The Sky Speaks — The Secret Astrology Embedded in the Chronicles of Narnia

Hey everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology [https://nightlightastrology.com/].

Happy Sunday. Hope you guys are having a good weekend.

It's a bonus episode. Today we are going to take a look at the secret astrology that was embedded into the Chronicles of Narnia.

Many of you have probably read the book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Or perhaps, if you're like me, you read all of the books in the series. There are seven of them total. You've got Prince Caspian, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the Silver Chair, and so on.

And if those books meant something to you when you were a kid, you may be shocked to find out that CS Lewis intentionally and secretly embedded those books with astrological symbolism. He was a medieval scholar who was fascinated by the astrological imagination that was present in medieval literature.

And it was an Oxford scholar named Michael Ward who was trying to piece together the intention symbolically behind the Narnia Chronicles. They were criticized by contemporaries, even Tolkien, who was a contemporary of CS Lewis and a friend, said, "What? Like? What? What is this? It's just like a hodgepodge of mythology and fairy tales and sort of Christian, Christian symbolism." But he didn't understand what was threading them all together, and nobody did.

Michael Ward, this scholar from Oxford who teaches CS Lewis, set out to try to figure out what Lewis was doing behind the Chronicles of Narnia, because it seems like there are deeper, embedded themes and coded symbolism in the stories. And many people have commented on this before, but it's rather enigmatic what he was doing. Certainly, he was a Christian, so we know that the texts were probably embedded with some Christian symbolism. But beyond that, it's sort of a mystery.

Well, while doing that research, he cracked the code, and he wrote this book, Planet Narnia. See if you can see it here, The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of CS Lewis. This book is absolutely brilliant. I recommend that you pick it up and read it for yourself. There's also a short documentary that was made based on the book called The Narnia Code.

And in this book, Michael Ward basically sets out all of the evidence that shows that every one of the seven Narnia Chronicles was based on one of the symbols of the, or one of the traditional seven planets and their symbolism. And then he sort of weaves a bit of Christian, you call it Christology, into his telling of these stories through a planetary symbol.

It's absolutely amazing, and it blew my mind, and it confirmed what I suspected as a kid, that there was a lot of magic in these books that felt like right there, but you couldn't put your finger on. And I think it's probably just that reason that they were so beloved by so many people.

Anyway, what follows is a talk that Michael Ward gave for Nightlight students through our speaker series back in 2019, which he gave me permission to share on the YouTube channel. It's about a two-hour talk, I think, if I remember correctly, but it is completely worth it. One little tip is like, if you know two hours is a lot for you, you can always put the speed up to like 1.25 or even 1.5, because he speaks very slowly as well. I do that sometimes when it's like a lengthy talk, but it's really worth listening to anyway. Take that or leave that.

It is well worth sitting with this if you know and love those books and are also a fan of astrology, a student of astrology. So I thought I'd replay this, because it's on my channel, but it was posted on my channel in 2019, so that's gosh, that's going on seven years ago.

At any rate, I hope that you will enjoy this and that it will capture your imagination in the same way that it did mine. I find it sort of breathtaking to consider that my favorite books as a kid, in the childhood of a future astrologer, that I had no idea, of course, no inkling, that I would become an astrologer, but as a child, that these books embedded with planetary symbolism told through the Christian lens I was growing up in as a preacher's kid, would be my favorite books of all time, and that eventually I'd be an astrologer who would discover that they were embedded with astrology.

I don't know. Maybe that's going to land with some of you too, but if you've read the books, you will love this. So I hope that you'll enjoy this talk with Michael Ward, absolutely fantastic talk, and there are no promotions today. Just remember to Like and Subscribe. Share your thoughts and reflections as you check this out.

You can find transcripts of any of these daily talks on the website, that's nightlightastrology.com. Enjoy.

I'm really excited about this talk, because as a professional astrologer who's, I consider myself something of a displaced Christian. And as someone who has always really loved CS Lewis. I live here in DC, and there's theater shows about CS Lewis's life that I've gone to see, and Mere Christianity is one of my favorite books of all time. The Narnia Chronicles goes without speaking.

I read them all after reading Dr. Ward's book, and my wife had gotten pregnant. I reread the all of the Narnia Chronicles to my unborn daughter. So my wife had never heard them either, so I got to read them all out loud. We did it at night over the course of nine months, you know. And I had newfound appreciation and love for the texts having heard Dr. Ward talk about the way that Lewis embedded the spiritual symbolism of the planets.

Now Lewis, of course, is doing this from a Christian perspective, but it's a perspective that I think is deeply valuable for us as astrologers. For most people in this audience are astrologers, and really for everyone. Lewis himself said that "the characters of the planets as conceived by medieval astrology seem to me to have permanent value as spiritual symbols." So it's really going to be beautiful to hear this talk.

I told Dr. Ward, you know, Dr. Ward is not an astrologer. He's coming to hang out with us and give a talk about what Lewis was thinking, what he was doing in his perspective as a Christian on the planets. So that's the perspective that we're bringing in today. I think it's to be really fun.

But before we start, let me tell you a little bit more about Dr. Ward. So Dr. Michael Ward is a senior research fellow at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford, and he's the author of the award-winning Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of CS Lewis. I'm going to hold it up so you can see it here. It is fantastic. I've read it twice now.

It's a really good book, and it survived a Marie Kondo, a slight Marie Kondo purge of my office. Such good things, I had to get a lot of books that I will never get rid of. This one, though.

Based at Blackfriars in Oxford, Dr. Ward is also employed as Professor of Apologetics at Houston Baptist University in Texas, teaching one course per semester as part of the online MA program in Christian Apologetics. Some of you may know that CS Lewis was also a Christian apologist, right, and he did a wonderful job of making the argument, making the case for the teachings of Jesus, in a way that was really, for me, it was really simple. It was like it felt really down to earth.

So at any rate, there's a lot more that you can read about Dr. Ward's career and his resume and his bio on the events web page. I'm going to put that into the chat box right now. So if you want to read more about him, you can. There are also a few ways that you can get in touch with Dr. Ward's work. On Amazon and on his website, you can find a link to the book Planet Narnia, which I recommend reading. And then if you can reread the Narnia Chronicles after reading it, because it'll just blow your mind.

Also, there's a really good documentary. I think the BBC did it. It's called The Narnia Code, and it's also about Dr. Ward's book and his research. So those are two really cool things to check out. Also recommend checking out planetnarnia.com, that's where you can learn more about Dr. Ward, his work, his book. And there's even one really funny thing here, which I thought was great. You can see Dr. Ward actually in the background here of a James Bond movie. So I thought that was really kind of a cool thing to get to brag about.

So at any rate, welcome, Dr. Ward. We're really happy to have you here. Really excited to hear about CS Lewis and the planets. And I'm going to take you off mute now. There you are. Okay, can you hear me now?

Dr. Michael Ward
Yep, can you hear me?

Adam Elenbaas
Yes, great. All right. I'm going to make you the host so that you can share your presentation. But thank you so much for joining us today. We're really happy to have you here.

Dr. Michael Ward
My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

Adam Elenbaas
All right, I'm going to make you the host now. So you should be able to share your screen. There should be an option now that allows you.

Dr. Michael Ward
Okay, so share screen application. And.

Adam Elenbaas
You're going to want to share your video again after you've put that up. Okay, yes, we can see your presentation now, right? And so now you're just going to press start video.

Dr. Michael Ward
Okay, nice.

Adam Elenbaas
I'm not usually this nervous, by the way, when introducing someone. I'm such a big fan of your work. Thank you for taking time with us.

Dr. Michael Ward
My pleasure. Um, is that all working now?

Adam Elenbaas
Yes, great. You're all set. So I'm going to put myself on mute, and then when it comes to Q&A or anything, just holler and I'm right here.

Dr. Michael Ward
Okay, great. Well, good afternoon or good morning, as it may be to you on the East Coast of America, wherever you're watching or listening. I'm speaking to you from my study at home here in Oxford in England, and I'm going to speak for probably about an hour. I hope that's not too long, after which we can have Q&A and discussion for another 20 minutes or so.

And I'm going to be speaking under the title Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of CS Lewis, which is the title of my book, as Adam mentioned. And what we're going to be focusing on is the seven Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis's best-known works, which he published from 1950 to 1956, one per year, and are still selling incredibly well. I'm told they're selling maybe as many as 3 million copies annually worldwide. They've been translated now into over 40 different languages, and the recent film versions have introduced a whole new generation of readers to at least the first three stories.

Now, CS Lewis, as you probably know, was a great friend of Tolkien's. They had a little readers and writers group called the Inklings. And when Lewis read aloud the first few chapters of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to Tolkien, Tolkien strongly detested what he was hearing. He didn't understand how Lewis had assembled that first book as he had, out of what he, Tolkien, regarded as very incompatible, inconsistent mythological traditions.

You've got English children straight out of the pages of an E. Nesbit story. You've got centaurs and fauns and dryads and naiads out of Greek and Roman mythology. You've got a Snow Queen, the White Witch, straight out of the pages of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. And you've got Father Christmas, for goodness sake. What's Father Christmas doing in this story?

And Tolkien thought this was a mishmash and a hodgepodge, and he soon gave up expressing any interest in these books, and he didn't bother to read them all when they were eventually published. He later confessed that they were entirely outside his range of imaginative sympathy. And if you know Tolkien's work, if you know The Lord of the Rings, you know that Middle Earth is a very different kind of imagined world. It's refined and polished to the nth degree of sophistication. And Tolkien was really a perfectionist, a purist, almost an obsessive, who wrote his work out of, well, first of all, imagined languages, and then behind the languages, there came geographies and genealogies. And Tolkien thought that an imagined, sub-created world should have the inner consistency of reality, and he thought that Narnia lacked that because it was assembled out of all these different and, in his view, incompatible literary traditions.

