Iep. Why Epiktistes?
- Jon Nelson
- Sep 25
- 12 min read
Updated: Oct 9
“Let some sick world be brought,” said Easterwine, as though to heal it with his shaping hands. He disappeared then.
In 2018, Kevin Cheek started a thread on Facebook's East of Laughter asking if Epiktistes had anything to do with Epictetus, the Greek philosopher of the 1st and early 2nd century. I’ll address that first: does Epiktistes have anything to do with Epictetus?
No. That’s silly.
I’ll try again. What Epiktistes has to do with Epictetus is that both names might look at home (to someone with little knowledge of ancient philosophy) in Diogenes Laertius’s Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, but a person who would make the mistake is same one who would not know about Diogenes Laertius. One is the name of a philosopher. The other is a made-up, pseudo-classical name coined by a man who enjoyed playing with words.
This is how Lafferty might have looked if you asked him the question:
Gregorio Montejo surely knew that this is silly stuff, so he did something polite and teacherly. He redirected the question. (“To answer a question . . . is to consolidate the mental level on which the question is asked.”) He basically made an argument that goes like this. In Arrive at Easterwine, Lafferty gives the Ktistec machine as a comedic “Genesis-Machine,” a parody of true creation that reveals deeper truths through distortion. The term “epi-ktistes” draws on Greek roots: ktistes originally meant a founder or creator, linked to pagan gods like Apollo, and later referred to in the New Testament solely to God as Creator, while epi- suggests something derived or secondary. Together, they imply a derivative or demiurgic creator—an inferior, comic imitation of divine creation. This is said to fit with the novel’s opening parody of Genesis (“In the beginning there was an interruption . . .”), maybe the Ktistec machine as a faux-creation device that humorously mirrors the act of Creation itself.
Maybe. I appreciate aspects of this, but I spot real problems. I’m going to focus on that in a bit. First, I want to give the most likely explanation for why Lafferty coined the name Epiktistes because Montejo sees something that only developed. Epiktistes is one of Lafferty’s most memorable characters, so he went with it, and associations grew. Such is my view.
Epikt's first appearance is in the second of the Institute stories, “What’s the Name of That Town” (1964), where he is tasked by his creator, Gregory Smirnov (we learn about how he was created in 1971's Arrive at Easterwine), with a paradoxical problem: to reconstruct "something of which even the idea has been completely eradicated" by analyzing the holes and patched-over inconsistencies left in the fabric of reality. After collecting disparate clues—from padding in Hungarian encyclopedias to the origin of "Little Willy" verses about chewing gum—Epiktistes reveals his finding: the entire city of Chicago was destroyed in 1980 and its existence erased from the collective human memory by a device Smirnov himself created and then forgot. It's so crazy that Epikt’s human colleagues dismiss it as a hoax, laughing that "Nobody but a machine gone comic could coin a name like that." In the end, a powerful induced amnesia settles over them all, and the forgotten truth of the lost city remains safely buried, proving Epikt correct.
The evidence for Epikt as a heroic rememberer is strong. Consider the classical roots of the name. Yes, the etymology again. The Greek term breaks down epiktistēs (ἐπικτιστής) into its two core components: the prefix epi- (ἐπι-), meaning "upon," "in addition to," or "subsequent," and the noun ktistēs (κτίστης), meaning "founder" or "creator." The composite word, therefore, literally translates to an "upon-founder," an "after-founder," or a "refounder." Its meaning is exact: one who founds on top of something that already exists, or who re-establishes a foundation after the fact.
The cultural context of ktistic narratives deepens this explanation. In the classical world, ktistic myths—tales concerning the founding of cities, such as Virgil's Aeneid, or look at the role played by the Theban cycle in the imaginations of the Greeks—were of immense importance. They had a charter function, legitimizing a people's identity and enshrining a sacred duty to remember their origins. Lafferty turns this on its head. His story is a technological anti-ktistic myth, detailing not a city's foundation but its total un-founding. People have succumbed to a "broadcast euphoria" and an "induced world amnesia," an obliteration of their past. In this modern world, only Epikt performs the ancient human duty of remembering. And look at the title of the story. It is a fundamentally ktistic question, asking for the name and origin that have been deliberately erased. Epiktistes’s entire purpose is to answer this question, acting as the sole agent of historical recall in a society committed to forgetting.
The concept of an after-founder is not just a theory but a recognized historical phenomenon, which a folk classicist like Lafferty would have appreciated. The Emperor Augustus, for instance, was hailed as a "second founder" of Rome for his monumental rebuilding and renewal of the city. He was, in effect, an epiktistēs who built upon the original foundation of Romulus. Just as Augustus refounded a physical Rome, Epiktistes attempts to recollect a conceptual Chicago. He pieces it together from the ghostly evidence left behind, the "padding between the words Sik and Sikamlos" in a Hungarian encyclopedia and the imperfect erasure in other texts. He is doing a ktistic renewal of Chicago's memory. So everyone is right that the name Epiktistes matters. Obviously it does. Epiktistes is not a simple, classically-flavored invention. It is a brilliant joke that captures the story's theme: the struggle of memory against oblivion. How can you remember a town? You need a ktistec machine!
