From: "Jason Voegele" <voegele.6@osu.edu>
Subject: Re: (urth) Torturers as priests
Date: Fri, 3 Jul 1998 00:43:37 

prion wrote:
>It seems to me that the original form of the torturers guild was the
>Roman Catholic Priesthood.  Gene Wolfe has said that he believes Jesus
>Christ was actually a torturer, and that God created pain for a purpose.

Now that's an interesting and very plausible theory.  Just before reading
this post, I was reading a passage from TBOTNS that ties in nicely with the
Torturers as Priests theory.  It's from SHADOW, ch. XI, paragraph 10 ("The
Feast") describing the festivities of the Feast of Holy Katharine:

    "She stood between the wheel and the sword while Master Palaemon (as the
older of our masters) told us of the founding of the guild, and of our
precursors in the years before the ice came--this part was different each
year, as his scholarship decided.  Silent she stood too while we sang the
Fearful Song, the hymn of the guild, which apprentices must get by heart but
which is sung only on that one day of the year.  Silent she stood too while
we knelt among the broken pews and prayed."

The fact that the history of the guild is mentioned in the same passage as
"we knelt among the broken pews and prayed" is a bit much for coincidence,
especially for the Loop the Lupine school.  The fact that the pews are
broken could suggest the decay of the Church into its corrupted form of the
torturer's guild, or it could just harken to the fact that the pews are very
old and the Church has decayed over time.

Jason Voegele



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