Seperation of Church and Chaos

1. The Donatist schism was caused when persecution of Diocletian caused certain of the faithful to become “Traditors” who surrendered their holy books to be burnt rather than face martyrdom. When Constantine ended the persecutions of the Christians, those who did not forgive the Traditors insisted that they were no longer Christians, no longer able to give or receive sacraments, appoint bishops, give baptism. The Roman Church took the view that the sacraments are valid even in administered by an immoral or imperfect cleric. The Roman Church wanted the Traditors forgiven and their sacraments and appointments ratified. The Carthaginians still resented the Roman conquerors, and saw the schism as an excellent excuse to follow up on the antinomian & puritanical stream in Christian thinking to do some creative rioting; the Romans saw it as an excuse to follow up on the authoritarian stream of Christian thinking, and do some disciplining. The schism was never really healed: the area was conquered by the Musselman, and remains in enemy hands to this day. They were not Gnostics, who were an earlier, Second Century heresy.  You are correct that if she were a strict Donatist, Thelxiepeia would not be quoting them. More on this below.

  2. I was not satirizing the Da Vinci Code, since I wrote my book years before his came out. I was inventing my own ‘secret history’ of the world, where your schoolteachers turn out to be Greek Gods and human civilization a fragile fraud created by these super-beings. I was not seriously proposing that the Donatists were Gnostics: it was merely that I wanted to have this character believe in a “Real Bible” that had been suppressed by the authorities, and the Gnostic Apocrypha provided me with convenient names.     

3. That’s a good question, and I am not sure if my memory is perfect enough to answer. The book was finished in 2001, and I do not recall being particularly favorable to Christians at that time, but I was disenchanted with neopagans. My loss of disrespect for Christians came from reading G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis, particularly Chesterton, who, as big a monkey as he is whenever he talks about economics, is abundantly supplied with common sense on all other issues. It was from him that I first met the horrible suspicion that not all Christians were simple-minded chumps.

There are three elements I note as particularly Christian in ORPHANS OF CHAOS: first,  Quentin buries two corpses with a prayer from the Common Book; second, Thelxiepeia is a Christian (albeit a schismatic); third, Thelxiepeia senses something or someone react when Amelia prays a rather nondenominational prayer to the God of Abraham, hoping for deliverance from her personal Egypt.  

My characterization of Quentin was based in part with my growing disdain for the dogmas of the neopagans. Much as I love them as individuals, their belief system is a nonsystematic mess, historically dishonest. I compared what they said to what the real pagans I read in school wrote: Socrates and Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus and Plotinus. What they said lacked roots. The neopagans I know personally were not particularly patriotic (I never heard one willing to die for the ashes of his fathers or the temples of his gods) or particularly chaste.

A caveat on that last comment—I have seen on the Internet at least one pagan with something of the ancient dignity: a guy who points out that Vikings died with weapon in hand, and whoever died ‘the straw death’ died as a slave, and therefore Odin was in favor of the Second Amendment. http://www.runestone.org/gunctrl.html Unlike my neopagan friends, who ring hollow, anyone who talks this way sounds solid to me, a heart of oak.

The big appeal of neopaganism, as far as I can see, was that it was nonjudgmental and phantasmagorical. The grim stoicism of the Norse, the purity of Plotinus, the ceremoniousness of Shinto, was absent. They were not members of a living tradition: they were more like SCA guys pretending to be knights. Sincere pagans are patriotic: who can fail to love the woods and hills of one’s hearth and home, if the woods are haunted by goddesses, the hills by ancestral voices? Who can leave his home, if the hearthstone is sacred?

When my neopagan friends refuse to celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas, holidays as American as apple pie, they are taking an abstract stand on religious principle, which is a Christian thing to do, but unheard-of in the pagan world, and alien to the community spirit of paganism. If anyone should respect their ancestors, it should be pagans. If your ancestors happen to be Puritans, I guess it is hard to pray to their lares, but that’s what a real pagan would do.

