Ghrul-Captain hopes that, if he is sentenced to death, then he will:
"...be turned loose in yonder forest for [the Grand Lord] and his hunters to chase down as they would any other brave, dangerous animal. Maybe I can take one or two to the Darkness with me." (p. 5)
Does this "the Darkness" mean absence of consciousness or just, literally, darkness, absence of light? We can be conscious of absence of light but not of absence of consciousness.
The Homeric hereafter was not absence of life, including consciousness, but consciousness of absence of life, a condition to be regretted:
I reassured the ghost, but he broke out, protesting,
“No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!
By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man—
some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive—
than rule down here over all the breathless dead."
-copied from here.
So which do the kzinti believe in: no hereafter or a Homeric hereafter?
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Perhaps many of the Kzinti believed in an afterlife much like the Homeric version. And I have seen mention of Kzinti invoking the "Fanged God." I don't know if either in a monotheistic or polytheist sense.
And of course there were the Daptists, followers of a religion founded by Dapt.
Ad astra! Sean
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