(urth) Urth - Earth links

[Jerry Friedman]

>From: Gerry Quinn <gerry at bindweed.com>
>From: Jerry Friedman
>From: Gerry Quinn gerry at bindweed.com
>
>> If all the passages from the Chrasmological Writings really are quotations, 
>> that would corroborate this idea, as it would be remarkable for the 
>> chrasmologists to have limited themselves to sources written before the
>>  late 20th century.
>
>
>We have only seen a small portion of the Writings.

Sorry, I meant "all the passages we've seen".
 
It would also be remarkable for the ones that come up in the story to be limited to those sources.
 
>> > Whatever 
>> > about ‘cycles’, Wolfe’s Urth is much the same as our Earth, and it’s prehistory 
>> > at least (the era of the Dawn Men, extending up to the colonisation of the inner 
>> > Solar System) appears to be nearly identical.
>
>> Presumably except for Jesus.
>
>Jesus existed in the universe of Urth – Silk has a vision of him entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.

I've always seen that as a trans-universal vision, delivered by the Outsider, of the most important Person in all universes (as Wolfe may see it).
 
People have been mentioning clues that Jesus existed in Briah.  I think that at least by the time Wolfe got to the Long Sun, those are resemblances with the same cause as the echo between Baldanders's story and Frankenstein's (and the possibly different story that Dr. Talos has in mind).  In other words, the Conciliator and other aspects of Briah "prefigure" Jesus, much like various sacrificed and resurrected pagan gods according to at least some Catholics.  Catholics seem to accept that this sort of causation can work backward in time.
 
I have a great deal of trouble believing that Wolfe wanted to imagine Incarnations in different universe or a world Jesus had been forgotten and the Roman Catholic Church had disappeared.  But I know of no evidence on this point.
 
On the other hand, I agree with those who suspect that he hadn't come up with the past-universe idea when he wrote that bit about buildings surviving so many centuries of futurity, and that there was some retconning, not necessarily as late as the Jordan interview.
 
On the gripping hand, one possible interpretation of the discrepancies in the Jungle Hut scene is that Wolfe was already thinking in /Shadow/ that Severian's universe's history that was similar to ours but not the same.
 
>> > Not just the Chrasmological 
>> > Writings but various objects and events in BotNS testify to this.
>
>> But how far would Wolfe go in familiarizing things from Urth's past?  Could he 
>> have changed the names of their saints to the names of ours?  Could he have
>>  changed Severian's description of the "Apollo" painting so we would recognize it? 
>
>Who knows?  He may even have selected or substituted the particular Chrasmological Writings recorded by Horn, so that prehistoric readers will correctly interpret their nature and origin.

Indeed.
 
Jerry Friedman
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