Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - The Chronicles of Narnia: The Last Battle

Episode Date: July 23, 2023

This is the end! Of Narnia anyway. Asha and Ketho are rejoined by Trevor and Alex to discuss Revelations for children. A false prophet, a gay unicorn, and quite a bit of confusing Christian theology join together for the end of C. S. Lewis' "The Chronicles of Narnia". It's all been building to this.Alex: @humvadevSapphic Sweets & Reads: https://shop.sweetreadsict.com/Trevor: @HistoryofPersiaHistory of Persia: https://historyofpersiapodcast.com/patreon.com/swordsandsocialismEmail: [e-mail] The Show: @SwordsNSocPodAsha: @Herbo_AnarchistKetho: @MusicalPuma69

🎵 Bro. Are you fucking real, man? Come on. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism, a podcast about the politics and themes not hiding at all in our genre fiction. Today, it is part four, five, whatever, four of our series on the Chronicles of Narnia. We are here to talk about the last battle. As always, I am Ashen and joined by my co-host, Ketho. How's it going, Ketho?

Howdy. And as promised, we are joined by two guests filling out from the series. First off, we have Trevor from the history of Persia. Welcome back, Trevor. Hello, everybody. And we have Alex. Welcome back in Alex. Alex, the owner of Savic Books and Suites. Savic Suites and Reads. Suites and Reads. That was close. Bookshop. Alex back again from the episode one of the series. Welcome back. Hello. We're here to talk about The Last Battle. Oof.

What a battle it is. This is a book about a shifty monkey, his dumbass friend, and how they started the apocalypse, which culminated in the world's most important battle fought by the smallest amount of people. It is an aggressively small battle. It is the last battle in the history of Narnia, and it is fought by maybe a grand total of like 40 or 50 people. And also a lot of other things happen so if we could what

the fuck was that what did i just read a book about a king who i'm certain fucks a unicorn what is it with you showing up on the on the weird episodes about unicorns call back to your first episode when we talked about the witcher and how unicorns. Call back to your first episode when we talked about the Witcher and how unicorns make terrible slaves because they don't have thumbs. See, the Calamines would disagree with that point and just

strap them to a cart. After apparently cutting their horns off. Well, that way they're not dangerous. That seems like a safety issue. Yeah. Gotta file that baby down um a book where we have tactical brown face if you missed that bit oh goodness gracious whereas the calamine uniforms hidden in his watchtower along with the oil that makes you brown so you can hide among the Calermen. Rampant slavery, false prophets, maybe

dualism in my Christianity, and, oh God, a whole bunch of other things. So thank you all for coming here to explain this book to me, because if I may say so, Jesus Christ, what the hell happened here? Jesus, that's about what happened.

Did C.S. Lewis, in writing this book, forget that even highly stories that are just meant to be bareface allegories still should occasionally have a plot? Because I think he forgot to put a plot in this one. It is extremely bare bones. It is extremely bare bones. I think it's more that he wrote a plot that intentionally has no conclusion or falling action. Like you get to the climax of the plot that he's been telling up to that, the like second to last chapter. And then the world ends. The falling action is them just being in paradise and going further up and further in, right?

Like that's just the falling action. I just find it really funny because it's like so abrupt. They're like, we're just fighting. We're fighting. Okay, I'm going to take this guy and I'm going to go into the stable. And then it just, you're in paradise now. Boom. You figured it out.

He's right there. Solved. All your BFFs are here. All the cool kings and queens, they're here best friends they're all here except susan fuck that bitch she likes boys too much and everybody died in a train accident i genuinely forgot that twist that the reason they all get to Narnia or the way they do it. And he handles the like, which world are you in problem is by having them all die in a train accident. Including some people who aren't there, you know, like their parents. They're not upset that their parents are probably dead.

I just want to say, forget that. Like, they're all in heaven. You can walk to England because you're the fucking flash in heaven, apparently. Think about Susan for a second. Her parents, her siblings, her cousins,

the nice old man who took care of them during the war? All dead. All dead in the same accident. She got punished twice over it was like hey you can't get into heaven also everyone you know and love will die is dead

is it more kind or less kind that she doesn't know that they're all in heaven together without her? Shrug? Yeah, it's bad either way, I think. Everyone you know and love died and it is heaven without you because you like boys too much. And parties.

Don't forget the... She's very concerned with invitations and that's a problem. she's very concerned with invitations and that's a problem I'm just imagining what parties were even like in like what year was this written 19 like 1960 maybe well I did have that question

when I was reading it like what year are they coming from earth that can't be that long that can't be like maybe the fifties at the latest. It's in the fifties. Cause if you, I think if you could actually do the math of like the,

the timeline, Eustace and Polly saved Prince Rillian in the silver chair, like one year ago, earth time. Right. And, and, and like Peter is only like just into adulthood.

Well, and he was like, and he was like was like like in his like early teens in like the first book and the Pevensies all chained each other together. So all their adventures altogether spanned maybe three or four years. Well, so that's the weird thing is that it describes Peter as just barely an adult from tyrian's perspective and yes for the audience there is a a king named tyrian as one of the main characters in this book uh yeah a little weird now different spelling if that helps uh but they also mentioned that lucy's done with school so she's at least 16 by the weird way British secondary school works. Yeah. And I think in the first book in Lion,

Witch and the Wardrobe, she's supposed to be like, what? Like 11? Yeah. Like somewhere between nine and 11. So. Somewhere between nine and 11 is the size.

Nine hyphen, not nine slash. I mean, how do you you write your dates it's kind of the same thing um so i mean so i think grand scheme of things and even if even if they were taking shelter in like the height of the blitz which would be what like 43 i think at the latest real world time, the last battle is happening at like the late 40s, early 1950, maybe. Yeah, early 50s, I guess. Yeah. So I don't know what kind of parties Susan is going. Look at Susan being like, was the party good enough to miss out on heaven, Susan?

She's going ballroom dancing. I don't know what the heck people did in 1945. Well, they're in England at the height of rationing. So... See, I feel like it's even worse, though, because like, it's not just... So this is... I'm pretty

sure it's explicitly said that this is post-war now, because... It is. Yeah. And so, like, that's a very weird time to be in britain because like britain has just been utterly decimated and so like even worse than just like having your stuff rationed everything is gone everything is being rebuilt like there is a reason that people who grew like the american baby boomer and the british baby boomer are just two totally different kinds of generation like i don't know it's yeah i mean the british

baby boomers are convinced they fought in world war yeah i mean they certainly suffered the effects of it but again yeah just all right so anyway r.i.p susan uh everyone everyone in your family is dead but you uh and you won't get to see them ever again um because you're too concerned with being an adult now i love how they even have polly say some shit like oh she's too busy hurrying to the silliest age and then wishing to stay there. Like Polly, you got married and had like a whole ass adult life. Polly, like Polly and Diggory had like whole ass adult lives, but they get to come back. Susan tries to be an adult and she doesn't get to come back. back i think it's the like like polly's giving me mad vibes of like the fucking lady from titanic

who like her dying wishes are about the boy she knew for five minutes on the titanic not about the husband and children she had for the rest of her life she lived in america like polly you had a whole ass life in england i i think it's supposed to be a critique of like college-aged people yeah and i'm like yeah if you judge someone by their behavior between the ages of like 18 and 22, nobody's going to heaven. Like if that if that's your gauge, then of course, everybody's awful. That's a good point. So to roughly outline the plot for anyone who needs what little bit there is,

you have, and boy, are we going to hit some, we'll just hit the weird stuff as we go. You have, is it shift, shift or shift? Oh,

by the way, my audio book I listened to was narrated by the Sir Patrick Stewart. Huh? That's an interesting because in the in the audio series i got every book's narrated by somebody different and the last battle is narrated by patrick stewart uh you have shift the monkey the ape who is immediately dare i say shifty like off the off the bat he's the first thing you learn about shift is that he gaslights a donkey. His main character trait is that he spends his time gaslighting this poor

donkey who is literally a dumb ass. It is shift by the way, with a T. So it's shift with a T. So it's just shifty. He's just a shifty monkey. So we have a shifty monkey who gaslights his friend that's his entire personality you've got the you've got the

you've got the donkey um whose name is escaping me at the moment puzzle that's right i had yeah it's puzzled constantly and the entire the the end of the world armageddon is kicked off by the fact that some hunter up in the western wastes killed the lion and skinned it and somehow lost the lion skin which came down over the falls and shift is like you know what would be hilarious is if we dress the donkey up like a lion because no one's seen one even though i know what one looks like without ever having seen one myself. I'm going to dress a donkey up like a lion and then we're going to trick everyone

into worshiping you and then command them to do our bidding. It's later implied that he was already in contact with Calorman traders somehow because he basically gets this whole, he gets this whole thing up and running in like a matter of like weeks well i don't there's a time skip between chapters one and two that is not clarified and i think that is an important detail in understanding what the hell

shift is doing because shift is somehow in this time sets up a scheme a pretty intricate one with the emperor of calorman the tisrock in in where they bring calorman people in disguised as traitors and then use the fake aslan to command people into servitude for the tisrock to expedite an invasion of Narnia to add Narnia as a province and question mark profit. Well, question mark profit for the monkey. It's not very question. There's no question marks on how the Calum in profit from this monkey just wants bananas and apples. No, sorry. No, this one, nuts and oranges and bananas this motherfucker's king louis from the jungle book i want like he just wants to be taught how to be a be a man because he dresses up in a fucking coat and drinks whiskey or whatever the hell he's doing that was my first i heard about

the monkey i was like is this king louis from jungle book again is there some either any of you know is there some literary thing for the fact that it's the monkey? Is this like his big sin is wanting to be man? Is that some shit I'm not aware of? I know it's a thing that comes up in more modern stories, but I don't like that's probably just aping off of this stuff. I mean, I don't I'm not super familiar with what C.S. Lewis's cultural

framework would have been in Britain at the time, but I know at this point, it's the 1950s, and around this time is when evolution discourse in America is really taking off. Specifically, this is around when schools are really having these debates around intelligent design.