Now, because Tolkien has become very famous, his attitude to Narnia has become very well known too, and lots of people have assumed that Tolkien knew the Narnia books much better than he actually did. As I say, he probably didn't read all the books even once, let alone have an intimate acquaintance with them. But on the surface, at least, his criticism is valid, isn't it? Because you can't really deny that what he's pointing out is true. There are all, indeed, all sorts of literary and mythological traditions that Lewis is drawing upon as he creates this Narnian world.

But Lewis himself was not typically or characteristically a random or a slapdash writer or thinker. He was a very rigorous and consistent thinker who had very good reasons for everything he did and said. Let me give you three quick examples of that.

His own poetry is fantastically complex. He once said that he was enamored of metrical and phonetic subtleties, and the poems which look as if they're in free verse are often in the most complicated meters of all. As a medieval scholar, Lewis loved studying the works of writers like Chaucer and Dante and later Spenser and Milton, writers, he said, who love to present us with something which can't be taken in at a glance. Everything leads to everything else in these writers, he says, but often by very intricate paths. Complexity, he says, is a mark of the medieval mind, and they love to present us with something which, at first looks planless, though all is planned.

And then, as a Christian too, Lewis believed that the universe itself, the real universe, is a fantastically intricate work of divine creativity. Every single thing in creation having been made for a particular purpose. We, as mere finite creatures, can't even, in principle, begin to work out that unfathomably complex divine design, but it was an article of faith for Lewis that it indeed existed in the mind of God. And so he can say in one of his books that God's purpose is working itself out down to the curve of every wave and the flight of every insect on the surface. We sometimes think that there can be no providential hand guiding the tiller of history when we see all sorts of accidents happen and innocent people suffering and any number of inexplicable events in our daily lives. But nonetheless, for Lewis, it was, as I say, an article of faith that there were divine purposes being worked out behind the scenes, as it were.

So Narnia, can it really be a hodgepodge or mishmash, as Tolkien suspected? On the surface, he's right, isn't he, but maybe at a deeper level, there's a more intricate level of coherence and design within Narnia. And the obvious place to look is the biblical parallels within the Narnia series, because CS Lewis himself once admitted that the whole Narnia series was about Christ. There's a very strong Christian theme running throughout the books, and if you look particularly at these three stories, the Christian biblical parallels are very obvious. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe gives us a Narnian version of the Gospel story. The Magician's Nephew gives us a Narnian version of the creation story, and The Last Battle gives us a Narnian version of the Last Judgment.

But these are only three out of seven books. This is less than half the series, and when you look at the other four books, it's not so obvious how these relate to biblical events, or aspects of the life or ministry of Christ. You might have expected Lewis to give us a Narnian story all about the birth of his Christ character, Aslan, the lion, king of Narnia. But you don't get that. You don't get a Narnian story of Aslan being born as a lion carpenter in Narnia, like Jesus was born as a baby into Bethlehem. You don't get a Narnian version of the ascension of Christ. You don't get a Narnian version of the day of Pentecost when Christ sends His Spirit on the church.

And you might have expected that, given what Lewis does in these three books, what is going on in these four? I mean, Aslan is still present, yes, and he's still Christ-like in various ways, but there's no major element or episode of Christ's life or ministry that's being reimagined. In Prince Caspian, Aslan enters the story amongst dancing trees before giving a great war cry. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Aslan is seen flying in a sunbeam. In The Silver Chair, Aslan doesn't actually come down to Narnia at all. He's confined to his own high country above the clouds, which doesn't seem a particularly Christian way of depicting your Christ character. He's not incarnated into the magical world; he's sealed up in heaven, as it were. That would be more like an Old Testament, not a New Testament, understanding of the divine figure.

And in The Horse and His Boy, Aslan is mistaken for two lions, or maybe three lions, and he does a great deal of dashing about in that story. You may remember, if you've read that book, that he says at one point, "There was only one lion, but he was swift of foot." So why did CS Lewis make that imaginative choice to render his Christ character swift of foot in that particular story, but in no other? I don't recall Jesus in the Bible being a notable sprinter or having a special ministry to athletes. Why did Lewis make that choice?

These are questions that don't come to mind when you're just caught up in the story, when you're enjoying the read, but when you sit back and reflect and ask yourself why, it's not very obvious how these books hang together. And yet, as I said, we have this very well-attested interest of Lewis in intricacy and complexity of all kinds. So what is it that makes the Narnia series hang together? Is there, indeed, a coherent pattern or design behind all seven Chronicles?

And lots of different Lewis scholars and critics have asked this question. They've gone looking for some kind of hidden pattern. Okay, on the surface, on the literary level, as Tolkien's said, they may not make much obvious sense. At the biblical level, they don't seem to hang together very much better. And yet we know that Lewis was so interested in complexity, and said of his own poetry that the poems which look as if they're in free verse are often in the most complicated meters. Medieval writers love to present us with something which at first looks planless, though all is planned. So you know, a way of phrasing the question would be, "Did Lewis plan it or did he not plan it?" Please excuse the terrible pun.

Now, all sorts of different theories have been suggested about what might really have undergirded these Chronicles. The Seven Deadly Sins has been suggested, the seven sacraments, the seven books of Spenser's Faerie Queene, one of Lewis's favorite poems. All sorts of different sevens have been suggested. I myself once made a half-hearted attempt to link the Chronicles to seven different plays by Shakespeare. But I soon abandoned that idea, because although it helped account fairly well for a few of them, it didn't really cover all seven. And in any case, it didn't have much explanatory power. So I abandoned that idea, and I just let the matter drop, and continued my study in Lewis and continued reading and rereading the Narnia books, but not actively trying to solve this riddle.

But it was when I was halfway through my PhD research that I think I stumbled across the real answer to this conundrum that the Narnia books present, and that's what my book is all about. The BBC got interested after I published this book, and they commissioned a television documentary called The Narnia Code, which was broadcast on the BBC a few years ago in this country, in the UK. And there's now a book, The Narnia Code, the same title. So The Narnia Code is a shorter, simpler version of Planet Narnia. If you want the detailed account of my argument, go to Planet Narnia. If you want a more popular and accessible version, either read The Narnia Code book or watch the hour-long documentary, which you can get on DVD.

So what I want to do in the remaining time is to give you a brief introduction of this discovery as I believe it to be, about what really holds the Narnia books together as a unified creative, artistic undertaking. So let me give you a few background reasons about what Lewis might really have been up to. Four background reasons before I come on to the substance of the argument itself. Once we've got these four background building blocks in place, I think hopefully it will be a little less implausible that he might have done a secret thing such as I'm claiming that he did do.

The first of these four background reasons has to do with Lewis himself and his own personality. He could be very secretive when he wanted to be. "Jack never ceased to be secretive," is the verdict of one of his friends who knew him for 30 years. Jack, by the way, was Lewis's nickname. He didn't like the name Clive and he hated the name Staples. Clive Staples Lewis was always known as Jack to his friends, and one of these friends says, "Jack never ceased to be secretive." And if we're looking for examples of his secretiveness, the most obvious is the fact that when he got married in his late 50s, he kept his marriage secret for the best part of a year, not even close friends like Tolkien were told about it. If you've seen the film Shadowlands, you may know about this. But there are other examples of his secretiveness too. And just to mention one, his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, left out so many very important significant things about Lewis that one of his friends jokingly said it should not have been called Surprised by Joy; it should have been called Suppressed by Jack. And there are many other examples of his privacy, of his guardedness, of his ability to compartmentalize his life. He wasn't the sort of person who let it all hang out. He would never have gone on The Oprah Winfrey Show. He could be very secretive.

Now, of course, just because he kept secret about his marriage, that proves nothing about Narnia, but it does indicate the kind of man we're dealing with. So this is a kind of temperamental background point, a psychological background point.

From psychology, let's move to his literary interests, because he was a very notable literary critic, literary historian. And one of the papers he wrote while he worked here in Oxford was this, "The Kappa Element in Romance." This is the title of an essay Lewis wrote, and Kappa is the initial letter of the Greek word krypton, meaning a cryptic or hidden. So Lewis wrote an essay with the title, "The Hidden Element in Story." That's what romance means here, the hidden element in story. Now most people don't know that he wrote this because he never published it under this title. When he published it, he selected a different title, and he dropped this term Kappa, but it was still basically what he was writing about. And he says this in the published version of this essay, which was called "On Stories." He says, "To be stories at all, they must be series of events, but it must be understood that this series, the plot as we call it, is only really a net whereby to catch something else. The real theme may be, and perhaps usually is, something that has no sequence in it, something other than a process and much more like a state or a quality."

So for Lewis, the best thing about a story was not just its clever plot, its sequence of events. You need a strong storyline, of course. You need a good plot, but the plot is really just giving you access to something else. And we know that because of the stories that we are likely to reread. Your favorite stories you will reread many times in the course of your life, not because you've forgotten the plot. You can remember well enough what happens, but you just want to re-enter that imaginative space. You like breathing that imaginative oxygen. You like the flavor of, say, the Jane Austen world or the Dickens world, or the Harry Potter world, whatever it may be. You can remember what happens, but it's not simply what happens that matters. It's how it happens, why it happens, the whole world in which these happenings happen that draws you back and back to your favorite stories.

