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Seriously, somebody ask me!
Okay. I slept all freaking day. Except that I didn't exactly sleep. I'm all achy and blah and I can't get comfortable when I lie down and I actually tried to sleep but I really watched movies. Let's see ... The Mummy (a favorite of mine!), The Mummy Returns (another favorite!), and Pirates of the Caribbean (also a favorite!). Yes, I did go to work, btw. For a couple of hours. However, my co-workers decided that I (and I quote) "look like death and need to go home." So I went home.
I'm also in the process of downloading Serenity caps because I want to make more icons. Yes!
I'm out.
Okay. I slept all freaking day. Except that I didn't exactly sleep. I'm all achy and blah and I can't get comfortable when I lie down and I actually tried to sleep but I really watched movies. Let's see ... The Mummy (a favorite of mine!), The Mummy Returns (another favorite!), and Pirates of the Caribbean (also a favorite!). Yes, I did go to work, btw. For a couple of hours. However, my co-workers decided that I (and I quote) "look like death and need to go home." So I went home.
I'm also in the process of downloading Serenity caps because I want to make more icons. Yes!
I'm out.
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Although he did not set out to do so, in the process of writing his fantasy works, Lewis (an adult convert to Christianity) found himself incorporating Christian theological concepts into his stories. As he wrote in Of Other Worlds:
"Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument, then collected information about child psychology and decided what age group I'd write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out 'allegories' to embody them. This is all pure moonshine. I couldn't write in that way. It all began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn't anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord."
Lewis, an expert on the subject of allegory, himself maintained that the books were not allegory, and preferred to call the Christian aspects of them "suppositional". This is similar to what we would now call fictional parallel universes. The Narnia series is not an allegory, because allegories have an overarching figurative level of meaning tied to the literal level, and the Narnia series has a literal level of meaning without any overarching figurative level, though there are figurative elements. The misconception that the Narnia series is an allegory is the result of the disjunction caused by the narrative taking place across parallel universes. There are similarities between the world of Narnia and our own, but these are literal manifestations of the same phenomena in multiple worlds, not allegorical abstractions. For example, the character Aslan is not an allegorical representation of Christ, but a literal representation of Christ. Aslan is a literal rendering of Jesus Christ, only in another body, in another universe, and by another name. In ‘’The Chronicles of Narnia’’, Aslan and Jesus are the same character in two different worlds. There is no allegory involved. As Lewis wrote in a letter to a Mrs. Hook in December of 1958:
"If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair [a character in The Pilgrim's Progress] represents despair, he would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, 'What might Christ become like, if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?' This is not allegory at all." (Martindale & Root 1990)
With the release of 2005 Disney movie there has been renewed interest in the Christian parallels found in the books. Some find them distasteful, while noting that they are easy to miss if you are not familiar with Christianity. (Toynbee 2005) Alan Jacobs, author of The Narnian: The Life and Imaginaton of C.S. Lewis, says flatly that Lewis has become "a pawn in America's culture wars" (Jacobs 2005). Some Christians see the chronicles as excellent tools for Christian evangelism.
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See, I'm the one who misses things. *shrug* I'm actually okay with that.
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There are certain Christians and Christian organizations who feel that The Chronicles of Narnia promotes "soft sell paganism and occultism", because of the recurring pagan themes and the heretical depictions of Christ as an anthropomorphic lion. Satyrs, fauns, centaurs, dwarves, werewolves, giants, and even the pagan god Bacchus and the Maenads are depicted in a positive light, when they are distinctly pagan motifs. Even an animistic "River god" is portrayed in a positive light. (Chattaway 2005), (Berit 2005) According to Josh Hurst from Christianity Today, "not only was Lewis hesitant to call his books Christian allegory, but the stories borrow just as much from pagan mythology as they do the Bible."(Hurst 2005)
Drew Trotter, PhD, president of the Center for Christian Study, noted that the producers of the film version of The Chronicles of Narnia felt that The Chronicles of Narnia closely follows the archetypal pattern of the monomyth as detailed in Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces. [1] Joseph Campbell himself felt that the New Testament adhered to the archetypal monomyth and was but "one version of mythic stories that can be found in many cultures."[2] Both The Chronicles of Narnia and the New Testament are rife with Jungian archetypal imagery.
A religious studies professor, Dennis R. MacDonald, PhD, who teaches at the Claremont School of Theology, has written numerous books stating that portions of the New Testament are actually derived from Classical pagan Greek literature like the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer(MacDonald 2000), (MacDonald 2003). Assuming that Lewis did indeed base aspects of The Chronicles of Narnia on the New Testament, Lewis might have, in fact, been infusing pagan symbolism, allegory, and supposition into The Chronicles of Narnia.
CS Lewis himself stated in an essay called Is Theism Important?:
"When grave persons express their fear that England is relapsing into Paganism, I am tempted to reply, 'Would that she were.' For I do not think it at all likely that we shall ever see Parliament opened by the slaughtering of a garlanded white bull in the House of Lords or Cabinet Ministers leaving sandwiches in Hyde Park as an offering for the Dryads. If such a state of affairs came about, then the Christian apologist would have something to work on. For a Pagan, as history shows, is a man eminently convertible to Christianity. He is essentially the pre-Christian, or sub-Christian, religious man. The post-Christian man of our day differs from him as much as a divorcee differs from a virgin."(Lewis 1994)
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anyway. my point to all that? i'm really looking forward to seeing 'hostel' next week.
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