And I'm pretty sure the Stokes Monkey Trial was the 50s. And so... Yeah, no, the Stokes Monkey T trial took place in 1925. I was completely off on that one. It feels like something that was been the fifties. Yeah, but that's because it was in the twenties. Cause,

uh, one of the people and it was William Jennings, Brian, uh, but inherit the wind came out in 55. So, okay. Yes.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, I feel like that's maybe where Lewis is coming from on this. My wild speculation there would be cautionary tale against man and ape. God created the kinds for a reason.

You shall never cross the kinds. I guess. Yeah, it's this weird, like... Go ahead, Trevor. Oh, well, that is kind of something that is more emphasized in this book than most of the other ones, is that all of the animals are very much still their type

of animal. Bears are stupid, and dogs are high energy, and cats are sinister tricksters, and monkeys are false prophets trying to become men. A classic monkey trope. But I think you're right. Even though in the earlier books, obviously animals sort of resembled the animal they were, even if they were ascended ones that could speak.

This one much more is like like the horses are like this. The dogs are like this. That's why I was talking. I think I mentioned it maybe right before I started recording. It's like C.S. Lewis's taxonomy of good and evil animals, which is like some are inherent. Horses, good. Wolves, bad.

Dogs, good. A bull, bad. Like it's very much like the animals just pick sides based on their nature and it's felt very for any real ogs of the podcast it reminds me very much of the red wall series where it's like oh you're a a rat well you're just evil then that you can't actually overcome your evil nature really except for like one or two specific examples. And it kind of felt that way when like all the animals were picking sides. Well, and not just the animals, though, because all of the magical creature species also are inherently one thing or another thing.

Centaurs are inherently magi looking up at the stars and predicting the future. And satyrs bad. Well bad well yeah satyrs are the most satanic of them all which is weird because he has both satyrs and fauns in this series and fauns are good because tumnus was a faun i mean doesn't that make sense though if like you know you've got your satyrs and your fauns, which are like, aren't these the same things? But then, like, he's got very, very clear, serious opinions about wolves and dogs being different, even though they are, like, they share, like, that's not even, like, it's not even, like, a common ancestor thing. We just literally got dogs from wolves. Like, that's just a human civilization

thing. So you're saying a faun is a domesticated satyr? Yes. That's the end result of this argument. Maintained the satyr and turned him into faun. So, like, I have a picture of a wolf, a picture

of, like, a chihuahua, a picture of a satyr, and a picture of a fa, a picture of a, like a Chihuahua, a picture of a Seder and a picture of a fawn. This does feel like a reasonably good commentary on Greek versus Roman mythology. Well, like you're right. Everything's like, you know, they pick the sides. But again, I want to point out that I think we did notice this from the first book where he said that like the creatures you should be most wary of are those closest to man that are not men. I'm pretty sure that was episode one. We talked about that, that the things that you should be most like scared of or suspicious of are things that are near men.

And that's explicitly in this story, the dwarves who there's like one one good one, a bunch of bad ones, and a bunch of in between. His commentary on atheism. Because, boy, we are going to have to get to the point where we talk about the fact that the dwarves, when presented with a false prophet who tries to sell them into slavery, they're presented with what we know to be the true prophet. But they say, ah, you fooled me once. I shan't get fooled again. Their solution to that is an attempt to create an ethnostate. Dwarves are for the dwarves. They said Narnia for the dwarves.

They're like, what if we genocide everyone but us? Well, and because dwarves, anybody know what C.S. Lewis's opinions on Israel were? Because that seems relevant in 55. I don't know. Offhand. I don't know if I want to Google that. If either of any of you are brave enough, Google, what did C.S. Lewis think about Israel? Because it sure it sure feels like the dwarves are just trying to create an ethnostate

with their atheism. My Google search has just been permanently destroyed, so I just don't give a fuck anymore, because my last Google search was canine pregnancy cycles, which I assure you was for a 100% legitimate literary research, don't question me. Sure. But the first result that pulls up when I research

C.S. Lewis' thoughts on Israel is from a website called First Fruits of Zion. So I'm going to click on this and we're going to see what happens. Well, I found an article titled C.S. Lewis's Antisemitism.

Damn. I am finding that there's a biblical study program that the C.S. Lewis Institute runs in Israel. That's really funny because the tagline of this article is C.S. Lewis and the Jews. The respect

and honor that he gives the Jewish people is profound and progressive. So we seem to have found opposite ends of the debate here. The fifth word in my article is literally Hitler. Damn! I mean, this is even without even, I mean, obviously,

I think if people don't know, you can touch on what we, what I will briefly mention here is that if you aren't aware in a lot of early fantasy dwarves are often a, unfortunately used as a stand in for Jewish people or a sort of like fantasized version of Jewish people in a lot of early fantasy works. So if you weren't aware of that, now you are. So that's why we immediately jumped to his thoughts on Israel. Because you could argue that the dwarves are the people who just, you know, don't accept the coming of the prophet. This is a wild article, though, because, like, it doesn't actually, like, say anything about his views. It just, like, gives an excerpt from an article he wrote, like an old-timey fucking letter, I guess, that C.S. Lewis wrote

in which he's like, the Jews exist, and then says that he was friends with an Orthodox Jewish man. Oh, well, he had a Jewish friend. Obviously, that means his views are unproblematic. That's all I'm finding in mine, too, is, like, he

wrote a, like, modernized, abridged version of the divine comedy that has a jewish character in it but like her judaism isn't discussed so clearly an unproblematic ally to the jewish people there's some there i mean there's some kind of whack not to necessarily just bring this back to some kind of whack stuff in this book. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Some kind of whack.

I had this page doggy eared and I was trying to find a way to bring it in, but it's around the same time. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Look at all those notes. I have a dog eared in like two spots. like two spots that's um but you know in another way kind of returning to his uh um thoughts on animals there's the scene when he first figures out that the uh horses are that they're working are narnian horses that can speak and he's like and though he hated to see even a dumb horse overdriven he was of course thinking more about the murder of the trees

I do hate animal abuse but I'm more upset about the death of the dryads is like I am not concerned about animal abuse unless they talk at which point I'm gonna kill this guy to be fair the felling of the trees was active murder of the dryads.

That's true. Who are living, thinking, speaking creatures. Right. Like people who have only ever had a medieval culture with non-sentient horses are actively murdering the absolutely sentient dryads. actively murdering the absolutely sentient dryads. Like, I don't fault him for being primarily concerned with the dryads and not what he assumed were horses they brought with them. Yeah, that's true. It's just the way he got worded.

He was like, so he was obviously more concerned about the murder of the trees. It was just... Tyrion is the Lorax. He speaks for the trees. He's that meme of the Lorax. He speaks for the trees. He started, he's the, that meme of the Lorax with a gun though. He comes to speak for the trees and immediately starts murdering people. It literally shows up and murders and like they murdered two guys like immediately.