While you read, that atmospheric, qualitative flavor or tone is not something that attracts your conscious attention. It's in the background. It's the oxygen you breathe. It's not so much a particular item on the page that you're looking at. It's the whole world, the whole field of vision you're looking along and through. And that's why it's effectively hidden, because you're inside it. It's cryptic. It's hidden. It's secret because you are inside it. So that's an important thing to bear in mind when we come to Narnia. What's the flavor? What's the atmospheric quality of each of the Narnia Chronicles that you don't look at as you read, but you look along, that you enjoy. So that's a literary background point.

And now a more theological background point. Here's a verse from the New Testament which CS Lewis was interested in: "For all things were created through Christ and for Christ, and in Christ, all things hold together." And CS Lewis, as I say, was interested in this verse. He paraphrases it in one place. He says, "Christ is the all-pervasive principle of cohesion whereby the universe holds together." The all-pervasive principle of cohesion, whereby the universe holds together.

Now remember he said that Narnia is all about Christ, and when we hear him say that, we immediately think of the Christ character Aslan, who does Christ-like things, who dies and rises, who creates, who judges, and all these other biblical things that Aslan does. But we don't probably think of this aspect of Christ, this more cosmic Christ, the omnipresent, universal Christ. The idea of Christ as the divine figure in whom all things hold together, all things, including the historical acts of Jesus of Nazareth, the Incarnate Word of God. This cosmic aspect of Christ is something that Lewis also wanted to put into the Narnia stories, I believe. But it's obviously a much harder thing to depict, because this aspect, this Christological aspect, would have to be in every part of the story at once, not just located in Aslan, but in the whole Narnian world that Aslan has brought into being.

So how would Lewis depict that? It's quite a hard thing, not only to depict in a story, but even to conceptualize. Because, well, Lewis says this in his book Miracles: "The fact which is, in one respect, the most obvious and primary fact, that is to say God, the Christian God of Christian theology, and through which alone you have access to all the other facts, may be precisely the one fact that is most easily forgotten, forgotten not because it's so remote or abstruse, but because it's so near and so obvious." And that is exactly how the supernatural, the divine, has been forgotten. In other words, what Lewis is saying here is that the divine nature is closer to us than we are to ourselves. The divine nature is the very ground of our ability to know anything whatsoever. We know God before we know anything else at all. And for that reason, it can be overlooked, because something that is everywhere, in a sense, might as well be nowhere, for the same reason that we were just talking about a literary flavor or quality. It's not something you look at; it's not a discrete item within your field of vision. It's your whole field of vision. And your whole field of vision can escape your conscious awareness if you're not very careful. So how would CS Lewis depict an omnipresent but overlookable divine figure in Narnia? Keep that question in mind as we go on.

But we've got one last background point to discuss, and that's this: transferred classicism. This is a term that Lewis coined when he was writing a review of the Oxford Book of Christian Verse. And he's talking there about how Christian writers as late as the 17th Century would adopt this technique, this transferred classicism technique, which means that they would reach back into the classical past, classical pagan mythology, the pagan myths of Greece and Rome, and they would find in those classical myths all sorts of characters and storylines and motifs and images which they would then transfer into their Christian literature. The Christian plays and poetry of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were full of references to Zeus and Venus and Apollo and Jupiter, not because these Christian artists still believed in the Greek and Roman pantheon of gods and goddesses, but because they wanted to use these well-known classical figures from an imaginative and creative point of view.

So Lewis can say that paganism, classical paganism, is the religion of poetry in the Middle Ages. In the Renaissance, it's the religion of poetry through which the poet can express at any moment just so much or so little of his real religion, of his Christianity, as his art requires. And everyone is in the secret. Everybody knows that when you see Apollo and Jupiter and Venus cropping up in, well, Spenser, Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, it's not because paganism still holds sway. No, it's because Christian writers are finding these convenient methods of talking about religious themes, spiritual subjects. Lewis says this is the best way of writing literature which is religious without being devotional, and everyone is in the secret, he says. God, the Christian God, will often appear in medieval literature, but masked, hidden behind a pagan veil, dressed up as Apollo or Zeus or Jupiter or whoever it may be. That's transferred classicism.

So we're now back to where we started, the Narnia books, and how they hang together if they do. But before we proceed, let me quickly recap the four points I've just talked about. Lewis could be secretive. He had a personality which is quite capable of keeping major secrets when he wanted to. His literary theory involved this idea of the cryptic or the Kappa element in a story, the hidden flavor or qualitative atmosphere of a well-told tale. His theology involved an idea of God as, in one way, effectively hidden from us by the sheer omnipresence of God. And then, as a literary historian, he understood how Christian writers in the past would often use classical pagan gods and goddesses for Christian purposes.

Okay, so we can now advance and begin to assess more closely what he's doing in the Narnia books. But at this point, we should remind ourselves that although Lewis was best known for Narnia, he wasn't professionally a writer of fiction. He was professionally an academic. He taught here at Oxford University for most of his career, and the biggest book he ever wrote was this, a 700-page tome entitled English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama. A really snappy title, I think you'll agree. It was part of this Oxford History of English Literature series. And Lewis abbreviated Oxford History of English Literature to OHEL. He called this his OHEL book. And it took him 15 years to write. And when he finally published it, he wrote to a friend and said, "Thank goodness I've completed this big academic work I've been engaged in for the last decade and a half." And then he adds, interestingly, "This book was the top tune all that time, and all the other books I published during those years were just its little twiddly bits." Which means that Narnia is basically just the twiddly bits on this massive intellectual enterprise. So if we think of Narnia as the main theme of Lewis's output, we get it completely back to front. No, this is the main theme. This is the top tune. This is the melody of Lewis's output as a writer. Narnia is just the little ting on the triangle, a little piccolo flourish. That's Narnia, is the ornamental detail, the twiddly bits.

But I mention this OHEL volume, because it begins with a very interesting discussion of the new astronomy that came in in the 16th century thanks to the work of Nicholas Copernicus. Because, of course, it was Copernicus, slap bang in the middle of the 16th century, who revolutionized astronomy with his theory of the heliocentric cosmos. Until Copernicus, pretty much everybody had always believed that the universe was geocentric, not heliocentric. But of course, once the Copernican understanding of the cosmos began to take hold, it had eventually a very impactful result in the literature that people would produce. It didn't actually take hold in the 16th century. Lewis concludes it was really only in the 17th Century that everybody came to accept the Copernicus theory, once the telescope was invented in the early 17th century, and once Galileo and Kepler were able to verify Copernicus's theory. But it was a hugely important thing for Lewis, because, of course, the kind of cosmos you believe yourself to be living in will have a major influence, sooner or later, on the kinds of literature that you produce.

And that's why in Lewis's last book, The Discarded Image, he has a long chapter all about the heavens as they were understood in the Middle Ages, but also a fascinating Epilogue all about cosmological models and the sorts of effects they have on the human imagination. Three times in The Discarded Image, Lewis encourages his readers to take a walk under the sky at night and to look up at the night sky as if they still believe that the universe was geocentric, as if the earth was static and central and surrounded by not empty space. Space, in that sense, is a 17th Century word. It was coined by John Milton in Paradise Lost. Before the 17th century, you couldn't have looked up into space. That word was not available to you. You looked up into the heavens, the seven heavens, each heaven with its own planet, and each planet with its own influences that it would shed upon the earth and upon events and even the metals in Earth's crust.

And let's just remind ourselves of those seven heavens. They are, going out from the earth: the sphere of the moon, then that of Mercury, in the third heaven Venus, in the brightest heaven of invention, to quote Shakespeare, the sun. The sun, remember, was regarded as a planet before the time of Copernicus. But a planet, literally in Greek, is a wanderer. These are the wandering stars. They have their own unique paths across the heavens. And all the other stars are not planets, but stars fixed in their constellations. Above the sun was the sphere of Mars, then that of Jupiter, and in the seventh heaven, Saturn. Still today, occasionally you hear people saying, "Oh, I was in the seventh heaven of delight." It's delightful to be in the seventh heaven, according to medieval thought, because up there you're furthest away from Earth and all the trials and tribulations of Earth.

Now, this is the image of the cosmos that we have discarded. That's why Lewis calls his book The Discarded Image. We no longer believe the universe to be geocentric. But in one respect, of course, we retain an awareness of this old pre-Copernican cosmos, because it's from these seven heavens, these seven planets, that we take the names of the days of the week. Today is Sunday, the day of the sun. Yesterday was Saturday, Saturn's day. Tomorrow will be Monday, moon day. And the other four days of the week, likewise, though it's slightly hidden from us in English, because for some reason, in English, we take the Norse names for those planetary gods and goddesses rather than the Roman ones. But if you think in Spanish or French, it's a bit more obvious. So Thor's day is jueves in Spanish, jeudi in French. Jupiter's day. Tuesday is martes in Spanish, mardi in French, Mars's day. Tiw is the Norse equivalent of Mars, and so on for the other days of the week.

Now, we may have largely discarded this understanding of the cosmos, but CS Lewis hadn't, because it was his responsibility as a medieval scholar to keep an awareness of this old cosmological scheme alive in his readers' and students' minds. How could they understand the literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance if this backdrop was not understood?

