"An Occult Reading of Narnia" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
October 16
An Occult Reading of Narnia
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In celebration of Greta Gerwig's upcoming epic take on Narnia's The Magician's Nephew, today we give an occult glance at the first book in C.S. Lewis's classic series and the book that started it all, which was published seventy-six years ago on this day...
On October 16, 1950, Geoffrey Bles
published a 172-page children's novel in London about four siblings who step
through a wardrobe into a snowbound land ruled by a witch. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
went on to sell tens of millions of copies, and its author, a devout Christian
apologist who had spent years writing in open defense of orthodox belief, is
remembered today as one of the twentieth century's most unambiguous literary
voices for the faith. The book he wrote that year, and the circle of friends
who shaped it, turn out to be considerably stranger than that reputation
suggests.
Start with the witch herself, since the text gives her a lineage most readers skim straight past. In the novel, Mr. Beaver explains to the children that Jadis, the White Witch, isn't human at all. “She comes of your father Adam’s,” he says, “first wife, her they called Lilith.” He adds that she's descended on the other side from the Jinn. Lewis didn't invent this; he pulled it directly from centuries of Jewish folklore in which Lilith, never named in Genesis itself, appears in later rabbinic and medieval sources as Adam's first, rebellious wife, predating Eve and becoming, over the centuries, a figure associated with demons and night terrors. A children’s book published in 1950 England is quietly resting its central villain's parentage on medieval Kabbalistic legend, which is an odd thing for a book so routinely read as straightforward Christian allegory to be doing.
That tension runs deeper than one
lineage. C.S. Lewis wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe inside a
close circle of Oxford friends called the Inklings, and the most influential of
them, after J.R.R. Tolkien, was a writer named Charles Williams, whom Lewis had
grown close to after sending him a fan letter in 1936. Williams was not merely
occult-curious. For roughly a decade, he was an actual working member of a real
ceremonial magic order, the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, founded by the tarot
designer and occult scholar A.E. Waite as an explicitly Christianized successor
to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Williams rose high enough in the
order’s ranks to hold the title Proclamator et Lucifer, owned ritual
robes, a wand, and a ceremonial sword Waite’s own rules technically forbade
him, and by some accounts was quietly being considered as a potential successor
to lead the Fellowship before he left to found an order of his own, the Companions
of the Co-inherence. Williams himself habitually described his old order
simply as “the Golden Dawn,” a loose shorthand that has confused the record
ever since; the accurate name is Waite's Fellowship, a genuine but distinct
descendant of that older, more famous order, not the Golden Dawn itself. Lewis
dedicated an entire volume of essays to Williams in 1947, and later admitted in
his own memoir Surprised by Joy that he had once felt a real craving for occult
experience in his youth, a confession that sits uneasily beside his later
reputation as British Christianity's most formidable public defender.
In 2008, the Oxford theologian Michael Ward published Planet Narnia, a study arguing that Lewis, a lifelong, genuine scholar of medieval cosmology, secretly built each of the seven Chronicles around one of the seven planets of pre-Copernican astrology: Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, and Saturn, planets Lewis himself once described in his academic writing as “spiritual symbols of permanent value.” Ward's case for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe specifically is that the book is constructed around Jupiter, or Jove, the planet medieval tradition associated with winter yielding to spring, festivity following sorrow, and kingship restored, which maps with real precision onto a plot that moves from the White Witch’s eternal winter to Aslan’s sacrifice, resurrection, and the crowning of four child monarchs. Ward's thesis isn’t a fringe reading; it was published by Oxford University Press, praised by Lewis’s own literary estate, and has become a serious, widely cited current in Lewis scholarship, precisely because Lewis never once mentioned the planetary scheme himself, in any letter, interview, or essay that survives.
That silence is, in its own way, the
most Lewis-like detail in the whole story. Here was a man capable of building
an entire layered astrological architecture into the bestselling children’s
book of the twentieth century, giving its villain a Kabbalistic genealogy,
keeping close creative company with a working ceremonial magician for the
better part of a decade, and never once letting on that any of it was there.
The book that resulted reads, on its surface, as a tidy Christian parable about
sacrifice and redemption, and that reading isn't wrong. There’s simply just a
lot more within the wardrobe than originally thought…
Planet Narnia: The Seven
Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis
By Michael Ward | Oxford University Press
Ward, now a Fellow of Blackfriars
Hall at Oxford, spends seven dedicated chapters working through the Chronicles
one book at a time, pairing each with its proposed planetary signature: Jupiter
for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Mars for Prince Caspian,
the Sun for The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the Moon for The Silver
Chair, Mercury for The Horse and His Boy, Venus for The Magician’s
Nephew, and Saturn for The Last Battle. His method is methodical
rather than speculative: he traces where each planet appears across the whole
of Lewis's other writing, poetry, academic criticism, letters, before showing
how that planet's traditional “influence” shapes both the atmosphere and the
underlying argument of its corresponding Narnia book.
What makes the book worth your time
alongside today's post is how directly it reframes Lewis’s reputation.
Reviewers have called Ward’s case for Jupiter’s fingerprints on The Lion,
the Witch and the Wardrobe, “winter past and guilt forgiven” being almost a
plot summary of the planet's traditional character, genuinely compelling rather
than merely clever. The book argues, convincingly to most who've engaged with
it seriously, that Lewis was a considerably subtler and stranger writer than
either his fans or his critics have generally given him credit for being.
This began as a doctoral thesis, and
it reads like one in places, dense, carefully argued, assuming real familiarity
with the Chronicles already. Readers wanting a lighter introduction to Lewis’s
Inklings circle and its genuine occult entanglements might pair it with a
biography of Charles Williams instead. But for readers who finished today's
post wanting the full, patiently built case behind the single boldest claim in
modern Narnia scholarship, Ward’s book is where that argument actually lives.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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