Now it's funny because in retrospect, that was the correct decision, but he feels bad about it. And we should specify the they in this case is just King Tyrion of Narnia and his best friend, Jule the Unicorn, who he has a very close relationship with. Very close. At one point, he just tells him to kiss him. Yeah, take whatever homoerotic undertones people read into Frodo and Sam in Lord of the Rings. And crank that up to 9 or 10. And that's what you get with Tyrion and Jule. Homoerotic more like... I don't know it's almost explicit uh yeah him so him and his life partner

the unicorn immediately just start murdering people which again in retrospect once you know the story was the correct decision but he feels bad about it because it was unsporting because he didn't give them any warning at all which is his main concern throughout the story his main concern is that again this is so british that like he's doing a war but he's concerned that it's being carried out in like an unsporting fashion like he's like oh i did kill that guy but it wasn't very cricket of me because i didn't warn him in advance i might as well turn myself in to save my own honor like the fuck are you on about they were murdering your they you're a king and they were they were actively murdering your subjects and you feel bad that you stabbed him

yeah there's there's some working through world war one as the book goes on. Like a lot of the battle scenes have very trench warfare sounding descriptions. Hmm. Just again, it's just weird. Like I wasn't very sporting for me to kill these murderers and slavers unannounced. It was surprisingly graphic. Like he avoids the like explicit graphicness. But there's like weird implicit graphicness but there's like weird implicit graphicness where it's like oh edmund and uh eustace forgot to clean off his sword

um when he sticks it in the scabbard and he gets scolded for it um later and you're like oh like oh god it's just the implications kind of gross so there there's just more of that. There's the implication that like Jewel has like literally gorn people to death with his horn multiple times. Yeah. Yeah. He talks a lot about the wars in general. The vague wars. Nardia's only neighbor is a country they are allied with

for their entire history. The wars are against Calamans. They have to be. Do you just march down through Arkenland every couple of years to go skirmish on the borders? To go fight the Turks? God, the Battle of Galicia. You fuck these guys up.

Because Alex and Trevor, I don't know if you heard the episode on um horse and his boy but clearly like the calumet is is literally just the ottomans there's no like if and or buts about it like it it's the ottoman empire um and in horse and his boy we said we have a complicated feelings about because it has the most interesting story and is also the most racist of this entire series. But that's also where we originally get introduced to. I think one of the other,

the sort of the main theology we need to get into here. If you don't mind, I want to, I want to jump and dive into it is let's talk about the Calorman God. Let's let's talk. You want to talk about Tash? The Calor Man four-armed vulture god

of evil? Yeah, it is Allah plus a Mayan sun god plus Shiva. There's a lot of coding going on. Off the bat, Alex, your opinions of Tash, please.

That's the only appropriate response. I don't... This is the thing. I don't know what is trying to be done there. I don't know what is trying to be done there. I don't know. It's like, this is the thing. Modern Christianity is so steeped in all of its influences, but as a result, because this is trying to be a unifying thing of this religion that has gone through thousands of years of change, it feels almost like a weirdly Protestant way of thinking about Satan, but not.

thinking about Satan, but not. Because C.S. Lewis is Anglican, which you could consider to be Protestant, but not in my view here. Anglicanism is not in the same way when thinking about American Protestantism.

We can debate what an actual Protestant is all day long. But it's a weird thing to me, because this is something that's being portrayed as almost an equal to Aslan.

Very obviously, this is an actual god. Even if it's clear that Aslan, as Jesus, as the Christian god, is going to triumph in the end, there's still this rival deity that still is giving him a run for his money. Well, that Aslan directly admits is extant, you know what I mean? It's not like, oh, that's a reflection of me or a shadow that's fighting against my power he's like oh no that's just tash i don't like him but he gets those people and that but that's the thing too it's like that's it's it's a weird kind of zoroastrianism

like it's that's the thing is like that's the only thing i can think of because that's not even like it's just straight up another deity then like gets his share of the souls at the end of time to me that that almost comes across as like a i mean it's not because lewis wasn't an american protestant like an evangelical but there's there's um like at least in my experience a trend of thinking of satan as kind of like a nega god um yeah i mean i can see that in some american protestantism the way they talk about satan is almost in a way that satan is its own like almost like a an inferior but but extant like other god

kind of being that has dominion over hell almost and you're like that's not how that can like again claim souls like this is some like Diablo ass lore so which just confuses me because I don't I don't think of Lewis is having that particular

view being an Anglican and not an evangelical. So I did find something interesting about this in my search to be like, is there explicit Zoroastrian and Iranian influence in this book? Because a lot of stuff was jumping out at me. this book because a lot of stuff was jumping out at me uh i found this quote from uh one of c.s lewis's theological books uh called mere christianity uh i freely admit that real christianity goes much nearer to dualism than people think the difference is that christianity thinks this dark power was created by god and was good when he was created and went wrong. Christianity agrees with dualism that this universe is at war, but it does not think this is a war between independent powers, which one, there is a large school of Zoroastrianism

that thinks exactly the same thing. I was going to say, there's like a whole branch of Zoroastrianism that would agree with that entirely. So yes, that is C.S. Lewis on dualism. Well, that makes sense for what gets represented in the text here. Yeah, it does. It just doesn't make sense trying to reconcile it

with what I think of as mainstream accepted Christianity. Oh yeah, it's dualistic. We view it slightly differently. it with like what i think of as like sort of mainstream accepted christianity they're just like oh yeah it's dualistic we just we view it slightly differently but like that's really not you're not really viewing it that differently i'm very confused i'm it i don't know if there's just something weird happened in translation between judaism and christianity where they suddenly were like satan's a guy like he's a dude like he's that that was dante oh i mean like that's also like the book of enoch and all of that second temple literature

when they were in a lot more regular contact with like zoroastrians and other you know zoroastrian influenced groups of like there was a lot of demonology and angelology and more dualistic stuff that judaism after the temple was destroyed was just kind of like yeah we're not dealing with that anymore we're gonna we have a book we have rules we're gonna be a very rules focused people and christianity was like i'm gonna come up with some new stories about the apostles and how they did magic it just it just feels so i don't know um it almost it almost kind of undermines a lot of stuff that is presented i think but well my other question is like i think i said this right before we started recording so you know in a way tash and aslan are presented as being, again, maybe not exactly

co-equal, but like independent entities of a same like taxonomical level. I think it's pretty understood that Aslan's dad, the emperor over the sea is above everyone. But like Tash still exists in his own space here, roughly on the same level as Aslan. Tash still exists in his own space here, roughly on the same level as Aslan. And we know for sure that Tash exists through the door in Aslan's country, in paradise, because that's where we see him last. That's where he claims his last victim is inside the door in paradise. So Tash, number one, exists independent of Aslan and somewhat independently of the emperor over the sea. And two, exists in paradise.

He just leaves, you know? He just fucks off, but he's still there. Again, maybe that's just shoddy storytelling on C.S. Lewis's part. But from a theological perspective to me, that's so confusing. I don't know what that means. Well, I think it's also like, he's trying to have his cake and eat it too, and that it's this

satanic figure of, you have a god of evil, even if, like, Tash... I think it's not too hard to say that Tash is just straight up a god of evil. Certainly portrayed that way. Even though you could make arguments around, like, is this actually... How is Lewis portraying all this?

And what problematic things is Lewis up to today? But, like, Lewis is trying to simultaneously have... Here's this co-equal, almost, god of evil to a god of good. But also, like, is still subservient in the end to aslan in the same way of like you crack open the book of job and it starts with satan howling around in heaven because god's called all the angels to him. And it's like, what's she up to, buddy? And in the modern evangelical sense, this makes no sense because it's like,

oh, Satan got kicked out of heaven and why would God be calling him back and having these little games with Satan? But then in the context that Job was written in, in the context of Judaism as it existed at the time, Satan is just another fucking dude in God's employ. He's just

going out being the asshole for God, basically. Trevor, didn't you say something about this earlier, Trevor? Oh, yeah, it's the very ha-Satan, the adversary version of Satan from the Old Testament. I want to say it's the history in the Bible podcast usually describes it as being God's prosecuting attorney, which I think is pretty accurate to Old Testament Satan. And then evangelical Satan is Ariman.

It's just an evil God on his own. Yeah, but you're right. It's more like Tash, the way Aslan describes it, where he's like anything good done in Tash's name was actually done in my name and anything evil done in my name and Aslan's name. It's actually done in Tash's name.

It means that just like you can, you can really look at it from like a functionary perspective, which is like, oh yeah, that way the bad people automatically get filtered out and go to Tash. Like, oh, they just,

that he just like, that's just, it reminds me of some D and D ass shit where it's like, well, if you're a bad person, your soul just like goes to the nine hells to serve Asmodeus. Because that's just where you go. He has literally an edict to collect the souls of those people.

It's very like you just have the right to these people because of the way they behaved. Or, you know, we're in a series with Father Christmas. He's like Krampus. a series with Father Christmas, he's like Krampus. He just takes all the evil naughty children and eats them. I mean, he does kind of...