Let me mention two medieval writers who use this backdrop very considerably. The first, of course, is Dante. Perhaps the greatest poem of the Middle Ages is Dante's Divine Comedy. And in the Divine Comedy, the pilgrim mounts up through the seven heavens in his ascent to God's throne. And here's an illustration from an edition of The Divine Comedy, showing you the seven planetary characters in the order of the days of the week. So there on the left, you see the sun, Sunday, in his burning, fiery chariot. Then we come across to the moon in her silvery gown, holding her crescent. The moon for Monday. Then Mars for Tuesday. Mars there in his helmet, in his chain mail, the god of war. Next figure is Mercury, and we know he's Mercury for Wednesday because of those wings on his heels. Mercury was the fleet-footed messenger of the gods, swift of foot. Then we come to Jupiter, Jove for Thursday. And we know he's Jupiter because of that stick that he's holding over his shoulder. It's not just any old rod or cane. It's a scepter. It's the kingly staff of office, because Jupiter was associated in medieval thought with all things kingly and regal and sovereign. Then we come to Venus in her green gown for Friday, because Venus was associated with fertility and creativity, sexuality, love, laughter. Think of the word 'venerate'. When you venerate someone, you are lovingly respecting them, and that's because Venus is influencing you to venerate. The influence lingers in our language there, as it does in the word 'venereal' contract, a venereal disease. You're doing something under the influence of the goddess of love, the goddess of sexuality. And in the final place, we have Saturn with his sickle, Saturn with his scythe and his hourglass. He doesn't have an hourglass in this picture, but very often he's carrying an hourglass. Saturn is an older version of our more modern picture of Father Time, or as he's sometimes now depicted as the Grim Reaper. The Grim Reaper, Father Time, Saturn, they're all the same character, mythologically speaking.

So Dante uses this cosmological scheme as the backdrop to the Divine Comedy. Then Chaucer, another great medieval poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, likewise uses it all over his work. This is a page of notes I found in CS Lewis's complete Chaucer. CS Lewis is making notes here about the Knight's Tale from The Canterbury Tales. You see there at the top, Knight's Tale. We don't have time to go through the astrological diagram on the left there, but maybe we can return to that in the Q&A at the end, if anybody's interested. I just put this up because it shows us how closely Lewis analyzed Chaucer's use of the planets in the Knight's Tale. He said that Chaucer uses the planets very interestingly in the Knight's Tale. He doesn't just put them as actors into the storyline. He weaves the appropriate influences into the plot of the Knight's Tale so that the climax of the story happens on a Tuesday, on martes, mardi, the day of Mars. How appropriate for a story about knights.

So CS Lewis has this academic, literary historical interest in the planets, but he also had a more personal interest. He was quite a keen amateur astronomer. He had a telescope on the balcony of his bedroom. He liked going to the local observatory, and he would often point out unusual conjunctions of the planets in the night sky. We know this from various letters and recording sessions that he had with his friends. But he also had a more spiritual interest in the planets. His favorite Psalm was Psalm 19. "The heavens are telling the glory of God. The firmament proclaims His handiwork." Lewis described Psalm 19 as the greatest poem in the book of Psalms, and one of the greatest lyrics in the world. And it's interesting how the heavens depicted in that Psalm declare God's glory not by uttering literal words, but by speaking to the ears of our heart, as it were. "Their sound is gone out," we're told, but there is no speech, no literal speech. Yet their voice goes out through all the earth and their words to the ends of the world. They are speaking, but they are speaking a language we can't hear with our literal ears. We have to be attuned to it with the ears of our heart. It's very close to the medieval understanding of the music of the spheres, which is constantly sounding, according to medieval thought, but because it's constantly sounding, we never hear it, because it's the permanent backdrop to our whole auditory life. The music of the spheres is like an auditory equivalent of both the presence of God in creation and the quality or flavor, the atmosphere of a well-told tale. You don't pay attention to it with your conscious, contemplative attention, because it's the whole field of vision, the whole field of auditory experience in which you live your life.

So Lewis has a scholarly interest in the planets. He has a personal interest as an astronomer. He has a devotional interest as a Christian. He also had an imaginative and creative interest because he used the seven heavens very explicitly in his cosmic trilogy of novels, interplanetary stories that he wrote just before and during the Second World War. This is the first book, Out of the Silent Planet. It's set on Mars, very medieval Mars. The second book is set on Venus, and in the third book, the planetary characters actually come down to earth to bring about the end of the story. And the planetary characters are used explicitly in this trilogy. You can't miss them. And if you don't know this trilogy, I would recommend it. It's full of fascinating stuff, both from an astrological and from an astronomical point of view.

Now, why was Lewis so interested in the planets? He said this: "The characters of the planets as conceived by medieval astrology seem to me to have a permanent value as spiritual symbols, which is especially worthwhile in our own generation of Saturn. We know more than enough. But who does not need to be reminded of Jove?" Now this is an absolutely crucial quotation for my whole argument about Narnia, because this shows us that Lewis understood the characters of the planets as conceived by medieval astrology to be of permanent value. That's not just something fit for those credulous or superstitious medieval times. There's a permanent value as spiritual symbols to these seven heavens, and indeed, it's especially worthwhile in our own generation, he says.

Now, remember, Lewis's generation was the generation that went through the First World War. Lewis himself had been a teenage officer in the First World War. He fought in the trenches of France, served for about six months before he was very nearly killed when a shell fell in his trench and killed the man next to him and spattered Lewis full of shrapnel. He had an out-of-body experience. He looked down on himself from a great height, and the thought occurred to him, "Here is a picture of a man dying." He thought he was dying, but obviously he survived. And he was invalided back to England, and he spent another six months recovering from his war wounds. But that's why he thought that the planets were especially worthwhile in his own generation, because of Saturn. His generation knew more than enough Saturn, the Grim Reaper with his scythe, cutting people down in their prime. Three quarters of a million British servicemen were killed in the First World War. And Lewis sometimes refers to the culture of the 1920s and 30s as Saturnocentric, fixated upon saturnine qualities of death and disaster, cynicism and pessimism. A very natural response to the huge trauma of the Great War that everyone had just been through. But the great thing about the seven heavens was that they indicated that Saturn was not the only, or even the best, way of interpreting reality. There were six other spiritual symbols that you could turn to as well, and the best of them was Jove. Who does not need to be reminded of Jove? Jupiter was the king of the seven planets. He was the monarch, the wisdom that governed the stars, as Lewis writes elsewhere.

So when Lewis came to write the Narnia Chronicles, I believe that he used these seven spiritual symbols again, but this time he used them implicitly. He'd used them explicitly in his cosmic trilogy, and he'd written about them explicitly all over his academic writings. But here he takes them, one planet per book, and uses the planet's set of characteristics and attributes, uses it as a kind of imaginative blueprint for the Narnian world that he's going to depict in that given Chronicle.

So let's start at the beginning, a very good place to start. The first book is The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which I believe is written to express and embody the qualities of Jupiter. Here is Jupiter the planet, and Jupiter, the king of the gods. And you can see there, I'm sure you know all about Jupiter's great red eye, the Great Red Spot of Jupiter there in the southeast corner, as we look at it. And that eye, that great red spot of Jupiter, is wider than the diameter of Earth. You could fit the whole of Earth inside that red spot of Jupiter. Shows you how massive Jupiter is. And the planet and the king of the gods there, Jupiter in Roman mythology, Zeus in Greek mythology, or Thor in Norse mythology. It's out of these jovial qualities that Lewis constructs The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Now this idea occurred to me when I was reading Lewis's long poem about the planets that he wrote many years before Narnia. I was lying in bed one night reading it halfway through my PhD work, when I came across these lines: "Of wrath ended and woes mended, of winter past and guilt forgiven and good fortune. Jove is Master." I said to myself, "Winter past and guilt forgiven." Winter past and guilt forgiven. That's like a five-word summary of The Lion, the Witch, the Wardrobe, which is all about the passing of winter. You remember how the White Witch has made it always winter, but never Christmas. Her kingdom of ice and snow passes at the coming of Aslan. We're told that when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again; when he bares his teeth, winter meets its death, or deep, as I like to say. When I was a kid, I was always troubled by that half rhyme. So winter passes in that first Narnia Chronicle, a very obvious jovial influence, according to this planet's poem.

But what about the kingship of Jupiter? Because how interestingly is kingship woven into The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe? The children, when they first hear about Aslan, don't know who he is. They think he might just be a regular man, but they're told, "No, he's the king of the wood. He's the king of the beasts. He's not safe, but he's good," because he's the king. Repeatedly, we have these kingly qualities of Aslan emphasized. We're told that he's royal and strong. He's royal and solemn. He's got a royal standard, a royal pavilion. And indeed, at the end of the story, he crowns the children. They become kings and queens themselves. And we're told repeatedly, "Once a king in Narnia, always a king in Narnia. Once a queen in Narnia, always a queen in Narnia." The royal destiny of the children is really prefigured in the first moment that they step inside the wardrobe together when they put on those fur coats. And we're told that the fur coats looked more like royal robes than coats when they put them on, and that's an indication of where the story is going to eventuate, when they are crowned and sceptered and hailed and enthroned in the castle of Cair Paravel at the end of the tale.

So you've got the passing of winter, all this kingship imagery, but also guilt forgiven. Remember how Edmund betrays his brother and sisters and then his guilt as a traitor is forgiven by Aslan, who dies on the stone table. Now, the Christian reflection there of Christ's sacrificial death on the cross is very obvious, and a lot of people have thought, "Oh, that's just a convenient little kind of Sunday school lesson that Lewis inserts into the story in order to make it edifying for his young readers. What could it possibly have to do with Jupiter?" Well, interestingly, in the same year that Lewis began writing in earnest The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, he published another book on the poetry of his great friend Charles Williams, who was another member of the Inklings. And in that book, CS Lewis writes this: "When he writes of Jupiter's red pierced planet, Charles Williams assumes that the huge reddish spot which astronomers observe on the surface of Jupiter is a wound, and the redness is that of blood. Jupiter, the planet of kingship, thus wounded becomes another ectype, another reflection of the Divine King wounded on Calvary." So this shows us that Lewis very explicitly connects jovial symbolism with the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, the divine king wounded on Calvary, which he's reworking at the heart of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, when Aslan dies and comes back to life for the sake of Edmund, the traitor.

