III

Chapters 3-5:

Of Divine Mysteries and Sacrifice

PLOT SUMMARY: Redival, neglected by the threesome of Orual, Psyche, and the Fox, turns for companionship to Tarin, a young soldier.  Discovered together at night, Tarin is castrated and Redival put under the eyes of the Fox and Orual.  The golden days of Orual’s life are spoiled by Redival’s presence and by Orual’s fear that the gods will become jealous over people’s attention to Psyche’s beauty.  The Tarin incident is followed by bad harvests, a rebellion, and the plague—even the Fox takes ill, but Psyche nurses him back to health and gains the reputation of a miracle worker.  The people force Psyche to come out to touch those who have the fever, though it nearly costs her her life.  The fever is followed by drought and famine, and public opinion shifts from praising Psyche as goddess to calling her “the Accursed.”  The Priest comes to the palace to tell the King that Ungit must be appeased through the Great Offering, in which a perfect victim is sacrificed to the gods and becomes the husband of Ungit or the bride of Ungit’s son.  Told that the lot fell on the royal family, the King grows angry and threatens the Priest—who doesn’t so much as flinch—until he learns that subsequent lots fell, not on him, but on Psyche.  When Orual protests and begs the King to save Psyche, the King gives vent to his fear and relief by beating her savagely and accepts the Priest’s words as what must be.

In these chapters Lewis takes us back to the rites and thought forms of an ancient and pagan society, asking us thus to broaden our range of human experience and begin, at least, to question naturalistic assumptions taken for granted in the twentieth century.

          The first such question, carried over from the end of the previous chapter, involves the existence and nature of the gods:  is it characteristic of the [< p. 19] gods to be jealous?  At the end of Chapter 2, Orual is filled with fear when the Fox calls Psyche prettier than Andromeda, Helen, and Venus Aphrodite:  he reassures her that “the divine nature is not like that.  It has no envy” (p. 24).  In Chapter 3, Orual is similarly frightened when she hears that many times Psyche has been worshipped as if she were a goddess. “Oh, it’s dangerous, dangerous,” Orual responds; “The gods are jealous. They can’t bear—” (p. 28).

          Lewis introduces here a central issue of the story, the problem of how Ungit on the one hand and her son on the other can be expressions of the same divine nature.  Until that can be understood, Orual will remain, necessarily, an enemy of the gods.  To the Fox, divine nature could not be jealous, because, as Stoic “Reason” or “Fate,” it is not personal.  But both of the main traditions which bear upon this work suggest the contrary.  In the Apuleian myth, Venus’s jealousy of Psyche’s beauty supplies the central conflict of the plot, and this suggests one level of thematic interpretation of the myth for Lewis: Ungit is the Glomian equivalent of Venus, the Greek goddess of love.¹  Thus Orual’s words, “The gods are jealous,” characterize not just the goddess but also eros, or natural love: such love itself is, or tends to be, jealous and dangerous.

          Her words also introduce a parallel to the Old Testament injunction against worshipping other gods:  “You shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God” (Exodus 20:50).  Jahweh is jealous in that he claims for himself the total allegiance and devotion of his people and warns them of consequences if they do not follow his injunction.  For a proper understanding of the Old Testament it is crucial to recognize that the jealousy of God is inseparable from the love of God.  As Gerhard von Rad puts it, “In this commandment declaring the zeal of Jahweh Israel was told two things:  Jahweh’s turning towards her—of this Hosea speaks in terms of the passion of a lover—but at the same time his threat, in case she should only yield to him with a divided heart.”²  The revelation of God’s love without the revelation of his jealousy would not [< p.20] make clear the proper and necessary relation of his people to him.  That in God which inspires fear and trembling, Rudolf Otto writes, “sets free as its accompaniment . . . the feeling of personal nothingness and abasement before the awe-inspiring object directly experienced.”³

       Till We Have Faces is purportedly written for Greeks, that is, for rationalists, for people who, like the Fox, think of the gods—if at all—in terms of reason and benevolence rather than of sacrifice and fear.  Lewis had made the point previously in The Problem of Pain:

A major purpose of Till We have Faces is to convey a fuller, more adequate awareness of the divine nature than that of the rationalists, which “will not produce that fear of the Lord in which wisdom begins, and therefore, will not produce that love in which it is consummated.”⁵

