We here at the Emerald City Zen Center have to make a confession - we used to be fans of C.S. Lewis. When we were young, we found his Narnia books quite enjoyable and a damned sight more fun to read than Tolkien's Middle Earth stuff. But we were just children then. What did we know?
The Narnia books are Christian propaganda wrapped up in a package designed to lure young minds to it. There's epic quests, witches, knights, monsters and incredibly resourceful children saving an entire world of fantastic beings. It's like a delicious cake filled with every kind of western mythology with a great big dollop of Jesus in the center.
It's not that the stories are Christian allegory that's the problem, but it's the kind of Christianity that they promote that is most disturbing. Lewis is promoting Christianity at its most paternalistic and authoritarian - no better demonstrated in the last book of the series, The Last Battle, when we learn that Susan Pevensie can not enter the kingdom of Aslan (AKA four-footed Jesus) because of her interest in boys - hence punishing her for discovering and embracing the power of her female sexuality.
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| Tilda Swinton as The White Witch in the 2005 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe film |
In Lewis' Christianity women are to be chaste and meek little things that do as their told. It comes as no surprise that Narnia's greatest villain (appearing in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and The Magician's Nephew), The White Witch, is an ambitious, strong woman. Another popular Narnian baddy is The Lady of the Green Kirtle - the villainess of The Silver Chair, who like kinswoman Jadis of Charn (The White Witch's true name) is a powerful, ambitious woman who dares defy the natural role women are meant to play in society. To underscore how unnatural these women are, Lewis explicitly states in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe that Jadis is descended from a union between Adam and his first wife, Lilith.
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| The Lady in the Green Kirtle illustration by original Narnia illustrator Pauline Baynes |
According to Medieval Jewish mythology and folklore, Lilith was created from the mud alongside Adam in Eden. Because they were both made from the same stuff at the same time, Lilith quite reasonably assumed that she and Adam were equals and refused to submit his will. Adam didn't take to kindly to this and rejected Lilith. To make it up to Adam, God plucks out one his ribs and creates Eve, who, because she is formed from Adam's rib, is naturally inferior to him and is expected to behave accordingly. The one time Eve does take the initiative, she gets her doofus of a husband to eat from the Tree of Knowledge and we all know how that played out. Meanwhile, while Eve was original sinning and condemning all women to menstrual cycles for her fruit picking ways, Lilith went off and became a demon/witch that goes around the world filling men with lustful thoughts and killing new born babies.
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| That darn Eve! |
Lilith was a popular subject for European painters and poets. Being the educated man that he was, Lewis would have been very familiar with the common depiction of Lilith as a beautiful seductress using her sexuality to ruin men. So, when he says that Jadis is not a "daughter of Eve" he is saying that she and, by extension, all women like her are a separate, unnatural race from those of us derived from the union of Adam and Eve. Yikes!
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| Lilith by John Collier (1892) |
This is pretty ugly stuff that is being delivered in the guise of a children's adventure story. So, while children may initially pick up the Narnia books for things like the swashbuckling mouse, Reepicheep,they are being indoctrinated with Lewis' seriously skewed views on women and sexuality. For this reason alone these books should be kept out of the hands of children.
But (like the used to say on the old TV commercials for Ginsu Knives) wait there's more!
Not only is Lewis promoting an especially sexist form of Christianity, it is incredibly intolerant. This is demonstrated in how he deals with the people that live in the Narnian world that are not followers of Aslan - The Calormenene.
The desert nation of Calormen is inhabited by dark skinned people described as having long beards, wearing robes and turbans. Their money bears the image of a crescent and they have an opulent aesthetic sensibility. In every sense the Calormenene fit into the stereotypical image of Middle Eastern people and Lewis makes no attempt to hide it
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| An original illustration of Tash by Chronicles of Narnia illustrator Pauline Baynes |
The Calormene worship the god Tash - depicted as a multi-limbed, vulture-headed demon with a skeletal body. A key component to Tash worship is human sacrifice
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It's fairly creepy stuff but what makes it worse is that the worship of Tash is very similar to Medieval Europe's beliefs regarding Muslims. Several Christian sources stated that Muslims worshiped a monstrous entity that required human sacrifices as part of their ceremony. A common deity credited to be the god of the "Mohammedans" was Termagant - often depicted as a kind of goat-headed entity in long robes. Termagant is the seeming inspiration behind the depiction of the demon/god Baphomet. One of the key charges levied against the Knights Templar when they were being persecuted and suppressed by the Vatican was that they went native and began worshiping the goat-headed god of the Muslims, Baphomet.
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| Baphomet by Eliphas Levi |
Termagant and Baphomet often showed up in Medieval and Renaissance literature, two things Professor Lewis was quite familiar with. By giving his Muslim stand-ins, the Calormene, a monstrous demon as a god, he was tapping into the same anti-Islam sentiment and fear that those much older works did.
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| A couple of Calormene nobles in an illustration by Pauline Baynes |
It was bad enough that Lewis depicts the only other belief system in his fictional world as being corrupt and evil, but he goes further and plays into the racism and xenophobia of his day by having the dark skinned Calormene plot to destroy Narnia - which represents an idealized Britain filled with Aslan fearing, tea sipping White folks and their equally British animal and mythological creature pals. The dusky Calormene wish to wipe the worship of Aslan from the earth and replace traditional Narnian society with its own. This is essentially the view of contemporary Islamophobes the world over.
In Lewis' Christianity as presented in the Narnia books, there is no room for other belief systems. In fact, any other belief system seeks to destroy the very civilization in which his target audience was a part of. It is not hard to imagine that Lewis wanted this message to penetrate deeply into the minds of the little boys and girls across the English speaking world he wrote the books for.
As if Islamophobia, misogyny and racism were not bad enough, the Narnia books argue for a violent defence of Christianity by focusing on the faith as being under constant siege. Over and over again the followers of Aslan have to pick up weapons and kill in the name of their saviour. This bunker mentality of having to withstand steady assaults on their faith is a common trait throughout Christian fundamentalism as practiced in America. Christian conservatives are constantly harping on about there being a "War on Christmas" or that their religious freedom is being robbed of them by the Supreme Court making marriage equality the law of the land.
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An original illustration for The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by Pauline Baynes, showing Santa Claus handing out weapons to the children with which to slay Aslan's enemies with. Christmas has declared war on you!
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Perceiving oneself as being under attack and persecuted allows someone to justify any actions they take to defend themselves against these imagined threats. Religious fundamentalists (Christian, Muslim and Jewish) operate from this point of view and that is how they are able to justify the use of terrorism against who they believe are their enemies. Lewis' Narnia books feed into this delusional mind set.
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| Mike Huckabee and Kim Davis - This is what you get if you let your kids read the Narnia books! |
To be continued . . .
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