Wherever you look in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, you find it strangely informed by, influenced by jovial qualities. Look at this medieval woodcut. It shows you Jupiter enthroned in the heavens, and down on Earth are the people who exhibit the jovial influences. So there on the foreground, you have a man kneeling. He's just about to be crowned king. On the left, you can see another man kneeling for judgment. Is his guilt going to be forgiven or not? We might fairly say. And in the background, you can just make out horses and hounds, and they're off hunting the White Hart, or the white stag that kings and queens would hunt for in medieval romances. So all of these elements we have in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. We have coronation, we have the forgiving of guilt, and we have the final chapter of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is called "The Hunting of the White Stag."

Now, is it possible that all these jovial influences found their way into the first Narnia chronicle by accident? For the sake of argument, let's say that it was accidental, that Lewis didn't intend it. Well then, when we turn to the next Chronicle, Prince Caspian, the second book to be published, we find that this is strangely influenced by martial qualities. This is the Mars book, if you ask me, because this is a story, first of all, about war. It's the civil war of Narnia, the Great War of Deliverance, as it's called. And the very word "martial" appears several times in this book. If you saw the recent film version, oh, no, sorry. Well, yes, if you saw the recent film version, you may remember how it began with that conjunction of two stars, two planets, which is depicted here and then in an illustration from Prince Caspian. Dr. Cornelius, the tutor of Prince Caspian, takes the royal prince up the tower at night and shows him the conjunction of Tarva, the Lord of Victory, and Alambil, the Lady of Peace. And we're told that this conjunction betokens some great good for the sad realm of Narnia. What it betokens is war, the Great War of Deliverance, to drive out the usurping King Miraz and restore the throne to the proper King Caspian. If you saw the recent film version, you will remember how they really went to town on the battle scenes.

But you might object that if you know the Narnia Chronicles, there are battles in quite a lot of the Narnia stories. And so what makes this a peculiarly martial story? Well, it's partly the centrality of these military events. It's partly, as I say, that the word "martial" appears many times in this book, but never in any of the other Narnia Chronicles. But what clinches it actually has nothing to do with warfare, but everything to do with woods. If you see here on the cover of the book, the trees. Caspian is just about to be knocked off his horse by a falling tree. The Telmarines are frightened of the forests. In this story, Lucy tries to wake the trees. The trees come to the battle at the end of the book. Now, why all these trees? What's that got to do with Mars? What's that got to do with anything, for that matter? Is it just evidence of Lewis slopping this book together in a mishmash, slapdash kind of way, as Tolkien thought? No. It's part and parcel of the fundamental martial spirit.

Now I didn't know this because my own classical education is very weak, but as soon as I began digging in my researches, I discovered that Mars, to the Romans, was not always and only the god of war. He was a vegetation deity associated with trees and forests. And we see here a mural from Pompeii, which shows you Mars in both capacities at once. Yes, he's the god of war. He's got his spear and his helmet and his shield, but he's standing against a backdrop of burgeoning vegetation, because he was also known as Mars Silvanus, god of trees and forests. And the third month of the year, March, is called March because it's sacred to Mars in both capacities at once, really, because in the third month of the year, the weather is getting good enough for armies to march off to battle, but the trees are also coming back to life after winter.

So think of Prince Caspian. Here's an image from Prince Caspian, showing you both aspects of the martial influence in a single picture. You've got the single combat there between Miraz and Peter, but it's overseen, interestingly, by the marshals of the lists. "Marshal" there being used as a bit of a pun. And in the background, you can see the trees. The tree spirits are called dryads and hamadryads and silvans in only Prince Caspian. Of the tree spirits called silvans, Lewis is there tipping the wink. He's giving us a nod to Mars Silvanus. Everything in this story conspires to generate a martial atmosphere. Aslan is the true Mars. He's the one who utters the great war cry, summoning everyone to battle. But he's also the one who's present "I'm alive," you remember? Lucy tries to wake the trees, but they don't come alive until Aslan is present. He's the true Mars, according to that technique of transferred classicism, by which the Christian God could be depicted under a pagan veil. And the children, as they relate to Aslan, become martial themselves. The boys harden into knights, and the girls romp in the bacchanalian revelry with the swaying trees and the growing vines. They become increasingly martial themselves.

And even seemingly random little details help generate the total atmosphere that Lewis is wanting to evoke. You may remember, in the ruins of the castle at the start of the story, that the children discover a discarded chess piece. Now this chess piece is totally unimportant. It could have been just described as a chess piece. It needn't have been identified any further, or it could have been a chess king or chess queen or a chess pawn. But what it is, is a chess knight with a little red ruby eye. It has to be a knight, just as Chaucer's Knight's Tale had to conclude on a Tuesday, because this is a story about knighthood, about chivalry, about gallantry, about all things martial. There are no accidents. Every tiny little thing is carefully selected for its martial qualities.

Let's move on to the third book, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. This, of course, is the sun story, the solar story. You could guess this really from the title of the book, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. This is a journey towards the eastern edge of the world, where the sun rises, when the ship finally treads the dawn and they meet Aslan scattering light from his mane. Earlier in the story, Lucy has seen Aslan flying in a sunbeam towards her. They've gone to that island with the magic pool that turns everything to gold. Gold, of course, was the sun's metal, according to medieval thought. Gold, illumination, sunlight are everywhere in this book.

But what clinches it actually is another theme of imagery running through the story, which again, I didn't know necessarily to begin with, had anything to do with the sun, because, as I say, my classical education is very poor. But as I delved into my researches, I discovered that the Greek god of light was Apollo, and Apollo was famously a slayer of dragons. Here he is, Apollo, and he's killing that miniature dragon, that lizard, with the beams from his eyes. He was known as Apollo Sauroktonos, Apollo the lizard slayer, the dragon slayer. Now, if we go back to The Dawn Treader, notice how the ship itself is shaped like a dragon. Eustace is turned into a dragon. They encounter the great sea serpent, and several other dragons are mentioned in the course of the story. When you begin to pay attention to this theme, that's because Lewis is wanting to talk about the god of light in the broadest possible sense, not just the bringer of illumination, not just the turner of base metal into gold. He's wanting to depict Apollo, the god of light, as the slayer of dragons.

So look at this image from the recent film version of The Dawn Treader. This is Eustace's eyeball after he's been turned into a dragon, and you can see that in the reflection in his eyeball, the approaching form of Aslan, the lion who's going to come and rip off the dragon's skin and turn Eustace back into a boy again. This isn't just a convenient little Sunday school lesson about Christian conversion. It's part and parcel of the solar symbolism out of which the whole book is constructed. In a way, what Lewis is giving us here is a classical and medieval spin upon biblical material, because, of course, there in the Bible, in the New Testament, we have God repeatedly referred to as the light of the world. Christ Himself says, "I am the light of the world," in the book, in the Gospel of St. John. And the idea of God as the bringer of light, the bringer of illumination, is a scriptural commonplace.

Now, Lewis could have just stopped there with the biblical imagery, but no, he wants to enrich that biblical imagery with classical mythology and medieval cosmology. So he goes a long way round, enriching his biblical foundation with this mythological and astrological material as he goes, which I think is why the Narnia books work so well on so many different levels. They resonate. We feel that there's more going on here than meets the eye. This is partly why they have become classics, because they are multi-layered. They're many-dimensioned.

So let me quickly mention the other four books, and then we can stop and have some questions and discussion.

The Silver Chair, of course, is the moon story. You could really guess this also from the title, because silver is the moon's metal. This is a story about wetness and wanderings. Wetness and all things fishy and watery are connected with lunar atmosphere, lunar influences. But also, of course, lunacy, madness, which is why the lost Prince Rilian is found raving like a lunatic at the climax of the story.

The Horse and His Boy is the Mercury story, full of language and running. And this is why Aslan, in this story, is swift of foot, because he's the true Mercury. He's the Word of God, living and active, to use a scriptural term. This is a story all about twins and boxing and theft and that whole strange concatenation of images which cluster around the quick-silver god Mercury.

The Magician's Nephew is the Venus story, because this is the story about Narnia being brought to birth by Aslan. He sings it into being, because Venus, of course, is the fertile, creative spirit. But also, Aslan summons Digory to go to the Western garden, very obviously based on the garden of Hesperides, and find there a magic apple, Venus's apple, the apple of Aphrodite that brings life, that cures the sickness of Digory's mother. This is a book full of fertility and motherhood and femininity and laughter and love and sweetness. So it's not just the Genesis creation account being retold in fairy tale form. No, it's Lewis giving expression to the whole range of Venus qualities.

And The Last Battle, of course, is the Saturn story. Because in this story, all the characters who are alive at the start of the tale are dead by the end of it, as indeed the stars have foretold. Roonwit, the centaur, is a great stargazer, and he goes and tells the king that if Aslan were really come to Narnia, all the noblest stars would be assembled in his honor. But because the noblest stars are not assembled in his honor, the accounts of Aslan returning to Narnia must be a lie. "Do not believe it, Sire," the centaur says to the king. "This is a lie." This indeed is the Antichrist. This is the last days. This is the final judgment approaching. This is the Narnian version of the Apocalypse and the book of Revelation. And who is it who brings Narnia to an end? But Father Time. Lewis puts Father Time with his scythe and his hourglass onto the very pages of The Last Battle. And he, of course, knows that Father Time is another name for Saturn. And in fact, in an early draft of the Narnia Chronicles, when Lewis had first mentioned this character, he had called him "the god Saturn." It's there in the typescript, but when he came to publish, he thought, "That's making things a bit too obvious. Let's hide my planetary purposes. Let's just call this character Father Time, and let's bank on people not knowing that Father Time and Saturn are the same character."