Tash does kind of just eat... It's kind of implied that he straight up eats people. Yeah, he does. He eats Shift the monkey. He eats the fight. He'd shift the monkeys. He eats the, the fucking Calorman captain guy. He's it's it. I mean,

the thing you were bringing up is actually really, really interesting. The idea of, um, the, the, the Coleman, um,

who goes in there saying, I want to see Tash. Um, you know, it's like, I'm actually faithful and I, and I want to see him. And then him making it to paradise. I don't know if that's like a weird, like almost like Lewis, like, I don't know if there's like a weird loophole there where it's

like, yeah, you could be worshiping another God in another religion. And as long as you're a good person and you're doing good things in their name you're actually just doing it for Jesus so yeah go ahead for listeners sake this is at the very end of the book and there is one Tash worshipper

from Calorman who is a good person who did good things in Tash's name and honestly believed in his God and believed his God was a good being and, and kept his odes. And that means that he was actually serving Aslan the whole time. And that, uh,

one conversation is the reason that like, I've read this book so many times because like what the first time I read it was like at a point when i was a kid where like it's like wow the whole heaven and hell thing kind of sucks ass doesn't it and like reading the past is like well that's that makes sense to me like that universalist like if you're gonna have a good loving god like obviously that's how it's supposed to work right but it's weird because another really important plot point to this book is tash and aslan are not the same thing and people who say that tash and aslan are the same are wrong. That is exactly what I like.

As soon as I came across it, I was like, is this him saying that that Allah and God from Christian theology is not the same being and just him being very angry about that? Yeah, he's like it. It does feel like, yeah, it's, it does feel like, yeah, it's very much like, no, despite us all being Abrahamic,

we're not worshiping the same figure here, but it does give you the weird, it's partly a get out of jail free where it's like, well, if you were in a different religion, but you're a good person, you can still go to paradise, but it does it in this very Christian way where it's, it's not,

it's not this basic. If you're a good person, you go to paradise. It's if you're a good person, you're actually secretly working for Jesus. You know what I mean? You know, get the difference there. There's a difference between like good people, regardless of intent are rewarded and good people, regardless of belief are actually Christian secret Christians. And they just don't know it. And like, that feels a little bit more insidious to me than like it, not nearly as universal as it might otherwise appear.

I'm trying. That's just me though. And well, but additionally, Emmeth, the, um, the guy who ends up in paradise,

Emmeth, he encounters Aslan. And then essentially in the dialogue is like, well, then I know I should have been worshiping this dude the whole time. Just converts on the spot. Converts on the spot as soon as he sees Aslan. Another literal come to Jesus moment in this series that is mostly that. So I think every, every book has one. And I,

and I feel like that might be the thing that saved him. Yes. And it's like almost explicit that if he, he still had to accept Aslan at the end as being the thing he worshiped. That is kind of like an old Christian idea though, of like the, this idea that everyone automatically gets condemned to hell

is not something that has necessarily been universally agreed upon in christianity and like i'm not exactly sure where catholic doctrine falls on this because catholics still have their concept of purgatory and like eventually you get saved in purgatory and move up to heaven. But especially in the Orthodox Church, there is still a very credible theological thought that you can be saved in hell, and that you can pray for folks who are in hell right now, and that they can still repent and be saved from hell.

That it's not a timer that stops when you die i mean wasn't that wasn't that pretty common in like the early middle ages oh absolutely like this is not you could you could like you could like pay to like host like a church service like in the name of somebody who had died to like make sure that their soul wasn't in hell or if it was that you could save it posthumously. Absolutely. The Catholics don't like doing this as much nowadays because the Catholics much more prefer, at least present theology is much more, we don't actually know. It's not our place to say who's burning in hell. just know that somebody's burning in hell but we don't

know who necessarily that's in god's hands whereas the orthodox church takes a similar beat but also yeah totally if somebody's in hell then you can probably pray them out of it and they have the opportunity to still confess man that is so much of... I don't want to be that kind of like, man, some parts of modern Christianity make me upset, but like, the fact that there were, like, historically ways to get out of eternal punishment makes things a lot less horrendous.

I mean, I think that's something I've learned from looking at history is that historically, a lot of the worst things we associate with sort of the conservative Christian movement now originated in the early modern period, not the sort of medieval period where things were a lot more gray. Why would anybody want to believe the more impressive. I think we should go all in on the Mormon thing, where you could just baptize people posthumously and save them with or without their consent. Yeah, that's

a little fucked, but... I'd like, no, this is totally the thing, like, most of, like, the fucking things like the Inquisition and the horrific crimes against humanity that the Catholic Church has perpetrated

were like, I'm not going to be like, was it actually religion that did that? But it was just like, a lot of that came from the fact that the Pope was his own nation state. The Vatican and the Papal States were their own nation states with national agendas.

And a lot, a lot of historians have also effectively argued that a lot of the crusades that we think of as religious things were actually more just really the more centralization expansion of state power in the late medieval and early modern periods. It was less about the religion and more about the, the nation state coalescing like centralized authority which is why it was really powerful in spain when they were trying to where

they're doing the reconquista i think and the spanish were so about it the pope was like i think you guys should chill out and isabella was like i don't know how to fucking chill out thank you i feel like you can actually boil down most world conflicts that people have attributed to religion to just being attributed to state expansion. And like, just. I mean, we have to be careful. We have gathered on this podcast,

like possibly the four anarchists on earth who are like, who are like religion apologists. So, well, yeah, that's, I mean, we're going to get it. We're going to get ourselves canceled on anarchist Twitter for being religion apologists. So, well, yeah, I mean, we're going to get ourselves canceled

on Anarchist Twitter for being religion apologists. I'm sorry. I will never fucking apologize for the fact that the Christianity we know today was a direct result of fucking imperial solidification. Like Christianity as it exists today was to preserve the Roman Empire and then it failed at that

depending on how you got Byzantium for a while but point being the Christianity we have today was explicitly Roman approved like all these fucking other variants of Christianity that we know existed but have very few

records of because the Romans fucking burned everyone. Yeah, all the Christians that were getting fed to the lions were the fucking feminists and anarchists, the ones that were like, Jesus made us all equal. That got you fed to the lions because the Romans didn't want

that. But now you get fucking pastors at the Southern Baptist Church that they're like oh i'm going to be persecuted for my beliefs you uphold the imperial power sir well i and i do want to like caution against the distinction between the pope and the kings and the lords of medieval europe like solidifying state power with religion as a tool and the thousands of people they recruited to go murder everybody between france and jerusalem who were like yeah we're doing it for jesus so that our souls will be saved that was also true that did that definitely was

religious yes and the pope knew that that sentiment was out there and he was like we need to send these people somewhere else. What if we don't leave them in France? Well, let's not leave them in Normandy where all of them seem to come from. Well, because the Pope, the papal States got invaded by Normans like twice a century.

And they're like, what if we took the Normans and kick God out of Normandy and Sicily and we instead sent them to the Levant? For like 400 years, every 25 to 50 years, a couple boats full of Normans would show up and sack Rome. And the Pope was like, we need another option for people to prove their battle heartedness. What if we send them to be the Greeks problem? So we've, we've, we've tangential five,

which I knew would happen in this episode because I do think it's funny though, that we've ended up being like mild religion, apologist and the episode about the guy was some of the weirdest Christian beliefs we've talked about so far, the most on your face, which is CS Lewis. And so we've talked a little bit about Tash and his weird,

essentially inherent dualism. Trevor, I know you've got about 50,000 notes tagged right there. Why don't you go ahead? Well, just pick one or two of the tags that, you know, you specifically wanted to talk about.

So I know there's a lot of things going on here. Like you can easily pick out which characters are just ports of like fables or characters from like revelations. You know, you have like the beast and you know, it's all those sorts of things, which is hash. Just puzzle the donkey.

Now the bridge, it's puzzle or it's puzzle the beast beast because he's the false prophet well i think uh i think puzzle i think puzzle is a plot device shift is the false prophet and i think that makes ginger the whore of babylon ginger the cat that's what i was like holy shit is, is this cat the whore of Babylon? What is going on? We told you, in the worldview of both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, cats are inherently satanic creatures. Well, okay, while I try to find the actual quote that I wanted in my series of notes here, I did discover in my looking for zoroastrian influence that the plot of this book is literally just an afghan folk tale that was uh published in britain by lord byron

in which a jackal convinces a donkey yeah convinces a donkey to put on a lion skin and pretend to be a lion to become Shah of the jungle. And they get into a conflict with the actual Shah, who then isn't able to win the animals over because they're all convinced by the donkey wearing a lion skin. Which is just the plot of this book. convinced by the donkey wearing a lion's skin. Which is just the plot of this book. You just swap Jackal for Ape and that's the exact same story. Imagining the Iranian child

losing a fight with a convincing donkey. This donkey ain't even convincing. No. Also, the ass and the lion's skin is also directly out of Aesop's fables as well there's it says here there is an eastern variant and sort of a western one the eastern one is like the one you're talking about trevor and there's also like a more aesop like sort of greek variant

of like aesop's fables which is still an ass dressed like a lion yeah okay uh So the thing I was looking for intentionally was there's this bit in Shift's villain monologue when he has King Tyrion and Jule as captives being brought before him after they feel bad about killing murderers. when telling the Narnians what his plans are for how he's going to make Narnia a better place with the help of the Calormen, we'll be able with money you can earn to make Narnia a country worth living. There'll be oranges and bananas pouring in and roads and big cities and schools and offices and whips and muzzles and saddles and cages

and kennels and prisons. Oh, everything. And like this, this is the list of bad things that he's going to bring to Narnia. And it's like capitalism and industrialism and prisons. Like these are. Narnia doesn't have prisons. Like the list of things he wants to introduce that C.S. Lewis is presenting as a bad thing are like all genuinely bad things. But the next paragraph is where he starts being like, Tash is Aslan and Aslan is Tash and C.S. Lewis gets into that bit.

