evil (let's not go to Machen's The White People's
>> prologue), but it doesn't remove the fact that those who serve and revere
>> him tend to be good, whereas those who oppose him tend a bit to the thug
>> side - at least if I remember the text (put aside the ones who were merely
>> fighting for their lives).