So that's an introduction to my argument. Why would Lewis have done this, assuming it's a correct reading of the Narnia Chronicles? Why would he have done it? I think there are three main reasons. One is simply fun, simply play. Lewis was quite a playful character, and when I told a friend of his, an old man now in his 80s, or even 90s, when I told this man, Simon Barrington-Ward, what I discovered—he knew CS Lewis very well in the 1950s—Simon Barrington-Ward told me in reply, "Oh, that's exactly like Jack. He would have roared with laughter as he did all that. That would have been entirely in character." The playfulness, the secretiveness, is entirely in Lewis's character.

But there are two much more serious reasons as well. One is literary and the other is theological. The literary reason we've already touched upon: the Kappa element, the cryptic element. These planetary characters, these spiritual symbols of the seven heavens, allow Lewis to give each Narnia chronicle a qualitative flavor or atmosphere. Everything conspires to generate a particular tone, which, of course, is what he thought was so essential to a well-told tale. You don't just want to plot a sequence of events. You want this quality, a state. So each book gives us a jovial state, a martial state, a solar state, and so on, seven times over.

And then the theological reason, again, we've touched upon this a couple of times: that Lewis thought that the Christian God could be interestingly depicted through classical myths, transferred classicism. But he also wanted to depict a Christ character who was not just incarnated in the localized figure of the Jesus character, Aslan. He wanted what we might call the discarnate, the unincarnate Christ character as well, in whom all things hold together. And so Aslan, yes, he sums up the planetary character in each case, but that planetary character is seen across the rest of the story world as well in each book, in the background descriptions, in the ornamental details, and in the way the children interact with Aslan. Lewis is to Narnia, we might say, as God is to the real world. And just as Lewis believed that there was in the real world no ultimate randomness or chaos, but God's providential hand was overseeing all the vicissitudes of history, despite many appearances to the contrary, so in Narnia, he gives us a superficially chaotic world, which could be dismissed as a slapdash, hodgepodge mishmash. But when you look closely, you see, no, no, no. Lewis is working his own purposes out down to the curve of every wave and the flight of every insect, down to the level of a discarded chess piece in the ruins of the castle of Narnia.

So on that note, I think I better stop. I've probably talked for far too long, as it is, but I think I've given you a good hour, and now we've got a chance for some questions and discussion. So, Adam, would you like to take over here and field the discussion from here on?

Adam Elenbaas
That would be great. Thank you. Dr. Ward, this was so fantastic. Thank you very much. I'd like to scroll up through the chat box. And if you have a question, if you'd like to enter it into the chat box, that would be the easiest way to go. So if you have a question, go ahead and feel free to put it in there for Dr. Ward, and I'll communicate it to him. I'm going to look back up and see if there's any questions that I missed in the chat box already.

Dr. Michael Ward
Okay.

Adam Elenbaas
I do have one question, Dr. Ward. For example, when I remember in Planet Narnia somewhere, you had mentioned that it was as if Lewis was working out a kind of imaginative Christology through the seven planets. And do you see that as kind of his own unique take, or did he take that idea of Christology rooted in the seven planets from someone else? Or was that kind of his own imaginative contribution?

Dr. Michael Ward
Well, as I say, there is this well-established technique of transferred classicism, whereby medieval writers would use mythology for Christian purposes. So it's there in literary history. But I think, yes, you're right, that in a way, Lewis is doing something new, because as far as I'm aware, nobody before Lewis had ever used the planets, the planetary characters, in so sophisticated a fashion whereby they both serve to control the depiction of the Christ character within the story, but also serve, on the larger level, the background level, to inform, to irradiate the whole of the Narnian cosmos as it is depicted in each story, with the background details and the ornamentation, and indeed, the process of the children's interactions with the Christ character. So I think what Lewis is doing is very subtle and sophisticated. Many writers before him had made the simple equation between Zeus and the Christian God, but nobody had done it in this multi-dimensional way, so that it's serving many purposes at once. And that, I think, is unprecedented. That I think is really new.

And part of the reason, I mean, there are many reasons, but this is part of the reason why the books have become so very successful. They've become canonical texts in English children's fiction. Because although until now, we hadn't quite been able to work out what Lewis was up to, I think lots of people had sensed it. They'd intuited that there's more going on in these Chronicles than meets the eye. They had felt some of the poetic harmonies. They'd sensed some of the resonances. It somehow hung together in the imagination, even though you couldn't say quite why or how. But that, indeed, I think, is one of Lewis's purposes in keeping it secret: that he wanted to address the imagination. He wanted to make us feel what it was like to live in a jovial world, a mercurial world, a lunar world. And in a way, I've rather shot his fox, I've blown his cover, I've stamped all over his secret, by bringing this to conscious awareness. And some people criticize me for that. They said that I should have kept it secret. But of course, I'm a literary critic, and it's a literary critic's job to expose the patterns and the skill and the design behind a literary work of art. Lewis himself was a literary critic and analyzed other writers very minutely. So I don't feel I'm doing anything that Lewis himself would not have wanted to be done. It's just he himself could not have done it because he's the author. In this case, he's giving us the creative work of art for us to enjoy, and now it's over to us as literary critics and readers to analyze it, if we wish. So it's my duty, as a literary critic, to analyze it and to try to dissect it and work out what's going on.

The only way I think in which I would be frustrating his intention would be if I claimed that this somehow was so much a solution to the mystery of Narnia that it rendered pointless any future readings of Narnia. And of course, I'm not claiming that. I'm claiming that when you go back to Narnia with this planetary scheme in mind, that the Chronicles make a whole lot better sense. They suddenly appear to be even better works of literature than we've previously taken them to be. Now that we can put more into them, we can get more out of them. But of course, in a way, you've just got to forget everything I've been saying next time you go and read Narnia. Read with a different part of your mind, as it were. Just enjoy the stories as stories. But now that you can read them in a more informed and intelligent fashion, hopefully they will begin to make better sense and be even more enjoyable.

Adam Elenbaas
Thank you for that. Yeah, excuse me. One of the things that we talk about as astrologers is what we sometimes call the archetypal eye. And it's, you know, I have background in English Literature and Creative Writing, and somehow that path led me to astrology. But really, in many ways, the way that we learn to see archetypes present in mythology and in literature and fiction and poetry. And that seeing by means of an archetype allows us to do within the context of a story or a film or something like that. I think it's the same of the same value that we get from going back to the Narnia Chronicles and being able to read them with the archetypal eye of a planet.

For example, there's that one example that you give in your book that really stuck with me was, and I think this was not from Lewis himself, but from someone that Lewis admired. But there was an example of walking, and I'm going to get this wrong, I think, but walking into a shed and seeing a beam of light. And when you look at the beam of light as a beam of light, it just, it's almost like an object in the shed. But when you step into the beam of light and look through, or by means of the beam of light up through the hole in the roof, you may see the sky. And I think my experience has been, after reading your book, going back to Narnia, I've, in some ways, I had the same feeling there was something deeper at work here in the book. And I see what you've done as much more than just decoding what it was. I see you also have given us the means to step into the beam of light, by means of which we can see the universe, or the universe of Narnia, through the light of a planetary archetype that Lewis was illuminating for us. Absolutely.

Dr. Michael Ward
Yeah, that's so important to Lewis's whole understanding of how we know things. That image of either looking at a beam of light from the side or looking along it from within, he found that an indispensable tool of thought, he said. And really, our whole conscious life is carried on in one or other of those two modes of knowing. That we can either be outside and experience inspecting it from a neutral, external spectator's point of view, detached and indifferent. Or we can be involved. We can look along the beam. We can be participants. We can have personal knowing. We can have enjoyment consciousness, as he calls it. And that, for Lewis, is much the richer way of knowing things. We don't want just savoir knowledge. We want connaître knowledge, to use the French distinction, or saber and conocer in Spanish. You can know about things all well and good from the outside, but if you want a deeper kind of knowledge, you have to commit, you have to step into the being. And I think that's precisely what he's wanting to do, both from the literary point of view and the theological point of view in this Narnia scheme. That he wants us to intuit the planetary symbolism by enjoying a story from within. We're not told in advance that this is going to be a jovial story. We're just thrown into it.

And then also, from the theological point of view, he believes that we come to know God much more by connaître knowledge, by knowledge by acquaintance, and by simply trying to study God as if God were a subject in a textbook. That's not the better form, that's not the deeper form of knowledge. You've got to be in relationship. You want spirituality, in Lewis's view, not just religious studies. So coming to know Aslan from within, as the children do in each story, is for Lewis a rich way of depicting a spiritual life.

Adam Elenbaas
That's so beautiful. And I'm reminded of a friend, another astrologer friend of mine, who did her dissertation on Carl Jung's Red Book and Tolkien's Middle Earth. Her name is Becca Tarnas. And she did a presentation for us not long ago. And in this presentation, of course, we were talking about some of the ways in which Tolkien was different-minded, different, but he had a similar way of infusing these archetypal values into Middle Earth. So it makes sense that they were friends, even if he didn't understand fully what Lewis was up to. I think he probably would appreciate it if he did. Yes.