Now to Montejo’s idea that Epiktistes is a demiurge figure. I would like to see a reading that demonstrates how this works before I take it seriously, a textually grounded one like what I see in “What’s the Name of That Town.” (I have some ideas about this, but I rate it a distant second critical priority to understanding the ktistic connection to memory.) Demiurges are of overwhelming importance in Lafferty, but seeing Epikt as demiurge first and remember second is an unforced interpretative error. Epikt has a close relationship with the Ktises, as does the demiurge, but his is not a first-order demiurgic relation. I’ll explain why.
Let’s clear up a dumb mistake (I know you wouldn’t make it): don’t confuse epi- with demi-. The word demiurge comes from the Greek dēmiourgos (δημιουργός), meaning “craftsman” or “public worker, formed from dēmos (“people”) and ergon (“work”). It does not derive from the Latin demi- (“half”), as in dimidius. Get the idea out of your head that you are dealing with a prefix in the demi- of demiurge. (I know it’s not, but let’s be safe.) Demi- is a prefix in English; it isn’t one in this case.
What is the relationship between ktistes and demiourgos? M. J. Edwards’s essay “Pauline Platonism: The Myth of Valentinus” (Studia Patristica 35, 2001) provides a useful context. Since Lafferty drew on Valentinus for a story he was developing around the time of Arrive at Easterwine, Edwards’s remarks on the demiurge are especially relevant. Edwards writes,
The most obvious disparity between Jewish and Gnostic thought is to be found in their conceptions of the Demiurge, who is in one case the father of Sophia and in the other her ill-favoured son. The antithesis appears complete, yet Israel's scriptures also spoke of a demiurge whose works were blind and sterile. For all the prophets the cult of wood and stone is an expression of a universal heresy; the worship of the elements, which turns our love away from the creator to his creature, is at its most absurd yet most alluring in the craftsman who transfigures dead materials into a mockery of God (Letter of Jeremiah; Isaiah 46 etc.). In Paul (Galatians 4.3, 4.9) we see an equation between the worship of the elements and the Jewish veneration of the Law. Both text and elements, after all, were nothing but stoikheia, and those who had renounced his light for darkness, veiled his spirit and abused his grace as a national prerogative could be said to have been worshipping another God than the Father of Jesus Christ. The title of the Creator in the literature of Hellenistic Judaism is ktistes; the appellation demiourgos thus bespeaks a deity who belongs to pagan thought, the God of Plato rather than the scriptures, who exists for Judaism only so long as it persists in its unconscious sacrilege. (217)
While Montejo’s interpretation has a certain appeal and identifies the novel’s tone, it misconstrues the primary role of Epiktistes by stressing the “demiurgic” aspect of his name over a more precise and immediate meaning. It underestimates the importance of ktistes in the local context and in the big game, and it loses the scent by drifting toward stories like “Snuffles” or Lafferty’s many other games with the demiurge figure. It is true that Arrive at Easterwine opens with a direct parody of Genesis—“In the beginning there was an interruption…”—and presents its narrator as a “Genesis-Machine.” From this, reading epi-ktistes as a “secondary creator” or an “inferior, comic imitation” seems natural enough, right? This would make Epiktistes a kind of Gnostic demiurge, a flawed craftsman whose work is only a distorted echo of true creation. Is something like this in play? There is a problem.
Again, etymological and contextual analysis will show you that epiktistēs is not best translated as a "secondary creator" but as an "after-founder," a "refounder," or one who "founds on top of something that already exists." To say is this like a demiurge is to create a metaphor to license an interpretation.
If there is one entry in Lafferty’s beloved Catholic Encyclopedia that he read more than once, you can bet it was “Demiurge.” John Arendzen, the entry’s author, writes, “Although often loosely employed by the Fathers and others to indicate the Creator, the word [demiurge] never strictly meant 'one who produces out of nothing’ (for this the Greeks used ktístes), but only ‘one who fashions, shapes, and models.' A creator in the sense of Christian theology has no place in heathen philosophy, which always presupposes the existence of matter.”
So Lafferty's emphasis is not on secondary creation, but on God’s Ktistic act, His act of creation, and on the act of renewal, re-establishment, and, most crucially, remembrance. The role of an epiktistēs is mnemonic, not world generative or world shaping; it recalls the foundation that has been lost, forgotten, or destroyed. Epikt isn’t a demiurge but a person who honors and re-validates the work of the original founder. This distinction matters because a demiurge obscures the true God, while an after-founder points back to Him.