                Ungit, too is a “numinous” god, not a god of the rationalists.  There is about her a sense of “the holy” which creates fear in the young Orual (p. 11) and later gives rise to “the horror of holiness” (p. 54).  And Ungit, like Jahweh, is jealous: as Lewis makes clear in That Hideous Strength, the ancient conception of Venus was not as a warm, sentimental, indulgent goddess, but as a powerful and dangerous force to those who crossed her.  The tension between mother and son is similar to the dynamic in Christianity between a God of wrath and a God of love; a dynamic Lewis elsewhere dramatizes in Aslan, who is “good and terrible at the same time.”⁶  One key theme of the story, then, is the need for Orual to find beauty in both Ungit and her son--to move from fear to awe to appreciation to love--and it is vital to realize that for much of her life she finds beauty in neither.

          Important as divine jealousy is in Till We Have Faces, Orual’s very raising of the issue is of nearly equal interest [< p. 21] at this point in the story.  The Fox asserts that the divine nature has no jealousy--whether it has or not, human nature certainly does.  We are invited, I think, to ask if Orual’s fears are in part a projection (perhaps unconscious) of her own feelings.  Orual has shown several evidences of a protective and possessive attitude toward Psyche.  As others notice Psyche, praise her, do obeisance to her, Orual may even at this point be protesting against sharing Psyche with others, against Psyche’s obtaining from others the assistance Orual wants to come only from herself. 

           In Apuleius’s myth Psyche’s exposure on the mountain is not a direct result of Venus’s jealousy.  Venus is indeed jealous of Psyche’s beauty; but the exposure comes as a result of the oracle’s directive, either to assist the working out of fate which has determined that Cupid and Psyche will meet, or at Cupid’s instigation.  Lewis accepts Venus’s jealousy as a given part of the myth and incorporates it into his plot by making it a basic and adequate motivation for Psyche’s being sacrificed on the mountain: she was the Accursed because her beauty made her, unintentionally, a rival to Venus. 

          But Lewis also draws on ideas of the pagan world-view he was depicting to add a secondary motivation by raising questions about the relationship between the spiritual world and the material world as reflected in events which follow the castration of Tarin.  Later that year is “the first of the bad harvests” (p. 26).  In a pagan world one might ask if this is only coincidence, or if there is a connection between the two.  Might the land be responding to the physical desexing inflicted, perhaps unjustly, on the young man?  In the next case there clearly is a connection: “The year after that we had rebellion. It came of my father’s gelding Tarin” (p. 29). The King must wage war against Tarin’s father and his allies, a war which the King wins, but at the cost of weakening the monarchy.

          To the modern mind, the connection is political, not spiritual, but the ancient mind would not make such arbitrary divisions: in the King, after all, runs the blood of the gods. “That year was the second bad harvest and the beginning of the fever” (p. 29), followed by a drought and famine: “The Shennit was now no more [< p. 22] than a trickle between one puddle and another amid dry mud-flats; it was the corpse of a river and stank. Her fish were dead, her birds dead or gone away. The cattle had all died or been killed or were not worth the killing” (p. 40). The question raised by all this, then, is whether there is in nature a responsiveness which extends beyond the Fox’s notions of a web of wholly naturalistic causes. Lewis, I think, does not desire to affirm the existence of such a natural sympathy—but I suspect he is very willing to shake our confidence that it could not exist.

          These mysteries take on a further dimensions as well, a religious one. For the Priest assumes that there is a specifically sympathetic relation between occurrences: “All the woes that have come upon us,” he says, are because “the land is impure.” Ungit’s anger, he continues, “never comes upon us without cause, and it never ceases without expiation.” There will be “no mending of all our ills till the land is purged” (pp. 45-46). Thus one explanation for the natural disasters is Ungit’s jealousy: “I hear of terrible doings in this land, mortals aping the gods and stealing the worship due to the gods” (p. 47). On this view, the guilty party must be found and must pay the penalty. This, in a strict view, is not sacrifice: it is justice.

          But as the Priest goes on, he moves easily, if inconsistently, from purgation to appeasement, from “expiation” by the ferreting out and elimination of the “Accursed” to the “offering” of something set apart for the gods to win their favor. As he describes the nature of the Great Offering, he is clearly discussing not justice, but sacrifice: “In the Great Offering, the victim must be perfect. For, in holy language, a man so offered is said to be Ungit’s husband, and a woman is said to be the bride of Ungit’s son.…That is why you are so wide of the mark, King, when you think a thief, or an old worn-out slave, or a coward taken in battle, would do for the Great Offering. The best in the land is not too good for this office” (p. 49).  

