(urth) The Wizard

[Daniel Petersen]

Yep, what he said.

On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 11:06 PM, Andrew Mason <andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com
> wrote:

> Regarding Kypris: I think within the _Sun_ cycle we see her
> transcending her background as a mainly sexual figure, and becoming a
> genuine love-goddess. (Remember that Mint is inspired by Kypris,
> apparently with love of the city.) And yes, Scylla and Echidna aren't
> particularly sexual figures, though they also aren't nice people.
>
> Regarding the general theological set-up: while the Christian
> references in _Long Sun/Short Sun_ are relatively few, they are almost
> all linked with the Outsider; and in connection with him there are a
> lot of them.  (Off the top of my head: the sign of addition, the
> beating of the traders in sacrificial animals, Silk's vision of a man
> riding through a city - possibly also the child in straw and the man
> on the scaffold, but they are less explicit - the Adam and Eve story -
> since we are told in the glossary that Ah-Lah is possibly the same as
> the Outsider - rituals involving bread and wine and the words 'this is
> my body', 'an unknown God'  - a title associated with the Christian
> God, from Acts 17-  the vision of Elijah.)   That they don't dominate
> the story more is unsurprising given that the story is set in what is,
> symbolically, a pagan environment. The Outsider is - or at first
> appears to be - outside; that is the point. But I think they are
> enough to establish the Outsider as the Christian God.
>
> Now there is no doubt that he is also associated with certain Whorl
> gods and so, symbolically, with certain pagan gods. Explicitly, he is
> linked with three; Kypris (Aphrodite), Quadrifons (Janus) and Thyone's
> Son (Dionysus). I take this to mean that pagan gods can be
> manifestations - 'forms' or 'aspects', in the language used in the
> cycle - of the true God. Near the end the Rajan generalises the point
> by saying . 'Insofar as they're gods at all - which isn't far, in most
> cases - they are him.' So I don't have any difficulty seeing it as
> fundamentally a Christian world and yet making sense of the pagan
> references within it. I find it much harder to make sense of the
> Christian references if it is a fundamentally pagan world.
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