Is that also just, sorry, is that also not just essentially a list of what the British Empire did everywhere it went? Uh-huh. Pretty much. Except for the oranges and bananas. Those are a little sweet for their palate. I mean, that's kind of what the... That's a little too spicy for the Brits. But the idea that we're going to show up and we're going to

enslave you all to make money so you can have roads and schools and prisons and be productive. Because there's something going on in there about, to me, which rings of this idea that Europeans had when they were colonizing all the rest of the world, that they saw indigenous peoples as inherently lazy for not having developed industrial capital capital yet or even like some you know work ethic where they're like oh these lazy natives just lay around and eat fruit all day they don't have an even they're not even effectively like exploiting the resources of their country that's what shift is shift in the callermen are trying to do to narnia, which is like an explicitly anti-colonial argument that I don't know if Lewis is directly trying to like criticize the British Empire or not.

It's such a specific list of like everything about modern society that I can't tell if it's like critiquing the empire or like what Tolkien does with the Shire. Yeah. There is a lot of overlap there between with, with good old J.R.R. Tolkien in terms of just hating industrial society. Look, we set the list was good.

There are benefits. He's saying good things. it's just like the point is well made it's just interesting that lewis is making it to me that lewis is like yeah you know it's bad it doesn't seem as dramatically anti-industrial civilization as token sure well what i'm saying is because because the narnians like narnia is supposed to be perfect, and, like, nobody there works for shit. Yeah, the implication is that they don't have money. Throughout the entire, like, multi-thousand year history of Narnia, there has been no money in the country. Well, I thought they had money because they go to, like, the market in, like, Beaverton and whatever the two other towns are they have

markets and they have traders from callerman come and trade for goods so unless they're just purely bartering all the time there has to be some medium of exchange right theoretically yeah but not explicitly or is it or is narnia entirely a gift economy i? It kind of seems like it's probably internally a gift economy, and then they barter with the Calarmin. They just run up north and grab some silver and gold off the trees, and are like,

ah, yeah, it was really hard to find all this stuff. Oh, it took me a lot of work hiding the tree behind you. There's gold growing on it you're like no don't look over no what no wonder kellerman wants to invade narnia well yeah narnians have it freaking easy in terms of like just their normal daily life again just narnians exist in the state of just like did we find complete complete ease we find the second anarcho-monarchist? Because he's still aggressively monarchist.

Still aggressively monarchist, and people still have to serve him if he gives orders. But besides that, everyone just kind of fucks off and does whatever they want all the time. This is what Aslan wants. I mean, at the end, they go to Paradise, and I'm pretty sure Paradise is pretty explicitly anti-work. Just don't do jack shit.

Fucking better be. Man, can you imagine, though, dying in a train accident and finding out your sister is going to super hell because she stopped believing

in your fucking fantasy explorations. And then you show up, and you're in Aslan's paradise. And it's just like, actually, BT Tubbs, we're setting up a factory here. You've got to clock in for the rest of eternity. Well, please, our protagonists don't have to. They're kings and queens.

Ah, they're the factory supervisors. We got, look, Eustace and Polly and Peter are angles here. They own the factory. I do want to know how in the Nardian hierarchy of kings and queens, where do Peter and Frank rank in comparison to each other? Well, they literally never mentioned Frank outside of the vague history. And he calls Peter the highest king of kings. Right. He's the shawn shah he is he is the king of kings is peter but then they get the greatest of kings and frank and

helen have just been i guess chilling under the trees in the garden of eden's so frank and helen which alex in case you didn't remember this from the magician's nephew and the Garden of Eden. So Frank and Helen, which Alex, in case you didn't remember this from The Magician's Nephew, the first king and queen of Narnia are literally the precursor to a London cabbie and his wife who were drawn into Narnia on accident at its creation. I was aware of that fact.

It's so cool. It's so cool that the first king of Narnia is a cabbie named frank and his wife helen yeah have they just been chilling under c.s lewis's version of the trees of valinor since since they died i guess since they died uh yeah but like peter gets to be high king of kings because he ruled over the most glorious golden age of narnia apparently i mean if you're a mardicus that tracks though like if you're a mardicus then whoever ruled the biggest empire was the best king true and he ruled over narnia at its height i suppose

also i was looking up because we mentioned earlier, we're talking about timeframes. Narnia only existed for, in Earth years, 49 years total. From Diggory and Polly being there at creation to Diggory and Polly being there at Armageddon was 49 Earth years and 2,500 years Narnia time. Yeah. Well, in the framework presented from Magician's Nephew, it does seem like a scrapped project. Like, you got to the point where the kings

were starting to get a bit harder and a bit meaner, and there was a bit more war, and people were starting to doubt, and Aslan's like, no, not this one. He's like, alright, this project's over, we're done, wrap it up. This universe has one millionth of the suffering of earth let's grab it wrap it up this one's this one's gone south there's too many calormen around this one's gone south wrap it up wrap it up we

need more people to clock into our heaven factory it's very important we're running out of laborers to the paradise fields. Do the hounds still have to serve in paradise? Do they still serve the Kings and Queens? I assume they do. Oh, I, the way he talks about the animals, like they are all inherently drawn to some aspect of their relationship with

humans in the real world. Like to me, to me that, to me, that's like a very direct, like direct representation of the, like Genesis story where like animals were created and man was created with dominion over them. Like,

that's just all of Narnia, right? Like that's just, that's just taking generous Genesis pretty literally. I mean, there's just like, there's that. And then there's also, I, like, there's that, and then there's also

I think, like, I think Lewis, you're probably right that Lewis didn't actually give this as much thought as I'm giving it, and was just like, ah, yeah, man has dominion over the animals, so of course man is going to have dominion over the animals in the afterlife, too.

But, like, there's also that through line that you see in Christianity, and, like, this pops up some in the Old Testament and animals in the afterlife, too. But, like, there's also that frue line that you see in Christianity, and, like, this pops up some in the Old Testament and some in the New Testament, but, like, this idea that angels will be lower than man once man is exalted,

and that's something that pops up way more in the Lord of the Rings, since, like, there's actual fucking angel ex-piece there, but, like... And also, Lord of the Rings is pretty explicitly's actual fucking angel X-beasts there. But like... And also Lord of the Rings is pretty explicitly about the ennoblement of man. But like, it totally tracks with C.S. Lewis and

his thoughts about these things of like, there can be no higher authority than man. Like, even other supernatural creatures cannot rank higher than man. The only even other supernatural creatures cannot rank higher than man. The only thing that can rank higher than man is man's creator.

Well, I think, like, the funny thing that you mentioned, the angels in that comparison, because the angels for Narnia are children from Earth. Like, that's, oh, that's a thing that used to appear in times of turmoil and need in the past, but that sort of thing doesn't happen anymore.

Like they are seemingly immortal beings who pop in and out of the histories to help out when needed and then go away because they're sent by God. Like what is that but if not an angel? I mean, again, you have to look at it from, yeah, that Narnian perspective, like Peter, who is a young man was literally exist, like showed up and defeated the white, which ended the a hundred years of winter was high King and then left. And now he's just back again.

And that's a thing that happened in your own history, like 12, like 1200 years ago or something like that like 2000 years ago or whatever or you can literally meet dickery who was there at creation and he's just a guy so you're right you're right trevor it's very much like oh yeah back in the old days whenever there was trouble some weird children would just appear and save the world but see then that makes me wonder like in this in this cosmological framework is this explicitly stating then that like humans who have grown up in narnia humans that were you know because all humans except for the humans that aren't because there's

humans that are just extant to narnia but then there's humans who cross through the portal of like the fucking pirates. If you go far enough back, there aren't any humans that are extant to Narnia. The Calormen came in through a portal somewhere in the Middle East. Clearly in Ottoman territory somewhere.

The pirates came in from lost British sailors who got lost on some South Pacific island. That's where the Telmarines came from. All humans in Narnia British sailors who got lost on some like South Pacific Island. That's where like, and that's where, that's where like the Telmarines came from. So like all humans in Narnia got there via a portal at some point or time, except for the ones that appeared with Frank and Helen,

who were the original Kings and Queens, which by the way, it's mentioned in this book, they mentioned Arkenland. The Kings and Queens of Arcan land are still directly descended from frank and helen but then that makes me wonder of like obviously there's protagonist syndrome of our protagonists are obviously going get the best deal out of things but like it seems like to me at least that humans who have been in narnia longer link Rower in Lewis's world.