          The Latin roots of sacrifice convey the meaning “make sacred”: one offers a thing to the gods, sets it apart or consecrates it to them, in order to win or regain their favor or good will. To peoples who regard property as [< p. 23] an extension of their persons (and we have barely emerged from that stage ourselves: witness the use of capital punishment for theft, on that grounds, as late as the nineteenth century in Europe), to offer an animal to a god was literally to offer a part of themselves: our donation, even “sacrificially,” of money, a thing clearly external to, separate from, ourselves, is not even a pale shadow of what sacrifice was to an ancient people. This is precisely the way the King interprets the act in Till We Have Faces: “It’s I who should be pitied,” he protests. “It’s I who am asked to give up part of myself” (p. 61). For, of course, in an ancient society, children—and women generally—were regarded as possessions of their fathers or husbands: “No one seems to remember whose girls she is. She’s mine; fruit of my own body. My loss” (p. 60). In that sense the Great Offering could be seen as required by the King’s gelding of Tarin, which caused the drought and famine. Ungit, a fertility goddess, was offended by an act which prevents the conception of life, and the King must make reparation to her to regain her favor.

          To the extent that impurity in the land has been caused by the King’s actions, his death could achieve purgation, but his death could not be a sacrifice. For, as the Priest insists, in the Great Offering, the victim, who becomes the husband or bride of the god (p. 49), “must be perfect,” and the King is not perfect, not suitable as reparation. Expiation and offering could be achieved simultaneously, however, if a perfect part of the guilty party were to be offered on the guilty party’s behalf. And this, of course, is the essence of sacrifice: the setting apart, consecrating to the gods, of something perfect, in the place of the imperfect thing which deserves to die, as the reparation which can restore the favor of and proper relationship with the gods.

          There is nothing reasonable about all this—why should a part, logically, be accepted for the whole? Thus the Fox finds it incomprehensible and repulsive (pp. 7-8), even apart from the emotional outburst prompted by his fears for Psyche:  “A moment ago the victim of this abominable sacrifice was to be the Accursed, the wickedest person in the whole land, offered as a punishment. And now it is to be the best [< p. 24] person in the whole land—the perfect victim—married to the god as a reward. . . . It can’t be both” (pp. 49-50). The Priest’s answer sets up a central theme of the rest of the book: “We are hearing much Greek wisdom this morning.… it is very subtle. But it brings no rain and grows no corn; sacrifice does both . . .” (p. 50).

          The mystery implicit in this part of the Priest’s reply reaches deep: at every level of being—the natural, the human, and the spiritual—life arises from death, and without death—sacrificial death—there can be no life. The Priest continues,

The answer lies in the nature of sacrifice: the victim of the Great Offering will be both the worst and the best—the best, because of Psyche’s goodness and beauty, and the worst, since Psyche not only represents the King but also has provoked the jealousy of Ungit.

          That the victim can be both, that such substitution can be effected, that life and strength can come from such a death, are mysteries, divine paradoxes, contrary to Stoic (and modern) reason. That the Fox cannot accept such paradoxes is part of the book’s central, crucial contrast between him and the Priest:

Later in the book (pp. 144 and 147), the Fox is compared to Oedipus, who used his intelligence to solve the riddle of the Sphinx and thus saved the city of Thebes. If the Fox is like [< p. 25] Oedipus, able to answer riddles (p.144), the blind Priest must be like the blind prophet Tiresias, and his confrontation with the Fox closely parallels the key juxtaposition in Sophocles’ play. When Tiresias tells Oedipus that he, Oedipus, is the cause of the plague which is now afflicting the city, Oedipus rejects the idea and ridicules the prophet because he cannot see. Tiresias responds: “And I tell thee—since thou hast taunted me even with blindness—that thou hast sight, yet seest not in what misery thou art, nor where thou dwellest, nor with whom.”⁷

          Tiresias is blind physically, but he has spiritual sight:  he sees the truth, knows divine wisdom.  Oedipus, for all his human knowledge and physical sight, is blind to wisdom and the truth.  So it is, Lewis is suggesting, with the Priest and the Fox.  The divine paradox of sacrifice is repugnant to the human understanding.  But a central theme of the book is that such understanding must “die,” must be “sacrificed,” must be transformed, so that it can see past the clearness of knowledge into the dark recesses where wisdom lies, and thus truly see and truly understand.[< p. 26]