From: Carlos Martinho <carlosom71@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Re:  Digest urth.v026.n008
Date: Sat, 1 May 1999 17:54:10 

> The "chruch
> invisible" is the deeper mystical elements that
> would exist even if
> all churches were destroyed.

This is a very interesting point. When I started to
read TSOTT (and I didn't know where things were going
to), I thought, at first, that the myths about the
"Conciliator" and the "New Sun" were some sort of
memory of Christianity, just weakened, warped by time.
And I don't know why, but I always thought of Dr Talos
play as some sort of Gospel, just warped by time and
age (as the Minotaur myth, in the story of the
cannon-boat in the labyrinth). 

Severian as the Second Coming? I guess it's a possible
interpretation. But it leads us to a sort of
egg-and-chicken question: in the past of TBOTNS world
(suposing that the history, there, was similar to
ours) was Christianity just a mythical interpretation
of alien/science events, or are the alien/science
events of TBOTNS a materialistic interpretation of
mystical ones? Or doesn't it matter at all?

Those questions, I believe, make the whole of Wolfe's
work even richer; they are not meant to be answered,
but to enlarge the reader's worldview while pondering
about them.
===
"The nostalgia of things unknown, of lands forgotten or
 unfound, is upon me at times. Often I
 long for the gleam of yellow suns upon terraces
 of translucent azure marble, mocking the 
windless waters of lakes unfathomably calm"

Clark Ashton Smith, "Nostalgia of the Unknown"
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