From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy@siebel.com>
Subject: RE: (whorl) Destroying Inhumi
Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 09:05:16 

PatNutRit:

> The Secret, it seems, is a weapon that can destroy the inhumi,

No, no, a _thousand_ times no! Horn says clearly that it will not,
that it will reduce them to mindless beasts. (Of course, you might
consider that a form of "destruction.") So far, "love each other"
is the _only_ suggestion that has any plausible hope of doing this.


> Practically, such blood could be deposited in blood banks,
> analogous to Christ's deposit of His blood in the Eucharist.

Not the Catholic (& therefore Lupine) understanding of the 
Eucharist. In the Eucharist, the Sacrifice of the Messiah is
-- not reenacted, but made present, in a sense which transcends
time and space: thus, the blood which the wine becomes is not
blood "deposited" in some mystical blood bank, but actually bled
at that (eternal, universal, non-temporal) moment. This is, btw,
analogous to the original Passover, in which the message is "God
did so-and-so for us" -- not "for our ancestors," but "for us";
in eating the Passover, a Jew of this day and age is mystically
present at the original Exodus. All the People of Israel are 
present at Sinai.

A somewhat subtler objection is "if the secret will reduce
the inhumi to mindless beasts, the Love One Another hypothesis
won't work _because_ humans will voluntarily give their blood
to the inhumi." Ahhh, but the inhumi to whom they give their
blood become human (at least in spirit); so the only pure inhumi 
are, precisely, the mindless beasts. This, of course, is true 
even as Horn speaks: Krait, Jahlee, Fava, etc., are in fact human 
in spirit. But they represent danger _because_ the kind of human
they have become is not a being of Agape; and the "weapon" is 
"too heavy to weild" _because_ humans, _not_ loving each other,
will not voluntarily give their blood to the inhumi anyway. It
is "too heavy to weild:" it is not practical (in the Fallen World,
in which Blue, Green, Urth, and the _Whorl_ all inhere) to suppose
that humans will as-a-race become Agape-driven, and so they cannot
even lift the "sword" that would destroy the inhumi _as a threat_.


> This has not satisfied because transforming the inhumi does not
> seem to be a weapon to destroy them. But is this the right
> understanding? SS is clearly a religious as well as a political
> and personal novel. Twice we have eucharistic scenes. 

Right -- the "agape feast" is brought into extreme foreground.

> That's no accident: In Christian thought the Eucharist is eating
> and drinking Christ's death into oneself, so that one can die to
> one's own evil and be born anew, over and over again. 

Clearly you're not of the "once for all" persuasion. ;*)

My own understanding is a bit different from the "over and over
again" you cite here -- Catholicism, as I understand it, teaches
not that the Eucharist is rebirth (that happens at Baptism), but
of the process by which we are gradually sanctified, con-formed
to the Image of Christ. By analogy, repeated feeding from 
Agapistic humans would gradually sanctify the inhumi, and con-form
them to Agape.


> I suggest that to transform the inhumi into true humans is
> precisely to destroy inhumi, to destroy what makes them IN-humi.
> Pay close attention to the name Wolfe has given them: We humans
> are usually inhumi, unless we "die" in Christ and are "raised"
> to a new life.

Ummmm. I _think_ the root of the word is not "human (ex _homo_)" 
but "humus." The prefix "in" is ambiguous, and can mean "not" or
simply "in." Thus, the inhumi are "not-Earthly," and, at the same
time, thay are the "in-Earth," the Buried, in at least the sense
of "hidden," but becoming horrifically literal in the marketplace 
of Gaon.


> In short, I suspect that destroying the inhumi has a religious
> meaning, not a military one.

There we are in complete agreement 8*)

Blat, blat,

--Blattid/Dan'l


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