Dr. Michael Ward
Oh, definitely. No, I mean, Lewis and Tolkien were both deeply steeped in poetic imagery, mythological traditions. And indeed, at least in Lewis's case, I'm not so sure about Tolkien, they were not uninfluenced by Jungian archetypes. Lewis had quite a lot of time for Carl Jung. He wasn't a signed-up Jungian, but he was interested in archetypes. He was interested in these deep patterns in the human psyche, in the human imagination, which recur over time. And I think that's one of the reasons why he was interested in the seven spiritual symbols. That he viewed them, not just as symbols, but as archetypes. They can be expected to crop up in almost any human civilization sooner or later, because this is just how the human mind, the human imagination, is, as it were, hardwired. So for the ancient Romans, you had Mars, a strong warrior, a strong man. The modern imagination gives us a Superman, or a current Marvel superhero that you care to mention. Or the Greeks had the beautiful woman, Aphrodite. Lewis's generation, mid-20th century generation, had Marilyn Monroe, who kind of filled that place in the modern imagination.

And he admits that some of the symbols have almost disappeared from the modern imagination. He says that the archetypes of Saturn and Venus are still pretty current, he believes, but Mercury and Jupiter, he says, are much harder for us to grasp. And I think that's yet again a reason behind his interest in putting them into Narnia. That this is a way of reacquainting a modern imagination with the jovial archetype, which is otherwise all too apt to disappear from the modern and Saturnocentric imagination. So I think Lewis sees his role there as a rehabilitator, as someone who's perpetuating the life of these very important archetypal symbols in the modern imagination.

I mean, he didn't know that the Narnia Chronicles were going to be so successful. He didn't know they're going to be translated into 40 different languages and be read throughout the world. He was just hoping to do something for the Western imagination, for the English-speaking imagination. Well, these books are now globally known. And it's interesting to me—I've got this picture of the seven heavens up on the screen—it's interesting to me, in the course of my research, I discovered that it's not just in English that we refer to the seven planets, seven days of the week, by reference to the seven planets. It's the same in Japan. The Japanese language is precisely the same. I've been told. I don't speak Japanese myself, but I believe that is true. So everywhere, all around the world, these seven heavens have played a part in human imagination, human culture. They go back to time immemorial. So it only makes sense for a canny artist like Lewis to exploit this prejuring role that they have in our imagination.

Adam Elenbaas
Yes, my friend Becca, that I was just telling you about, she also recommended that I read Till We Have Faces. Oh yes, and yes, I did read it and it's so amazing. I wanted to suggest as you were just speaking, I thought I should make mention of that, because I think many of those here who love Lewis, or who may really enjoy your book, would also enjoy that, because it's kind of another instance of the retelling of a sort of ancient mythological story with this kind of, he has a way of embedding it with what you were speaking of, in terms of coming to a personal relationship with divinity. And I think that that story, in particular, sort of gets right to the heart of that relationship and embeds the need for that message in another mythological story, again.

Dr. Michael Ward
Yes, indeed, Till We Have Faces. It was Lewis's last novel, and he regarded it as easily his best work. And most scholars, most critics, tend to agree with him. It's not his most accessible work, but it's probably his most profound. I've read it more often than any other of Lewis's works, and every time I go back to it, I get something new out of it. It's an amazingly deep and moving, challenging story. And interestingly, it is in large part worked out again from a planetary symbolic point of view, because much of the imagery in that book is derived from Venus and Aphrodite. It's not done in quite the same way as he does it in Narnia, but he's clearly got unfinished business with Venus. When he completed writing The Magician's Nephew, he still wanted to explore the Venus imagery a bit further, and that's what he does, in Till We Have Faces.

Adam Elenbaas
It's interesting to me as an aside that I don't remember if it was that Lewis himself thought of these, the Narnia Chronicles, as ornamentation to his epic tome. But Venus is, of course, symbolically associated with ornamentation. And so his connection with Venus seems, throughout his life, is his love story. The story of his own romantic life, his interest in romanticism, his artwork. All of this seems to be, I think, for many people, Lewis is a bridge between that artistic, more sensual desire for personal relationship. He somehow creates a bridge where people can walk across and have that experience of the Christian God. And I think that's really important for people to have.

Dr. Michael Ward
Just personally. Yeah. And it's interesting, Venus is in the Bible used as an image for Christ. You know, Venus is the morning star. And in the book of Revelation, Christ says, "I am the bright and morning star." So there again, you've got very explicit scriptural precedent for using the stars in a Christian way. But he, as I said earlier, Lewis doesn't just start and stop with the scriptures. He's interested in far more things than just the Bible, and so he will use Venus also as an image for indeed, his wife, you're right. But his own love story, his own late marriage, was understood in no small part, in planetary ways. After his wife died, he looked up at the sky one night and looked at, presumably, the evening star, Hesperus, another name for Venus, of course. And he quoted these lines with reference to his recently deceased wife: "Thou wert my morning star among the living, ere thy fair light had fled. Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving new splendor to the dead." Oh, wow. So he sees his own wife in Venus terms.

And indeed, another nice thing about his marriage was that on the last night before his wife died, he sat up late with her, and he said that even after all hope was gone, even on the last night before Joy's death, there were still "patines of bright gold." And there, of course, he's referring to that famous speech in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, where Lorenzo says, I'll just quote six lines: "Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold. The stars. There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st but in his motion like an angel sings, still choiring to the young-eyed cherubim. Such harmony is in immortal souls. But whilst this muddy vesture of decay doth grossly close us in, we cannot hear it." There you have the music of the spheres, which we can't hear it on earth because it's always sounding. And that's what Lewis was thinking about on the night, on the eve of his wife's death.

Adam Elenbaas
Speaking of the theme of death, Jen has a question that says, "Do you think that Lewis ended with Saturn in the Narnia Chronicles, as life ends in death, which, like God being everywhere and everything, death is as much a part of life as any other?"

Dr. Michael Ward
Well, yes, in some ways, definitely. You know, if he's going to use Saturn, obviously, the place to use Saturn is in the final story, to bring everything to a close. But it's interesting. When you begin to look in detail, close up at the end of The Last Battle, you find that there's an interesting shift that goes on in the very final pages. Because I don't think that Lewis wanted to conclude absolutely on a saturnine note. As I was saying, he had a relatively low view of Saturn. "Of Saturn, we know more than enough." It's not correct to think in Saturnocentric terms. Saturn is only one of seven ways of interpreting reality, and Saturn is not even the best. "Who does not need to be reminded of Jove?" Jupiter is the best. And so it's very interesting to me that at the end of The Last Battle, there's a subtle shift in the symbolism. After all, the characters have died and gone to heaven. In the case of the children, there's a very interesting exchange between Lucy and, I think it's Edmund. And Lucy says, after they've died and been resurrected, she says to her brother, "Have you noticed you can't feel afraid anymore? Even if you want to feel afraid, try it." And her brother tries to feel afraid, and he says, "By Jove, you're right, I can't feel afraid." Now, there's a double meaning in that. "By Jove, I can't feel afraid." By Jupiter, I can't feel afraid. Because Jupiter has, as it were, regained his throne. He's come back into the central position. Saturn has done his worst. Saturn has brought Narnia to an end. Saturn has killed off the whole cast of characters. Death indeed has ended the life of the children here on earth, but they have a resurrection life to look forward to in Aslan's country, and that resurrection life is much more appropriately depicted through the symbolism of Jupiter. And I think Lewis is glancing at that rather cleverly in that apparently throwaway phrase "By Jove, I can't feel afraid."

Adam Elenbaas
That's wonderful. There's so many nice comments here. I'm going to try to read through a few of them quickly. One of them was the bit where you spoke to Psalm 19, and the ever-sounding music of the spheres, and how it's sort of imperceptible to the intellectual mind is really exciting. Thank you. Another one. Let's see. I'm just kind of thinking through a whole bunch. Someone mentioned that Aslan was first conceived of or inspired by a dream that Lewis had. Can you comment on that?

Dr. Michael Ward
Well, yes, he says that when he began writing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, that he was having a good number of dreams, or sometimes he says nightmares, about lions at that time. I think he had already begun writing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe before Aslan appeared in the story. And indeed he says that. He says Aslan came bounding into a story which was already underway. He had begun writing the story out of an image, a picture that had been in his mind's eye since he was a teenager: a picture of a faun in a snowy wood carrying parcels. And he said to himself, one day, "Let's make a story out of that picture: the faun in the snowy wood carrying parcels." And then, as he began to unfold that picture, then the lion came bounding in.

Now I've got a long theory about what I think he was really up to in that unfolding picture, the faun in the snowy wood carrying parcels. I think myself that picture is a kind of embryonic clash between Saturn and Jupiter in Lewis's imagination. Because the snowy wood, the winter, represents Saturn. Saturn and winter nearly always go together in Lewis's imagination. And yet, standing in this snowy wood is a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels. He's carrying an umbrella. He's trying to protect himself against this winter. This is not a good winter. He's not frolicking around, throwing snowballs and making snowmen. He's protecting himself against it, which is an indication it's a saturnine kind of winter. Moreover, he's carrying parcels. Christmas parcels. We're later told in the story, as it unfolds, that she's made it, the White Witch has made it, "always winter, but never Christmas." This faun, Tumnus, as his name turns out to be, he laments the fact that there's no longer any jollification in Narnia. So it's as if these parcels have been bought for a Christmas that will never come in this permanent winter, in this 100-year-long saturnine winter. But when the lion comes pounding in, the true lion of Jupiter—Jupiter was always associated with lions—then Jupiter can begin to have a controlling influence, and Saturn will have to fade into the background. The Witch's winter will have to pass. So that, I think, is how the, you know, I don't really know, this is just educated guessing, but this seems to me to be quite a plausible way of accounting for the imaginative process that Lewis tells us about.

