Brechdan reflects that he will give:
"...this flesh to the soil and this mind to the God." (p. 23)
Not "myself" or "my soul" but "this mind." I took this to mean that the God reabsorbs minds just as the soil reabsorbs flesh but other interpretations are possible. Morruchan spoke of souls that the God might cast back but he lived centuries before Brechdan and might have expressed a more primitive version of the belief.
A gong calls Merseians to worship and Vachs have Secret Prayers and that is about it for Merseian theology as far as I know. Neither "the God" of the Roidhunate nor "God the Hunter" of the Ythrian New Faith is compatible with any Terrestrial monotheism.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
You may, however, be overthinking this. If, centuries before, Morruchan Long-ax could speak of "souls" being cast back by the God, is that truly very functionally from Brechdan Ironrede thinking that at death he would give "...this mind to the God." If queried Brechdan might well not object to using Morruchan's word "souls."
This paragraph from Chapter XVII of A CIRCUS OF HELLS was esp. interesting: "His time hidden had not been totally a vacuum for Flandry. True, when he unloaded the bus--before sending it off to crash at sea, lest his enemies get a clue to him--he hadn't bothered with projection equipment, and therefore not with anything micro-formed. Every erg in the accumulators must go to keeping him unfrozen. But there had been some full-size reading matter. Though the pilot's manual, the 'Book of Virtues', and a couple of scientific journals palled with repetition, the Dayr Ynvory epic and, especially, the volume about Talwin and how to survive on it did not."
I have wondered before if that Book of Virtues was a scripture of the God worshiped by Merseians stemming from the dominant culture around the Wilwidh Ocean. Analogous to the OT Book of Proverbs? A pity we don't see more about that Dayr Ynvory epic!
Ad astra! Sean
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