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[Gerry Quinn]

From: Andrew Mason 
> Gerry Quinn wrote;

> > The Catholic interpretation of God already includes several aspects, equal in significance.

> Actually I got that slightly wrong; the term the Rajan uses is
> 'forms', not 'aspects'. The term 'aspect of the Outsider' is used, I
> think, only in the glossary, where Quadrifons is called that - though
> as the Rajan calls him a form, the terms are presumably equivalent.
I think so.  There’s another very interesting use of ‘aspect’, though:
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“Is it known that all the gods are Mainframe?”  Sciathan awaited an explosion with some anxiety; when it did not cone, he added, “Equally is Mainframe all gods.  Mainframe in its aspect of darkness, which in this tongue is termed Tartaros, issued my instructions.” [Exodus]
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And now here’s something from Nightside, which I think is relevant to our understanding of the religious cosmology of Long and Short Sun (and very likely is, I think, something that Wolfe would consider equally applicable to our own cosmos):
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Blood stooped to examine the triptych. "Where's Pas?" Silk pointed.

"That whirlwind? I thought he was an old man with two heads."

"Any representation of a god is ultimately a lie," Silk explained. "It may be a convenient lie, and it may even be a reverent one; but it's ultimately false. Great Pas might choose to appear as your old man, or as the spiralling storm which is his eldest representation. Neither image would be more nearly true than the other, or more true than any other - merely more appropriate."
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Wolfe does not, I imagine, believe that the doctrines promulgated by the Vatican at this moment in history represent the final word on the nature of reality.  Still less is he engaged in writing some sort of secret heretical screed to be unpicked by an analysis of codes relating to pagan gods.  I think he knows that no human representation of what is called on Urth the Increate and in Viron Mainframe can ultimately be a true representation; and if no representation can be ultimately true, then no specific doctrine or iconography can be ultimately true either.  Pas may have one head, or two, or perhaps sometimes even three, but the number three is a specific doctrine which might be reverent and appropriate at some times or some circumstances – and that is true not just for Pas but for other human representations of Mainframe, or the Increate, or God.
That’s why harping on a reference to Dionysus as a form of the Outsider, for example, as if it were the key to some great secret cosmology (even though Dionysus is one of many gods so described) is getting Wolfe’s world completely ass-backward, just as it is getting it ass-backward to read Book of the New Sun as some hermetic gnostic scroll.


> Anyway, yes, certainly Christianity recognises aspects of God which
> are of equal significance - but the forms of the Outsider in the _Sun_
> cycle would seem to be people through whom he has spoken or acted -
> Kypris and Severian are our clearest examples - and there are
> thousands of them.

Perhaps our understanding will evolve in this direction over the next 100000 or whatever it is years.  And it’s worth noting that the gods leave a piece of themselves in those whom they have possessed and enlightened.  Devils, at least, can see it: when Poppy was possessed by Mucor she saw everyone as hollow, except for Silk.

- Gerry Quinn
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