From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" 
Subject: Re: (urth) latro and ares
Date: Thu, 08 May 2003 09:16:11 -0700

Mark wrote in part...

>I am especially interested in the almost random manner in which
>Wolfe associates Ares with Ahura Mazda, the singular God that embodies good 
>as
>opposed to the plurality of lesser deities that proliferate on Olympos.

Slight correction ... Ahura-Mazda (Ormuzd, other spellings) is not a 
"singular"
god but one-half of a dualistic pair; the other being, of course, Ahriman, 
the
god of Evil. The prophecies of Zarathustra suggest that Ahura-Mazda will be
victorious in the final battle, but since everything else in the religion 
posits
them as opposite equals, I've never quite understood how that's supposed
to work out.


>Does
>that make Ares an incarnation of the "true" God instead of just an angelic
>being - thereby possibly making Latro much more than a man, but something 
>like
>a trial run for Christ?

I don't think so. Humans being possessed by or avatars of one of the greater
but of-this-world beings called "gods" would not be the same kind or order 
of
thing as a human incarnation of the one transcendent God.

--Blattid

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