Dave Sim & Steve Peters: "Spirituality Vs. God" (part three)

Part three of Dave Sim (Cerebus) and Steve Peter's (Awakening Comics, Everwinds) discussion of religion and spirituality at SPACE: Small Press and Alternative Comics Expo, April 5, 2003.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Cerebus
• Dave
• Sim
• Steve
• Peters
• Sparky

[hossrex]

Wow.  He really calls the Judaic god "YouWho".

[SuenteusPo]

@hossrex - Yup. Actually, YhooWhoo. It's a a bit of a joke, inserting vowels where none exist in YHWH. Since it's unpronouncable in English (YahWeh being the accepted pronounciation of the Tetragrammaton, sometimes written as JHVH, IHVH in Latin, and JHWH in German, French and Dutch), Cerebus took it upon himself to "fix" the problem by making it YhooWhoo.

It's easier to say than YodhHeWawHe, anyway;)

[maxeemcom]

Interesting ... Yalubah ... is that Yabulah? The great Baal, liar and miscreant? Don't occultists follow that the devil lives at the center of the Earth? ... weird. But then, Sim apparently made the concept of Cerebus after recovering from drugs ... what a bizarre conversation!! Comics are awesomse!

[SuenteusPo]

As far as the accusation of "occultism" - Dave's kind of views on a divided God have been around for a while, most notably with Manichaeism which started in the 2nd or 3rd century.

[bainst]

Actually, the divided god goes back to Zoroastrianism...dualistically speaking. Gnosticism has the One and the All...which is a division, of sorts. Ego and Logos in the Greek philosophies. Or something like that...maybe...

[SuenteusPo]

"One and the All" doesn't sound like a division to me. Christianity has the Trinity, which to me is more of a division. Ego and Logos, yes. Even the ancient Hebrew texts used the word Elohim as a reference to the Gods of earth and sky, later becoming the "majestic plural" form.

[hossrex]

@SuenteusPo

Oh, I'm aware (of most of that anyway). I've read cerebus 1-300 a half dozen times.

For fun the last time I did a read through a few months ago, I read the phonebooks in reverse order. Starting with "The Last Day", and working back to "Cerebus".

A very interesting way to absorb the content. You should try it.

[SuenteusPo]

*sigh*

He didn't come up with Cerebus after a drug binge. He came up with the idea of making the already ongoing series into a 300 epic showing the story of a life in which the lead character dies in the end after a short LSD bender.

The religious stuff came *MUCH* later after he started researching the Bible for Cerebus/parody purposes in the early nineties.