Adam Elenbaas
That's a really beautiful analysis of that image. That's really nice. Someone is mentioning Till We Have Faces is the Cupid and Psyche myth, that's right. And so that's the, just so that people are aware of that. When I said that there was a mythological connection with that book, that's the story that Lewis kind of reworks.

Dr. Michael Ward
Yes. Can I just say a little bit about that? Because it's very interesting why Lewis was so interested in that myth of Cupid and Psyche. Because at the heart of that myth is the moment when Psyche takes a lantern into her bedchamber at night. Now she's been told by her husband, the god Cupid, that she must not look at him. She must only know him at night in the dark, through his voice, through his embraces, through his smell, I suppose, as well. But she mustn't look at him. But then when she does bring the lantern into the bedchamber, a drop of oil falls from the lantern onto his sleeping form, and he wakes up, and he realizes that she has disobeyed his command, and he banishes her from his sight. Now that's a very profound mythological accounting for this distinction that we were talking about between looking at and looking along, between savoir knowledge and connaître knowledge, between studying something from the outside and allowing yourself to participate in it from the inside. And the whole point of this myth, as Lewis understood it, is that Psyche was much better off when she was in the dark, when she knew her husband through knowledge by acquaintance, through his loving touch, through his voice. And she lost all that when she insisted on the intellectual, external spectator's point of view. And that, I think, was why Lewis was so fascinated by that myth, because it spoke to his own experience as someone who had worked out that principle existentially in his own path to faith. He writes about this in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy. And so it's fascinating to me that Narnia gives us enjoyment consciousness by means of the planetary symbolism, because this is Lewis giving us, as it were, of his best, what he thinks is the richest way of knowing anything written, but especially good literature, and even more especially God.

Adam Elenbaas
Yeah, about 10 years ago, when I started my astrology practice, I named my astrology practice Nightlight Astrology. And the reason that I named it that was because I felt that the contemplation of the heavens and the astrological archetypes that we perform in charts and things like that are a way of knowing divinity that's lit up by a more nocturnal frame of consciousness. And so you can imagine my total joy at finding your book and realizing that CS Lewis was up to something similar.

One question that I have for you is that, have you received any, I don't know, pushback from the Christian community? Some of this is a little esoteric. I could imagine more conservative Christians or different branches of the tree of Christianity reacting rather strongly because, you know, it might be more comfortable sometimes to think of them as a hodgepodge than to have to consider some of the implications of these theological assertions that he's making.

Dr. Michael Ward
Good question. Yes, hardly any pushback, to be honest, on that point. There was one person, I remember I was giving a lecture somewhere in America, and he came up to me at the end of the lecture, very excited and totally infuriated that I should put CS Lewis and astrology in the same bracket. He completely missed the point of my talk, because I always try to make this point front and center, especially when I'm speaking to Christian audiences, that there's a long tradition of astrology in the Bible. And I always, well, I nearly always begin with the Psalm 19: "The heavens are telling the glory of God." In the book of Genesis, God creates the sun and the moon and the stars "for signs and for seasons." They have some signification at the very start of creation. And then later on in the Old Testament, in the book of Judges, we are told that the stars in their courses were fighting against one of Israel's enemies, giving a very literal role for the stars in human affairs. And then when you come to the New Testament, you find Jesus talking about when you see the sun darkened and the moon giving no light, you will know that the end time is near. In the book of Revelation, you have St. John the Divine in his vision seeing the Son of Man holding the seven stars in his right hand. And that apocalyptic imagery is taken by some to refer to the seven planets, the seven days of the week. In other words, it's a way of depicting Christ's lordship over time.

But if there should be any doubt at all in a Christian's mind about the value, the spiritual significance, of the heavens, you only need to look at the opening of Matthew's Gospel: the wise men who come to Bethlehem, they say, "We have seen his star in the east, and we have come to worship him." So the wise men from the East are clearly astrologers. But they're astrologers. Their astrology leads them to worship Christ. So Christianity and astrology are not at loggerheads. They are not at daggers drawn. There's a long tradition of Christian astrology, and Lewis writes about this in The Discarded Image. He says that the Christian church was fully accepting of the idea of planetary influences. The only thing that the Christian church held out against was, well, three things. Obviously, you shouldn't worship the planets. That would be idolatry. Obviously, you shouldn't regard the planetary influences as determinative and absolutely controlling of you. They may well give you a disposition, but they cannot overrule your free will and your responsibility before God. In a way, the medieval understanding of the planetary influences was very similar to our modern understanding of genetic inheritance. We may inherit a certain gene from our parents which will incline us to act in a certain way or get a certain disease, but we still have certain choices to make. We still have a certain freedom about how we live our life within that framework. So no idolatry, no absolute determinism.

And the third thing that the church held out against, Lewis says, was the lucrative and the politically undesirable practice of astrologically grounded predictions. Because you can see very easily how the court astrologer in the Middle Ages might be a bit of a charlatan. He might be in the pay of the French, and he might go to the king and say, "Well, next Thursday, Sire, you should launch your attack," all the while just taking in the money and betraying his lord. So it's lucrative, it's politically undesirable. But if it's not abused in those ways, then astrology still may well have a very proper and indeed Christian use. So as long as astrology was practiced within those constraints, the medieval church had no problem with it.

But really, since the time of Copernicus, astrology and astronomy have diverged. And Lewis talks about this in his 16th-century volume. And I think he one of the things he's wanting to imply is that the medieval understanding, when astronomy and astrology were pretty much one discipline, was a healthier situation than the situation we're now in, where the two disciplines are rather polarized and strongly bifurcated. He thinks that's a kind of disintegration, and there's a more harmonious way, if only we could learn it from our forebears.

Adam Elenbaas
I'm, as I was as you were at the tail end there, I was scrolling down to see a few more comments here that have come in. Betty says, "Reminds me that in the Bible, the same Hebrew word 'to know' is the word used for sexual intercourse. Adam knew his wife." So interesting. And then someone said, "Let's see, beautiful." And actually one comment to follow what you said was that actually even the Hellenistic tradition of astrology, we find many of the authors giving instructions on the same things. For example, Firmicus Maternus says very clearly that astrologers should stay away from political means, should have a meager income, should not be in it for money. And you also have people like Manilius and others who, even though they may mention worship of the planets in a way that's not going to jive with the Christian worldview, there is also mentioning at times of almost like a Godhead. And that's mentioned by some astrologers as well, where there's the idea of a Godhead, but all the planets are different aspects or facets of that Godhead. You see that in India too. So I think, and some of the same instructions you see in different pieces of the ancient tradition outside of the Christian hold of astrology. So that's interesting to mention. I think there's one other question here. "Did Lewis have any medieval astrology books in his library?" We'll take this and maybe one more, we'll be done.

Dr. Michael Ward
Well, yes, I mean, he knew his medieval sources intimately. He was one of the most learned medievalists of all time. He read everything and he remembered everything. So if you look at his 16th-century volume, you'll see him interacting really explicitly with quite a lot of texts about astrology, astronomy. That opening section of his OHEL volume is the best place to look for that. But there are also references in The Discarded Image. Yes, he seems to have known a good deal about medieval astrology, both from the theoretical point of view and from the more creative and artistic point of view. As I mentioned, his knowledge of the way Chaucer uses astrology was deep and detailed. Chaucer himself uses astrology in a fantastically detailed way, so Lewis necessarily had to understand it almost as well as Chaucer. I mean, I haven't been able to follow up all these details myself. I'm not myself so much interested in astrology per se, as I'm interested in Lewis's imaginative and theological use of it. But Lewis himself knew loads. Yes, many such texts in his library.

Adam Elenbaas
Very good. Thank you. I think since there are no more quick questions, that this would be a good place to end. So, Dr. Ward, thank you so much. Thank you everyone for your great questions. This has been a really nice dialogue to follow up with. So I hope that you all check out. I'm going to put a few things back up on the screen here to remind you. Hold on. Let me just get this up again. Okay, here we go. So first of all, here's Planet Narnia. You can see my copy of it. Check it out. The Narnia Code, which is, Dr. Ward mentioned, is so maybe more like a, would you call it more popular, accessible version, less of the details of Planet Narnia? Is that how you describe it?

Dr. Michael Ward
Yes, I would. Planet Narnia is a very detailed book. It's based really on my PhD thesis. I mean, it is readable. I made it as accessible as I could, given all the detail I wanted to get in. But it's scholarly and it's lengthy. So if you want the shorter version, then The Narnia Code is the way to go. And if you're a visual learner rather than a reader, then there is this DVD of the BBC documentary, which you can get as well.

Adam Elenbaas
You can see the link to Planet Narnia right here, which I've just provided through his website. Which you can pick it up on Amazon. Type in Narnia Code on Amazon, you can find the documentary DVD as well as the book. Gosh, I didn't find that Planet Narnia was, you know, it read to me. I just devoured it. But I like reading more philosophical stuff. I haven't checked out The Narnia Code, but the documentary was really fantastic. So I just recommend everyone check it out. I'm going to bring up Dr. Ward's site one more time. So this is planetnarnia.com, where you can follow what he's up to. I think that's about it that I have today. Thank you again so much everybody for being here, and mostly Dr. Ward for gracing us with such a beautiful presentation. And I think it got me, I'm sure it got all of us, really fired up to go back to the Narnia Chronicles and maybe Till We Have Faces, or just getting back into Lewis's imagination again. Great.

Dr. Michael Ward
Well, thank you, Adam. I appreciate it very much, the opportunity to speak. Well, it's been very good. Thank you.

Adam Elenbaas
Absolutely. Okay, everyone. You guys have a great day. Take care. Bye.