Quentin was supposed to be my idea of a sincere pagan–a guy who would not sleep around or break an oath, because the All-Father punishes oath breakers, and His Queen curses the unchaste. A guy who does not forget that he is British merely because he is also a warlock, and so he knows and respects the traditions and history of the British Islands, which includes the Book of Common Prayer. (He also pours a libation to the ghosts, of course, and pays for the Ferryman).

I also needed to have a little bit of a morality play, of what goes around comes around, and so I had to have a burial, and have the satisfied ghosts show up later to reward this act of piety and kindness. Quentin’s burial prayers had to be something the other kids knew and shared, otherwise he would get all the credit, not them, for the burial, whereas I needed Amelia to be saved twice: once by the ghost of Latinus, once by Telegonus.

Thelxiepeia’s story about the saint was added after my conversion, but, I hope, not because of the conversion. Previously I had had an awkward passage there, where she told Amelia that while there was a real Jesus Christ, the Historical Christ was an Olympian named Baphomet, and that he had been attempting to steal worshippers from Jehovah, who was Lord Terminus (Jupiter) under another name.  Aside from any theological issues, the whole paragraph was confusing, and added nothing to the story. The copyeditor asked whether the pronoun for Jesus should be capitalized (if He was a deity) or not (if he was a fraud). Since I did not want to explain how a Christian pagan goddess could believe in a Christ she knew to be a fraud, I preferred to drop the whole issue. I also thought that if I brought up a mystery surrounding Jesus’ identity, it would have to be answered or resolved later, and this book was not about that.

I decided instead to retell an old Irish folktale with Thelxiepeia as the mermaid, in order to give her some personality and background. I suppose that sticks in some craws as being too Christian, well, take that up with the Irish, not with me. Go into any pub after the boys have had a few and start telling the Irish how their religion is a blather of Papist claptrap, and let me stand at the door and take pictures. Affairs have some to a sad state when a man cannot tell an old folktale about the sea fairies and Friar Tuck without being accused of being a Fundie. Do these people think history only begins each day at dawn? 

The rest of her comments I left as-is. I had by that time also done additional research on the Donatists, but decided for artistic reasons to leave her as a semi-Gnostic, merely because that world view was more foreign to the Catholic consensus we know, and more critical of the Christian claims of truth.

I am not sure how I could have been more antichristian without pulling a Pullman: according to Thelxiepeia, the orthodox Christian claims are false and truth was suppressed, violently suppressed, by the Catholic Church! The only openly Christian characters are the bumbling Dr. Foster and Thelxiepeia the man-eating siren. She’s a villainess. A bad guy, working for the bad guys! The only thing I did not do is make her an unsympathetic, a two-dimensional cardboard parody of a Southern Baptist or something.

The Prelapsarians I added just because I liked the name. They are not beings that pre-date the fall of man, but who pre-date the fall of Uranus.

My attempt was to show at least as much dignity to my hated enemies the Christians as I was showing the pagans. (As an atheist, keep in mind, I was then hostile to paganism, rather than regarding it, as I do now, as a beautiful but incomplete attempt to find spiritual reality.) Because I had established a magical world, I decided prayers did something: You see, as an honest atheist I thought of Christianity as myth, as fairytale, and I treated it as such. In fairytales, when you kiss the sleeping beauty, she wakes up. In Christian fairytales, when you pray, angels answer. The big men with eagle wings did not seem any more or less fantastic than the little men with butterfly wings.

You cannot imagine how disoriented I was to learn that some atheists who read my book regarded this as pro-Christian propaganda. I swear to you I laughed aloud. The reaction convinced me of the insincerity and intellectual poverty of the dishonest atheists. It was like a scientific test: take a book written by an atheist and tell everyone it was written by a theist, and see if they see it as atheist or theist in tone. They saw what they wanted to see.

If you tell a story where a crucifix drives back a vampire, doesn’t that hint the author might not take crucifixes any more seriously than he does vampires? Instead, atheists were driven back, like so many vampires pretending the Cross had no power to repulse them, but backing up anyway.