From: "Alice K. Turner" 
Subject: Re: (urth) God in the Machine
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2002 22:42:32 -0400


From Matthew:
And a persistant one:

   Adam lay ybounden,
   Bounden in a bond,

[snip]

A perfectly lovely old lay. I was lucky enough to hear this sung as a round
once by the Princeton Glee Club with some extraordinarily high and pure male
voices. My eyes tear, just remembering.

Meanwhile, Crush, I perfectly agree with you that Typhon is consciously
presented in LS as the Demiurge, the false god who believes (both sincerely
and cynically, in the modern way) that he is the only creator god of the
Whorl. And the Outsider is (if not a hallucination!) the true god. And in
SS, angels (archons)=Neighbors (Of course Zak and the gang are also angels),
inhumi=demons (with the only excuse  for all the histrionics at the end
being an anti-Origen slant that demons cannot be saved, which I deplore
critically but understand as fitting into orthodoxy), all that, yadda,
yadda. I am truly sorry that Wolfe could not find a Sophia figure--Scylla in
no way cuts it despite all that last-book sentimentality about her poor
little real self--but I do not think he is a real Gnostic; he is once again
too orthodox to dwell on such a powerful heresy. Not to mention being a
little weak with female characters, as has been noted. Also, technically it
would have been awkward; I doubt that Wolfe had such a vast contraption in
mind when, working his way through these series, he first conceived of
Typhon as a false god.

-alga



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