Finally Reading Runes/Lord Foul and the his Prison

[Rukh]

Okay, well I have finally gotten a copy of "Runes..." I am amazed. It is so great to see that SRD is still in top form. I found that the story has lured me in just like all the previous installments. I am particularly taken with the way that he has begun to flesh out so many things about the past of the Land. I was very intruiged with Stave's recitation of the history of the Viles, Demondim, and Ur-Viles. I had always wondered about this subject.
But, the main point of this post is to return to one of my favorite subjects; Lord Foul. I am struck again by how similar the cosmology of the Covenant saga is to a great deal of Gnostic lore. When Linden threatened to tear out Foul's heart, his reply was that he had no heart, only darkness, and that was why he must destroy his prison, the Earth. In many of the Gnostic scriptures the Creator of the World is simultaneously its lord, and it's prisoner. Foul was often described as the brother or shadow of the Creator, which in mythological terms is another way of saying that he is an aspect of the Creator. Depsite is dangerous to the Earth in large part through the medium of corruption, that is by Foul finding a purchase in the souls of the Earth's inhabitants, by finding the Despite within them and amplifying it to suit his purpose. So, in a sense, there is an element of the Despiser in everyone. This is not any astounding observation on my part; its very obvious. But I am intruiged about what this may mean in terms of the shared experience of those who are defined beneath the Arch of Time. It is a statement about how we define the experience the Being. It is intruiging to to see the diversity of the characters in this context. The aloof elitism of the Elohim, the earnest commitment of the people of the Land, the madness of the Ravers, and of course the overwhelming contempt of Lord Foul. It would seem to me that when Foul corrupts the Earth, what he is really doing is to remake it in his own image; he takes his view of what the truth of Being is, and remakes the Earth by means of finding and/or creating those elements in the Earth, amplfiying them with his might.