Lucifer: Cain. You must know of the Cainites?
Cain: Can't say that I do...
Lucifer: Gnostic sect. Second century. They rejected the books of the New Testament in favor of the Gospel of Judas.
-page 49, panel 1.
Lucifer: They believed that we created the heaven and the earth, and that you were the persecuted party in that unfortunate affair with your brother. They also held that the way to salvation was to give way to lust and temptation in all things.
-panel 2.
Lucifer: And no greater percentage of them turned up here than of any other religion. Amusing, isn't it?
Cain: I wouldn't know.
-panel 3.
The Wikipedia article on Cainites mentions this issue of The Sandman as a popular cultural reference.
Now maybe it is time to return to Poul Anderson's very different Cainites?
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I don't thin I had ever heard of this peculiar sect before, at least clearly, before you mentioned it here.
Sean
I meant THINK, not "thin," in my first comment above.
Sean
Paul:
Speaking of Cain....
The title character of the graphic series Corto Maltese by Hugo Pratt is an adventurer in the first third of the 20th Century. In one of the books, an Ethiopian Muslim calls him an infidel, and Corto replies, "...I am not an infidel, as you say... I am a Beni Kain. Our father is Kain, son of Adamah and Ewa. We Kenites are still searching for our lost paradise...." The Ethiopian later vouches for Corto to his tribe, repeating the "Beni Kain" claim as fact.
(Corto's actual provenance is that he was born "in Valletta on the island of Malta on 10 July 1887, the son of a sailor from Cornwall, and a gypsy from Seville.")
Post a Comment