The return of a pure, pansexual and revealing Jesus

Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985) was an American science fiction, horror, and fantasy writer. He always had limited commercial success, although he was a screenwriter for the series Star Trek and two of his stories were adapted for the legendary series The Twilight Zone, Sturgeon had a following of loyal readers and some renowned admirers, such as Kurt Vonnegut and Ray BradburyHe died in relative obscurity, after many years of barely publishing anything. A year after his death, the novel he had been working on for over a decade was published, Cosdivino, now published in Catalan in Males Herbes in a good translation by Josep Sampere Martí.

Cosdivino does not move within the coordinates of any of the three genres in which Sturgeon specialized. However, there is something – an unprecedented atmosphere, a tone of wonderstruck perplexity – that is characteristic of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. This is because, beyond the modern and popular conception that today's readers have of these three genres, Sturgeon recreates and renews in Cosdivino The most fantastic story in the history of humanity, the story of the most wonderful monster, the story of the most influential extraterrestrial: Jesus Christ.

Reconnect with real life

Set in a small New England town in the founding, Puritan heart of the United States of America, the novel chronicles the impact the Divine Cosmic has on a gallery of disparate characters—a kind and diligent minister, his loyal wife, a gorgeous and wounded hermit, a woman traumatized by rape, a violent and unrepentant seducer... who, by his very presence, teaches them to relate more freely to others, to themselves, and to their bodies. That is, he liberates them toward sexual pleasure and toward generous, fulfilling love.

The way Sturgeon combines paganism and early Christianity to create his messiah is risky, but he succeeds. In the opening chapter, when one day in early spring Pastor Dan Currier encounters Cosdivi in the middle of the forest, the reader feels as if they are witnessing an encounter between an upright Christian and a kind of neo-pagan incarnation. This feeling is strengthened by the realization that, for the pastor, the encounter represents a reconnection with true life, unfettered by strict morality, sexual repression, and the vile machinations of evil. The reader realizes that Sturgeon is a first-class writer because of the chromatic expressiveness with which he loads his prose—"in that green universe, only Cosdivi was red, only he was red"—and because of the emotional and prodigiously ecstatic eroticism that overflows when the pastor arrives home and makes love to his love.

While Sturgeon initially makes Cosdiví resemble the god Pan, she gradually makes him more like an almost pantheistic Jesus, at once pure and pansexual, who enlightens the righteous and redeems the wicked (those who desire to be redeemed). In this sense, from a literary history perspective, this posthumous work by Theodore Sturgeon can be read as a culminating, revolutionary, early Christian and hedonistically rebellious contribution to the tortured Puritan-rooted literary tradition inaugurated by Nathaniel Hawthorne in the mid-20th century.