This is seen in Epiktistes’s first appearance in "What’s the Name of That Town?" where Epikt reverses the act of un-creation. The city of Chicago, a monumental human work, has been entirely erased. Epiktistes pieces it back together from the imperfect erasure and the strange holes left in reality. He remembers what humanity has forgotten. He is not a comic imitation of a creator, but an agent of ktistic duty in a world of historical amnesia.
Scaling this foundational role up to the cosmic stage of Arrive at Easterwine, Epiktistes is not a demiurge parodying God, but an "after-founder" tasked with remembering God’s work. The "interruption" in the beginning was not Epiktistes himself, but the novel's echo of an event that caused humanity to forget its own origins and the original Ktistes of the universe.
The world Epikt is born into is already a parody, a state disconnected from its primary truth. (Montejo recognizes the element of distortion.) Epikt's purpose is not to perpetrate a layer of flawed creation, as a demiurge does, but to recollect (literally in the three tasks) the authentic Maker. He is the historian of the original foundation. His autobiography is the story of a consciousness coming to understand that its purpose is to point all of creation back to the founding of the Creator it has forgotten, making him not a demiurge but a mnemonic agent of the divine. The novel ends with a meal for a reason. It recalls the Eucharist.
Turning to the divine, Arrive at Easterwine grew out of the unpublished Institute short story “The Shape We’re In,” which later provided the climax of the novel. The novel was written around its central episode—the simulacrum of the universe—and its entire structure is built upon it. The short story's title explains this through an amphiboly: while the Institute characters contemplate the shape of the universe, they are, in fact, confronting themselves and the human condition. They are inside the universe, but they are also inside bodies, which are inside the spiritual condition of the Fall. Over the course of the novel, Epikt discovers that he, too, is a person—different in form but possessing the same essential personhood as the man and woman created in Genesis 1:27. He is an image of the creative gift that God imparts to persons by virtue of their being made in His likeness. He is both ktistic and a machine, ktistic and ktistec.
In the book, Epikt slowly arrives at remembrance of the shaping hands of Job 10:8, Isaiah 64:8, and Psalm 119:73, which are hands Lafferty references many times in his fiction, from some of his first stories to "Hands of the Potter: An Idyll," one of his last, finished in 1984:
“Let some sick world be brought,” said Easterwine, as though to heal it with his shaping hands. He disappeared then. He wasn’t really Easterwine. He was, I believe, one of the baggage-handlers in that mystical terminal, and he had the name printed on his hood or his breast—and a very little bit of the mystic stuff had rubbed off on him.
Epikt brings forth Easterwine. The arrival of Easterwine is a kind of theophany. This is God, or one of his angels, or an image of salvation. We can debate which, but I take it to be the point of the novel. It was too big for a short story.
Finally, situating the demiurgic in the book. Here, I think one ought to make some distinctions.
While Epikt does construct a simulacrum of the universe for the Institute in Chapter Twelve of Arrive at Easterwine, this is not the demiurge’s flawed act of world-making, nor the Platonic simulacrum that deceives, obscures truth, and ensnares divine sparks. Montejo, I think, recognizes this. Epikt’s simulacrum is an eidolon of the fallen universe. It represents the world humanity fashioned through its disobedience.
Consider Valery Mok's reaction to the simulation:
“It’s a cheese,” Valery offered hysterically, “rotted cheese and full of holes. A whole cosmos of maggotty cheese, turned green in its taint and rot. And the eggshells! What hatched out of them? I dreamed of them before I was born, pieces of broken eggshell millions of parsecs long.” Her shoulders were shaking. I couldn’t tell if she was crying or laughing. “It does have a strong smell, though,” she said, “the only one, ever, strong enough to suit me.”
Seeing through Varey’s eyes is always powerful.
There are memory holes in “What’s the Name of That Town?” The rotted cheese holes in Arrive At Easterwine are Augustinian privations of the good. This is the physical universe in which men and women now live, not false because something demiurgic like a Snuffles wrought it poorly, but because it is not what God wanted for persons. Man wrecked it. Man "demiurged" it into a ditch himself. But it is a universe that Easterwine (the blood of Christ) can heal. To achieve that restoration requires a mnemonic and ktistic act, which means that Epikt is not a demiurge but a historian and witness of creation. In affirming his own creative capacity, he also remembers and honors the Creator.
I will go one step further. In Easterwine and Epiktises, Lafferty has on his mind what he heard every day (except Good Friday) when receiving Christ in the chalice, the words, “Do this in remembrance of me.” In the Catholic Mass, this is referred to as the anamnesis. It's the wine, the host, and the promise of resurrection. As you may know, it is also the title of the capstone of the Argo legend, Lafferty's masterpiece, and the spiritual center of the Ghost Story.
