Matuchek, wolf, fights the succubus which has also transformed into a wolf:
"I killed her.
"In the last fragmented second, I heard - not with my ears - the shriek of the foul spirit within. I felt - not with my nerves - the space-time turbulence as it struggled to change the mathematical form of its Schrodinger function, thus fleeing to the Low Continuum where it belonged and leaving me with the exchange mass. But my fangs had been too quick and savage. The body perished and the soulless demon was no more." (p. 118)
There are three issues here:
(i) quantum mechanics;
(ii) Christian theology;
(iii) fantasy theology.
(i) Can changing a Schrodinger function translate a body into another universe?
(ii) In Christian theology, a human being is a body and a soul and a soul is an immortal spirit whereas a demon is an immortal spirit without a body. Although a demonic spirit is not a "soul," it is not described as "soulless" either because the latter implies mortal.
(iii) In the fantasy theology of Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos and of Mike Carey's Lucifer, a demon is a mortal embodied being.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I can't comment on your Point (i), not being a physicist and mathematician. Altho both Frank Tipler and Sean Carroll probably could.
As for Points (ii) and (iii), I'm rereading OPERATION CHAOS too, and this is what I read in Chapter X: "Any true individual, human or otherwise, is under certain constraints of a...a moral nature. A demon is allergic to holy symbols." So I see a contradiction here in Steven Matuchek calling the succubus a "soulless demon." Unless we define angelic spirits, fallen or unfallen, as immortal spiritual beings, which would fit in with what Matuchek said. And in OPERATION CHAOS demons manipulate simple matter to appear in that universe.
Ad astra! Sean
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