(urth) Urth - Earth links
Marc Aramini
marcaramini at yahoo.com
Fri Oct 14 12:40:57 PDT 2011
--- On Fri, 10/14/11, Antonin Scriabin <kierkegaurdian at gmail.com> wrote:
I was indeed brought up in a very religious household, with all of those things you mentioned; I didn't take the apparent reference to Christ to be anything more than a secular adjustment of present-day myths for a far-future Urth. Our entire mythology, Christian or otherwise, is condensed to some bizarre miasma in the dying Sun days; whatever resemblance they have to present Christianity is the result of cultural evolution. It seems to me that Holy Catherine (sp? I don't have the book in front of me) isn't even a religious figure; just a left-over tradition from long ago that the Guild retains for tradition's sake. Despite initial impressions, I think it becomes clear that the Conciliator is not Christ (or a type of Christ), and when you read what Wolfe wrote about concerning the "translation" of TBONS, it becomes further clear that references to saints, the use of Latin, etc., are just contrivances by the "translator" to make the story accessible
to the reader. We aren't supposed to think that they are actually referring to "saints" as we know them; the word "saint" is just supposed to the closest equivalent for the purposes of translation.
So it didn't seem like a far future religious manuscript to you, with the new sun coming to save the earth from the death of the sun at the end of mankind? There is a cataclysmic ethos in Christianity that begs for the return of Christ one final time, to me New Sun is clearly the playing out of that apocalyptic and eschatological strain, and EVERYTHING points to a religious identity for the conciliator, from the opening, a thousand ages in thy sight are like an evening gone, short as the watch that ends the night before the rising sun to every sustained symbol.
Can anyone read new sun and say it's NOT a religious manuscript, one greatly influenced by the eschatological tradition of the church? huh. Interesting.
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