That if you are a fresh face to Narnia, or in the case of the children, hopping in and out until you finally die and just automatically go to heaven, you don't seem to get as much significance. I think you're definitely right. If you are a native narnian human or a telmarine or an archenlander you are still man and have dominion over animals but you are

lower on the totem pole than like some british school children that's the thing is like i i'm trying to process through my head here of like what, what is Louis trying to say with that? Because we can say, oh, monarchism. Peter fucking ruled the biggest empire, and so he gets to have the most exalted seat in heaven. But, like, what about his

siblings? Like, obviously they were great kings and queens in Arnia 2, or, you know, queen, since Susan's just been fucked and lost all of this. But, like, what is the point that Lewis is trying to make here of these kids who have been popping in and out get to have a higher status than, like, your random Telmarine

or, like, even the kings of Telmarine. Still, monarchs that ruled. They have a higher status than any of the other kings and queens of Narnia. What is Lewis's point there? I'm just trying to figure out, is that just literally, it's protagonist syndrome?

He cares about the protagonists more and so the protagonists get the best feel in the end? Is there some moral statement trying to be made of... I'm trying to wrap my head around what is even the allegory here of... Because Lewis is all about the allegory. Everything he does is allegory. And so what is the allegory for I'm going to take somebody and transplant them through time? Is this the prophet Enoch being whipped away to heaven without dying and then being placed back in random points in time?

I don't... I'm not sure what Lewis is trying to say there. Yeah, it's interesting because we have also seen that other Narnian kings can come back because at the end of Silver Chair, Eustace and Polly see Prince Caspian resurrected in Aslan's country. He like pops through the portal real quick to beat some school kids with a sword. Like Prince Caspian has been resurrected so yeah why do why does like eustace who never ruled anything get a get to sit closer to the right hand of god

than prince caspian maybe i mean they all ended up directly in narnia through aslan's influence so i don't know if it's just like they were specifically chosen by aslan whereas caspian was like born into a line that was indirectly chosen like the line was chosen i guess well the telmarines the line wasn't chosen by aslan specifically i guess but um but this is alex's point where it's just protagonist syndrome it's just like well they're the main characters so they get to sit at the right hand of God. I would honestly probably argue that. It's very clearly the right hand because when they're letting all the creatures in through the door of questionable size, he specifies quite a few times that everyone is standing to Aslan's right.

I want to say he says it at least three times that everyone is standing to Aslan's right. So we make sure that you know they're at the right hand of God. But I don't know, Trevor, do you have an opinion about whether there's an allegory here or whether it's just protagonist syndrome? I think it's both protagonist syndrome and they are divinely chosen. Like they are the protagonists because they are picked out by Aslan to be there. So it's simultaneously like they are God's chosen favorites. And like, of course they're the favorites because that's why they're protagonists.

Like, Hmm. This random school child. I like him so much more than the King who ruled justly and peacefully for like 75 years. I mean, Aslan has a thing for choosing random ass people. And I think it has to do with, I mean, humility a little bit. But I feel like that's part of the reason he picks the cabbie to be the first king. Because he's like.

I mean, the cabbie was there on accident. Yeah, but it's part of his plan. You know, and then aslan was like you're gonna be king you're gonna be king there you go i just that to be that i think we talked about that in the magician's nephew episode that that feels very much like the the like you know any you know i anything that you do will end up as part of my plan because he's like, Oh, you accidentally brought a cabbie here. Well,

guess what? That cabbie gets to be King now and all Kings forever will be descended from him or something. But I just, God, it would feel so weird to just be. Yeah. The right hand of God.

And just this like idea that you just, yeah, that they are these random British school kids are the chosen of God. Ergo, they get to be more important. And if you're just some regular ass human or a talking animal, you get to go to paradise and then you just have to continue following the divine hierarchy of beings. Like no matter what, like you'd still got to go. And if high King Peter is like, like hey i need some fresh fruit over

there they all got to be like yeah man i'll go get it don't worry about it i got you fam you're the special one and i just feel like that's kind of a shitty way to have an afterlife no matter how good the fruit tastes but we can't really know because lewis can't explain to you how good the fruit tastes and i appreciate the attempt to like just to describe heaven as indescribable but like on the 13th page in a row of telling me how i can't possibly understand what you're describing like i get it like and i got it when i was nine too like i don't it ends up more frustrating than it is interesting is this is this the part where we can get into not theological discussion or even thematic discussion?

Can this be the, what I would call, authorial discussion, as a writer discussion? Because I feel like just as a writer, as a book, this one just isn't that good. The plot is simplistic. The characters are flat, like exceedingly flat. And I found myself just bored almost at times because a thing will happen. And then you'll have a character explaining the thing we just witnessed.

It's like, I think what the worst in anime, the, the CS Lewis book. Yeah. Like the worst one is after Tyrion gets through the door, you then have Peter and Eustace and Lucy explain step for step what happened, but from their side of the door. Well, first the door opened and the cat came through and then the door opened and the Calerman came through. And then it's like, yeah,

we know we just watched that happen two pages ago. Yeah. It's the thing that any other book would start with, you know, start that conversation and then say, and then Lucy explained all of the things that had happened in the previous scene. Like,

yeah, you say, and then, and Lucy described, yeah, you know, Lucy described watching all the, you know, the various people come through the door and you can maybe explain the part that we wouldn't know for sure that like, I don't know, the dwarves couldn't see anything or that, you know what I mean? Like the, what the Calorman swordsman didn't notice them either. Like little things like that, but like you don't have to blow for blow describe the action again

it just seems like poor writing and i think um and listeners in case you didn't know um alex did have to leave us for some you know uh you know family commitments and such but alex pointed out on her way out that like it seems like i think it was alex's head or kethel did you say this it seems like by this point it was Alex who said, or Ketha, did you say this? It seems like by this point, Lewis was just kind of like losing his juice. I think that was, that was Alex.

Like just, he just kind of didn't have, didn't have the juice in him at this point to like write it that well. Or was he just too excited about talking about heaven that he didn't bother? I think it was probably more like he, I think he was very excited to write this book um and i i think just based on how strongly allegorical it is you can feel him just being so into it um but it's also because of how hard he goes on the allegory that he almost has to

make it kind of flat right it's not like it's not like the book of revelations has an interesting plot line to it. It's, it's a lot of crazy whack shit happening very quickly. Yeah. I, that is worth pointing out for every weird ass thing in this book. It is not a 10th as weird as the book it's based on. Um,

yeah, it's just super strange because this is presented in the form of a children's story. Well, they're in the form of a children's story well yeah they're preventing the book of revelation which is even crazier and i think the fact that it's a children's story is part of that like he's really trying to emphasize and make sure all of these kind of more complicated story beats are getting across to small children. Because the story beat of there is a false prophet, therefore it was so convincing but terrible, therefore there are people who won't be convinced by the true prophet, that can be a slightly complicated concept to get across to a child.

I would imagine, you know, the idea of like the once bitten twice shy, but for gods, I guess. Right. And like, I think,

you know, Lucy explaining things on the other side of the door is like making sure the implied, they saw Tash on the other side and bad things happened from the previous chapter is explained in full which we as adults are like well obviously because you've been foreshadowing that tash is behind the doors for multiple chapters now but like he's making sure that a nine-year-old gets that yeah i suppose it just it just maybe it is because a combination of his excitement and like the subject matter but it just comes across so clunky and i think even as a

kid i felt it was clunky which is that aside from the general weird vibe of it all is why i opposite of you trevor why i didn't reread this one as a kid because I was like, this is just weird. Like this story is like, I don't know. It's like a donkey that's dressed up like a lion or whatever. Like, you know what I mean? And so maybe it's the combination of those things is what makes it so clunky to read as an adult.

Yep. Uh, it's, but it's weird that like the very children's book repetition stuff is then mixed in with the most hardcore battle scene in the entire series. With like actual tactical like moves, right? He's like the dogs go back here. The people over here, people over there, people over there. Like he like sets everything up.

Polly like Merck's multiple people with a bow and arrow like explicitly and like he describes the the kids kind of blacking out in the midst of fighting and like eustace just swinging wildly and not really remembering the part where he murders people like yeah but like like you said it's a it's it is one of the more explicit battle scenes even though he does kind of do the like oh the kid blacked out and can't really remember it it's still very much like the bear gets killed and you watch the bear die confused like the bear understand and then just dies and it's like wow like, he gently lays his head on the grass and dies. And you're like watching the dryad die.

