(urth) Tzadkiel/Melek Taus

[Mr Thalassocrat]

On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 10:22 AM, John Watkins <john.watkins04 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Ooh, this is excellent stuff.  Thank you for this.
>
> Someone like me (but smarter) should take this insight and run with it into
> a full-on application of Melek Taus to other Wolfean demons.  If Wolfe used
> the figure once, did he use it again?  If not, why not?
>

This is the way I see it: In the BOTNS, Wolfe shows how a young man, by no
means inherently evil, is induced to do the will of (call it) Lucifer,
working on the young man's inclination to obey and disinclination to think
clearly when afflicted by religiosity, with these propensities assisted by a
cloud of meretricious gnostic-ish mumbo-jumbo which takes the place of "true
religion". The Lucifer figure is particularly evil in that he causes the
young man himself to be responsible for the mumbo-jumbo, unwittingly.

Wolfe takes the reader on the same kind of journey as Sev. He sets up the
form of the story to make it look like a tale about enlightenment and the
progression of a soul from lowest to highest, and what BOTNS/UOTNS shows is
how powerful such forms are. By the the end of UOTNS there is overwhelming
evidence to make the enlightenment reading completely untenable on any
"objective" grounds, but nevertheless for most readers it persists.
"Tzadkiel" remains somehow the agent of some greater good, Sev has somehow
earned his role of minor god to the remnants of destroyed Urth humanity, a
grand (unknown) plan progresses to a sanctified (but unkown) end.

On this view, BOTNS/UOTNS is a kind of demonstration of how people can
become "yazidis" (to the extent that the term can be used to denote those
who beleive bad is good - no offence to actual Yazidis!).

Anyway, if Wolfe was thinking along those lines & did make use of aspects of
the Melek Taus figure, I guess that use was  pretty specific to the concerns
of BOTNS/UOTNS. The closest figure I can think of in other works is The
Lowest God from W-K, but even though he may well be a de-winged angel, he
fits a different "error" (ie "lowest = highest", rather than "wrong
highest").
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