(urth) Urth - Earth links

Sergei SOLOVIEV soloviev at irit.fr
Sat Oct 15 12:49:28 PDT 2011


We may discuss the importance of the interviews (and of course they are 
important)
but GW is very daring for a catholic (in dogmatic sense), and plays with 
very dangerous
themes - take for example "Houston, 1943". I think it is a brilliant 
horror story, but
there are themes relevant to the Urth-Earth relation and to all the 
Solar cycle - the world
in this story is supposed to be our world (i.e., after Christ) but there 
are plenty of dark
powers that make it look not so much different from the world of the 
BoTNS, there
are interesting out-of-body experiences, that can be compared (though 
different) with Silk/Horn/Mucor experiences. To me it seems also that 
there is an idea that the characters
of american popular imagination may be sometimes a sort of devils... - 
and this is
after the incarnation of Christ.

Sergei Soloviev

Andrew Mason wrote:
> Jerry Friedman wrote:
>
>   
>> I have a great deal of trouble believing that Wolfe wanted to imagine Incarnations in different universe
>>     
>
> Well, C.S. Lewis did, and he was pretty conservative. That's not to
> say it's actually orthodox, but it's not so blatantly heretical that
> no basically orthodox believer could entertain it.
>
> 'La Befana' may be relevant here. It's based on the idea that the
> Saviour has to be born on every planet. In the author's note Wolfe
> makes it clear that this is a joke, a deliberate misinterpretation of
> 'world'; but that allows that he may actually think it true of
> universes.
>
>
>   
>> or?a world Jesus had been forgotten?and the Roman Catholic Church had disappeared.?
>>     
>
> That, I admit, is trickier. But Jesus has not been _wholly_ forgotten,
> if the Conciliator is partly based on memories of him, and the passage
> in the Chrasmological writings about the beating of animal-sellers
> relates to him.
>
> Something very like the Catholic church certainly exists in the past
> of Wolfe's world - rituals invovling bread and wine, crosses, saints
> (Wolfe in COTO makes it clear that Holy Katharine is indeed the saint
> of that name, of Alexandria).  It's fair to ask how, from a Catholic
> point of view, it could perish. But we don't know that it has perished
> everywhere; there are plenty of places besides Urth and the Whorl
> where it may be flourishing.
>
> I'm not actually committed to Jesus existing in the past of Urth; it
> may be there was a Jesus-analogue who was ony a prophet, But if he's
> not literally present, he's symbolically present. After all, the
> various pagan gods who are alluded to aren't literally present either.
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