And like the second chapter was pretty graphic. All things considered the dryad is literally there talking to them. Like we're being murdered. And then you just watch her collapse debt. And you're like, fuck. Well, and over the course of that battle scene,

like it shifts focus from Jill to Tyrion. And from Tyrion's perspective, we see the child protagonists that we've been following get picked up by enemy soldiers and thrown into a stable to be sacrificed to an evil God. Like you look at scene, Jill being drug by her hair into what you assume is a building of human sacrifice. Like, and then Tyrion does the whole, if I'm going,

so are you grabs. That is the most metal part of that. Yeah. That's. And, and because I was on for the magician's nephew i kind of wonder is the hardcoreness of the military stuff in this book supposed to kind of be saying narnia is slipping in that kind of charn direction where the kings got harder as time went on and you know they got more brutal and they got more violent like yeah things have gotten like you know they've degraded in a way like it's no longer as

high and good and like as it used to be yeah because the like tyrian is a drill sergeant where like caspian is like and yeah an, an adult. And when needed an adult, who's like Eustace, you need to get your shit together. But like, he's never demanding about it beyond like, do not get my crew killed at sea. Yeah.

And like Tyrion is like, like, like a battle commander, like dogs on the flank, you know, Centaurus to the left. He's like, like again,

like issuing orders and like doing like incredibly like militant activity. And again, to like all 12 people that are on his side, but like, again, hardcore for like a battle of 30 people total. Yeah. Also how,

how did they, the Calamon conquer Narnia exactly? Like, okay. I, there's a, a infiltration team up North where the King is and Tyrion gets involved in all that crap. You're saying,

but like they just sailed into care, Paravel and killed everybody there on a pose. Yeah. They sailed in with, they sailed in with, it's like 200 ships or some shit. They just like sailed in with a full on invasion force and did like an amphibious landing at Cara Para Vale.

And there was, and it's, there's no Narnian resistance after that. Well, I think there was, I think it's implied that they did resist, but they were just killed because they, they,

the, they talk about the Eagle talks about seeing all the bodies of his servants and like the army that they were supposed to be raising there to come fight up North. So I think it's implied that the Narnians attempted to resist, but there was not like a coordinated resistance because the King was off in his fucking hunting lodge, like with his life partner. So like,

like the, the, the, the Kellerman just like sailed in like full sail, full like naval landing party and brought their whole ass army in. And the narnians were like, oh, we simply weren't prepared. And we're like slaughtered in their like minimal defense of the capital of Narnia. There is like through that kind of the implication that like the king of Arkenland, whoever it happens to be at the time,

the king of Arkenland, whoever it happens to be at the time, like gets news that all of this is going down and is like, is he raising as large an army of like his people and, you know, the refugees from Narnia. And then like, while he's doing that, the stars start falling out of the fucking sky. Literally like, yeah. So whoever the current king of Arkencan land is yeah like you said who i'm sure is like trying to muster an army to come to their forever allies defense like while they're

mustering yeah literally like the stars fall from the sky the land begins to shake and then you're just just comes upon you just the irresistible urge to sprint full tilt towards narnia towards an undefined point in narnia because i guess from the description where he says all manner of creatures and people appear all the arcanlanders they saw the good one all of them made it up to the to the door to be judged because like aslan sits there judges every single soul before they enter paradise. That's the problem. Asha with keeping devilish creatures. Sorry to let the cat out.

He was crying. Um, like he literally like Aslan has to do final judgment on every soul from the entire created world, which I assume includes all the Arcanelanders because this Calorman come to. So I'm assuming they ran all the way from callerman well like it turned let's talk about the whole apocalypse scene too because like physics turns off father time wakes up and his

name is not going to be time anymore we don't find out what his name is going to be um and then like every living thing in the world sprints including i assume all the stuff that lives out in the ocean like yes there's fish like there's sea monsters and people living on islands and like just well i think he tries to head wave that by saying they don't know whether it took two minutes or like like seven minutes or seven years while they stood there so i think it's sort of implied that it's just sort of this wishy-washy like everyone just immediately departs for the west like everyone is the elves who've suddenly heard the call for the sea and everyone is immediately like running to the west to depart and like they eventually all get there but you're right like are

the sea beasts coming because if all the animals of the land get to come do like what the mer people get to come there are merfolk in narnia we know that for sure we've met them or you know maybe they've got the uh another door open in the bit of aslan's country that we see in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where there's another one way out in the east at the edge of the world. Oh yeah, over the waterfall that Ripachique goes over. Why doesn't he get to come

back? He does come back to the world, but he's the one who greets them at the gates of paradise when they get there. Oh, I mean, you're right. I forgot. You're right. That's true. It is one who greets them at the gates of paradise when they get there I mean you're right I forgot you're right that's true it is rip a cheek greeting him the gates of paradise because he's the one that like went over the edge of the world in a canoe because he's

a lie shot he is a lie we didn't we didn't even mention that in the first recording get though that he is basically Elijah that tracks fucking rip a cheek, but yet like,

it's a, what is it? Did he spend paradise just like waiting to be at the gates of heaven to like welcome everyone in at the end of time? Well, I do wonder like, because of how non-existent time gets when they're in paradise and like they can sprint at the same speed as a unicorn going full tilt and everything. Like maybe like for people who die in C.S.

Lewis's mind, like they're in heaven for what feels like minutes. And then the world ends and everybody turns up like could be. It's like sort of your reverse of like the time rules for the real world, you know, where like thousands of years go by Narnia and it's been like a month and a half in paradise or something or minutes in paradise. Could be.

But, uh, I like that all like that there has to be something to do with father time. Why is father time involved at all? What is C.S. Lewis doing here? It's not explained. It's not part of Christian theology. It's not really part of any world mythology that i can really think of like yeah why is father time included as an explicit character and then what's that deal at the end with like the two beings that like join together isn't like father time and something

else like join together to like bring the world to a close like they there at the end might just be a really cool visual I think that's possible like the only connection I could make was like platonic ideas of Saturn and Zoroastrian Zervon like Zervon mentioned Zervon mentioned

it's like it's the it's one of the only like fully developed theological of the only, like, fully developed theological ideas of time I've ever encountered. Like. Yeah, it's like time is a theological concept. Yeah. So like, that's the only reference point I have for it. And it does track pretty directly to like what Zervon is in Zoroastrianism as, you know, time is linear until the end of the world

and then time is non-linear which is a hell of a thing for someone to have come up with in 400 BC um yeah but I guess that does track with what we were just saying about time passing in paradise you know yeah it's like once once you're there time no

longer passes because you're no longer in well here's the thing Tolkien does that too because what the place the place Once you're there, time no longer passes because you're no longer in. Here's the thing. Tolkien does that too. Because the place where Eru Iluvatar exists, what is that called in the Silmarillion? The Timeless Halls. It's the Timeless Halls. Time only exists inside of creation, which in Tolkien is Arda, which is all of creation, which includes Middle Earth. But like, and Valinor, to be fair, is inside of Arda, is inside of creation. But so

like, C.S. Lewis is essentially doing the same thing that Tolkien did, where outside of creation, time simply does not exist. Like now that you mentioned that, I'm like, oh shit, that's just the timeless halls again. So Aslan's country is simply more timeless halls. What I'm learning through this is that there was some book in the Oxford Library in the 20s that these guys all got really into. You know, they all got into it like the early teens when they were all like in college there before they were professors, when they were all the inklings or whatever, before they went off to World War One, like when they were all like in college there before they were professors when they were all the inklings or whatever before they went off to World War One like when they were all still students because like clearly there's some like Gnostic influence going on here

yeah oh when that might be it when was when did they find the Nag Hammadi library could be great if it was like right around the time that they were in college uh not when they were in college 1945 oh so right when they were like getting when they were in college. 1945. Oh, so right when they were being professors.

Yeah, and right when they were getting these books put together. So if you can explain, the thing you just of texts that they found in Egypt. And Gnosticism is more than we can get into here, but was a version of several Middle Eastern theologies that had a real focus on like, you have to know the secret knowledge about God and the structure of the universe to receive more like enlightenment than redemption really. But it got into very grand cosmological ideas, like a tier of beings and then another tier of beings, and then another tier of beings below them, and another tier of beings below them, down to, you know, a corrupt force that created our world, which is not exactly what C.S. Lewis is presenting, obviously, because Narnia is created by

a very good being, but there are, you know, so they would have been following the early publications of these translations when they were first coming out as Lord of the Rings and Chronicles of Narnia were being put together. So there might be something to that. There's a couple of apocalypses in it, but I don't remember which ones have which features it just you know again it could be the fact this is something that you know like you and i think about a lot and so you know it's very much like when you're when you're looking for this thing all the time then that's what you see everywhere or it could just be it could be more than a coincidence that that's just was it did have an influence on there when they're like, well, I want to write something crazy and creative. And they just use the influence of this crazy new thing that they were just

reading about at the time, which was, you know, nonlinear time outside the circles of the world. Right. And like, like is also coinciding with the early publications of stuff like string theory,

which we talked about with magician's nephew and the pools between the worlds. So there is like, they were thinking about how to include time into their theology. It's weird. Cause like, I don't remember how like earlier, like even as like a medievalist of Tolkien was like Tolkien himself was like

looking at how, like, I don't know the medieval Catholics like look at time. I think to them, time was just like a well there was a there was creation and then there will be time and then time will end and that's it like i don't think they thought that hard about what happened afterwards or beyond it i could be wrong though but i don't remember too much catholic doctrine from you know the year 1000 that was concerned

with like the passage of time to god that could be getting into like you know does god see all points in time at the same time you know which i suppose i guess he would have to if he's omnipotent and omniscient i guess but maybe not necessarily i don't know not that into the theology of it yeah that i that's getting into more than chronicles of narnia deserves, frankly. Oh, well, if,

uh, I think that was a good time. Are there any other final things that either of you flagged up that you didn't necessarily wanted to bring up besides the weird giant worms and beasts that come out of the mountains to destroy Narnia at the end of time, the dragons and worms and monsters that destroy Narnia while father time calls the stars down, which again is all things. I think Lewis just pulled entirely for himself because they thought they

were cool. The visual of father time blotting out the sun is sick as hell. Just reaching out, reaching it out with his hand, just clenching his hand around it well it is a bit like father time wakes up to hit fast forward on narnia so that it can go from like a healthy developed world that could go on for many more years and aslan's just like no we need to end this now because they comment on like as he's as father time destroys the sun, it turns red and Polly and Diggory notice it and think, oh, that's like and they had seen a son like that before in a dying world. It reminds me of the, like these, like sort of the string theory episode of Futurama where they have a time machine that can only go forward, you know,

where they just like fast forward through time and watch the earth, like eventually dry up and like, you know, dry up and like cake up and then get destroyed just at the end of the universe. Like it reminds me of that with the, yeah, they just leave father time wakes up and just hits fast forward. Like, all right. That's what I said earlier. It's like aslan was just like all right let's he's like making the wrap it up symbol with his fingers all right let's go let's go come on no more of this like this experiments run its course i mean that might just be the only implication behind father i think i

think blotting out the sun and the dragons and other crazy monsters destroying the land i think i think he just did that because he thought it was cool oh yeah like i think there's versions of that in most mythologies with an end of the world like it's actually almost weird that revelation doesn't feature more monsters destroying things because like that's like ben rear eats the sun and the world serpent wakes up in norse mythology and and the yazadas stomp around and burn everything in zoroastrianism and you know there's versions of that for everything i think islam has a version where everything burns to like that's pretty standard apocalypse stuff yeah you're right it's weird that revelations doesn't have more like more kaiju in. And there is like what a seven headed dragon with 10 horns and 10 crowns and like,

yeah, whatever the fucking the beast, but all right. Other final things. And like I said, you've got, I know you've got some bookmarks and stuff. Geth though.

Any other final points you want to make about the last battle? Again, some of the stuff I wanted to talk about while you look is like, some of the allegory to me was just too annoyingly on the nose. Like, I'm the lamb and I'm speaking up against the false prophet. And you're like, okay, man, get it.

Like, sure, fine. But I don't know. What have you two got here? Yeah, like from a writing perspective, like bringing back every character with a name in the last chapter in Heaven is cheesy. But it's a book for kids. I get why you did it. Second to last chapter, please. No, the last chapter is all about how they had begun the greater adventure that no one on Earth has ever heard before.

And Aslan... Oh, and that's the thing earth has ever heard before and yes aslan and oh and that's the that's the thing i want to point out and aslan no longer looked like a lion and everything was going to be perfect from here on out like aslan just openly reveals himself to be jesus at the end he does yes he he stopped short of saying he looks like a man now and just says he doesn't look like a lion. You're like, oh. Well, I mean, that's just like in previous books where he says, you will know me in your world by other names. You're like, OK, bud. I think the line you're looking for was the beginning of the true story, which, quote, goes on forever, in which every chapter is better than the one before, which is paradise and eternal life in the kingdom of God.

Yeah. The, I, this book really just had me kind of groaning more often than it, where I, where I was like, Oh, there it is.

Well, there it is. There's the next, you know, the allegory, it beats you over the head more than it does in any of the other books it stops being allegory at a certain point and it's just describing heaven like yeah it's not an allegory for heaven it just is so it was just and across the way you

see the world that is england not not our world the world that is England. Look, if I'm going to paradise, England better not be there. What's that old quote where it's like, who's in heaven? Oh, people like me. Who's in hell? People like you. It's like, I want to go to hell. Who's in purgatory?

The fucking dwarves. That's what you get for being an atheist. You just get to go to purgatory, I guess, because you also, like, the dwarves murdering the talking horses was pretty fucking dark. Yeah, they just kill all the horses. Okay, fine, you don't, you want dwarves for the dwarves.

You want to go off and do your own thing. Why are you, just let these two armies do their battle. Like, go away. You don't need to participate anymore. Which is really how I feel about, like, r slash atheism on Reddit. You just don't need to participate. You can just let them be. Just let them duke it out and go live underground.

Tolkien for saw Reddit atheism. Or not Tolkien, C.S. Lewis. C.S. Lewis for saw Reddit atheism and it made the dwarves. Can't fool me. It's satisfying to know that there were Reddit atheists in 1956. For him too that that in 1956 there were people who were just as annoying about it well i will i will say to both sides this issue there was just the other day there was on twitter there was a viral video of like somebody animated what they

call like you know the process of evolution where land animals went like land mammals went back into the water like how you got whales and stuff from like land-based creatures like returning to the ocean and all because it's twitter now every reply under it was like a blue check reply of someone be of someone being like lmao look at this bullshit like all very anti-create like anti-evolution anti-science like blue checks being like fucking people believe that a dog evolved into a whale and like it was it was essentially you know the um i'll mention again you know the futurama episode about the missing link where the monkey the monkey professor keeps arguing like where's the link between this one and this one and farnsworth is like we found

it it's this one he's like okay well it's linked between this one and this one. So they keep inserting more links until you don't have a link. That's what those people were arguing on Twitter about like animals returning to the sea. They were like, well, we don't have fossils for all those animals in between. So that clearly didn't happen. And you're like, you are welcome to go

to get to go get in the ocean gate sub and go look for the fossils. Please get in the ocean gate sub and go look for the fossils. Please get in the ocean gate sub and go down there and look. Quickest and easiest way to die known to man. You know what? Be dead before

your synapses fire to tell you that anything has happened. More billionaires going into submarines, please okay any any final thoughts on the last battle pretty whack not what i would call a satisfying conclusion no i will say it's kind of a letdown for the end of the series i think the magician's nephew was more interesting just because of the weird ideas proposed um with like string theory and universes and charn and jadis it was more interesting the horse and his boy was way more interesting uh and then this

just sort of is there i do want to point out the fact that on the scholastic cover it's not easy enough to see, but they do give you the unicorn's dick. They also give you the unicorn with blood on its horn. Oh shit. It's even smaller on my copy. Yeah, smaller dick.

But it is absolutely there, balls and all. It is there. Balls up. It's very important. They have to know, Jule is a dude. Well, yeah, that way, you know, the conservative Christian readership

doesn't get the wrong idea about King Tyrion's relationship with that unicorn. Oh, man. The strongly implied relationship that he has with that unicorn. That is an unfortunate, like, just the way he portrays it is just not good. I don't like it. Like you said, it's like the Sam and Frodo thing, but taken to another level. Not a fan.

He tells him to kiss him. He says it explicitly in the text. I think we're going to go out on that message that he explicitly tells the unicorn to kiss him. And he gets to go to heaven. So, what's that say, C.S. Lewis? Checkmate.

Checkmate dwarves. Checkmate dwarves. Well, I'll tell our listeners that if you made it through all four parts of the series congratulations and thank you you are wonderful we love you if you like what we do here we do have a patreon you

can subscribe to where we do one to two episodes a month about non book stuff we just talked about fallout new vegas we've talked about music we talked about fallout new vegas we've talked about music we talked about uh other stuff um you know this is the one time i'll ask you to do the pod if you made it through all this you are dedicated and this is the one time we'll say do you like the the podcast rating thing where you like go onto your app and say that we're cool that'd be nice um if you want to get in touch with

us our social media is in the description. I want to say a special thank you to Trevor for joining us. As we said before, Trevor is the host of the History of Persia podcast. The link to that will be in the description of the episode. Thank you for joining us, Trevor. You are welcome. I request this. And if you want to learn more, yeah, he specifically requested to be here for this.

And if you want to learn more about Zervon and Zoroastrianism, there's lots of episodes about that throughout time in his podcast feed. Alex, thank Alex and Abstentia for joining us. Alex is one of the owners of Sapphic Suites and Reads. It's a bookstore. You can order stuff from online. I'll have the links for that in the description as well. Thank you all for listening. And we'll be back to you next time with God knows what.

We haven't even talked about it yet. So I have no idea what's coming next. We'll figure that out soon. Thanks a lot. Goodbye. Bye. Bro. Are you fucking real, man? Come on.