Through the Wardrobe

by Herbie Brennan

  Lewis succeeds better in other books, such as The Horse and His Boy. In that book, the characters are (quite sensibly) fleeing a horrible fate. The adventure is center stage, and so we journey along with them, absorbing themes and morals in a more effective way: through the story rather than instead of the story.

  Of course the book where Lewis succeeds most brilliantly is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. In it, the characters explore, escape, befriend, betray, fight, and win in accordance with their personalities, rather than to fit a plot contrivance or a particular message. This book is the most famous and beloved novel of the series. It’s also the one that focuses the most on the story. Coincidence? Methinks not. Lewis is at his most powerful (and memorable) when he delivers story first and message second.

  Sure, It’s a Nice Garden, But Does It Have Tomatoes?

  The Magician’s Nephew is another example of a story with a subtle-as-a-sledgehammer allegory that isn’t overwhelmed by its allegory. The Magician’s Nephew clearly references Genesis. It’s a creation story. Aslan sings the world into existence in a very “let there be light” sort of way. There’s even a temptation-in-the-garden scene that goes as far as to have the Witch use the word “knowledge” as she tempts Digory with an apple: “If you do not stop and listen to me now, you will miss some knowledge that would have made you happy all your life.” It also has its own Adam and Eve in the form of the cabby and his wife. (In case you missed this reference in The Magician’s Nephew, Lewis describes them in The Last Battle in this way: “These two were King Frank and Queen Helen from whom all the most ancient Kings of Narnia and Archenland are descended. And Tirian felt as you would feel if you were brought before Adam and Eve in all their glory.” Not exactly subtle.)

  But this highly unsubtle novel also has elements that are purely Narnian. For example, it includes the origin of the lamppost. The Witch throws a metal bar at Aslan as he creates the world of Narnia. When the bar lands, it begins to grow like everything else affected by Aslan’s magic. It sprouts into a lamppost. To the best of my knowledge, there’s no religious allegory involved here. This scene merely explains why there’s only one lamppost and why it isn’t near any house or road. It’s details like this that allow the novel to transcend the underlying allegory.

  Even the temptation scene mentioned above has its own Narnian flair and doesn’t require Bible knowledge to understand. The White Witch offers Digory an apple, which she says will cure his dying mother. But Aslan has instructed Digory to bring the apple back to him, so Digory has to make a terrible, gut-wrenching choice. Frankly, I doubt that I’d have the strength to make the same choice, but Digory (unlike me and unlike the biblical Adam) chooses to take the apple to Aslan rather than using it. As a reward, he is given another apple to cure his mother, and the core of that apple grows into the tree that later becomes the magic wardrobe.

  Oh, the magic wardrobe! That wonderful, fabulous wardrobe! This is one of the enduring images of Narnia and is undoubtedly responsible for the continued existence of this type of (very large and heavy) furniture. Who doesn’t want to step into a wardrobe and through to Narnia? As with the wardrobe and the lamppost, the creation story in The Magician’s Nephew is specifically a Narnian creation story. Though it was inspired by Genesis, it stands on its own. And it works as its own story because it is internally logical—and because all the Narnian details are cool.

  I Want a Talking Horse

  All the Narnian details are cool. The Talking Beasts, for instance, fulfill a favorite fantasy of thousands of readers. Okay, maybe just mine, but haven’t you ever wondered what an animal would say if it could talk? What would your dog say? (“Food, food, FOOD!”) Or the gorilla in the zoo? (“I think, therefore I am.”) Or the neighbor’s cat? (“Psst, my mistress wears purple underpants.”) In the Narnia books, C. S. Lewis gives us a whole country of Talking Animals to daydream about—and also to care about. Even though we may never have met a Talking Deer (outside of Bambi), we immediately understand the horror in The Silver Chair that the Marsh-wiggle Puddleglum feels when he realizes he’s been eating a Talking Stag. He “was sick and faint, and felt as you would feel if you found you had eaten a baby.” I think that’s the most memorable (and nightmarish) scene in that entire book, and the fact that it succeeds as being so horrifying shows how compelling the fantasy of Talking Animals is.

  As far as I know, the Talking Animals don’t have anything to do with any religious allegory. Like the lamppost, they are a purely Narnian element. And they are part of what makes these books special.

  Personally, I believe that any story can be improved by the addition of a talking animal or two, and I’m not the only writer who thinks this. Thousands of magical creatures walk through hundreds of fantasy books, courtesy of writers who were inspired by the Chronicles of Narnia. Yes, I know there were plenty of talking animals and magical creatures in stories before Lewis’s books, but for many of us, Lewis was the one who first brought talking trees and Fauns to life for us and (more importantly) made us care about them.

  Seriously, who doesn’t want to hang out with Lewis’s Talking Animals? After a long, tiring day, it would be so nice to have Mrs. Beaver clucking over you and fixing you a spot of tea and a hot marmalade roll. And who doesn’t want to ride a Talking Horse? I know I desperately wanted a Talking Horse when I was younger. (I didn’t want a real horse, of course. I was petrified of riding. To be fair, I was petrified of anything that looked like it could result in a broken neck. You might say “wimp”; I prefer “healthy survival instinct.”) Anyway, a Talking Horse is entirely different from a real horse. I thrilled to the escape of Shasta and Aravis on the backs of the Talking Horses Bree and Hwin in The Horse and His Boy. I imagined myself galloping across fields and farms on Bree’s back while he told me tales of Narnia and the North. . . .

  There’s a lot to love in these books, and a lot of it (like the Talking Beasts) is utterly independent of religious allegory. In fact, I bet if you ask a hundred kids what they think of when you say the word “Narnia,” you won’t find one kid who says, “Ooh, those religious themes!” But you will find kids who mention Faun Tumnus, the White Witch on her sledge, the lamppost, the wardrobe, Reepicheep, the Gentle Giants, the Beavers, Aslan. . . . The symbolism and religious message in these books is important and valuable, of course, but grasping it isn’t a prerequisite to valuing the books.

  The Point

  And that’s why it’s okay that I missed the “point.” There’s so much else in this series to get. It’s a smorgasbord of meaningful moments and memorable characters, thrilling adventures and captivating places. It’s okay to miss the point because, regardless of any allegory or any meaning that we as readers impose from the outside, at its heart, the Chronicles of Narnia is a wonderful story. And this is, perhaps, the most important point of all.

  As Lewis says in The Horse and His Boy, “For in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you’re taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.” Um . . . well . . . yeah . . . what I mean is . . . oh, crap.

  Sarah Beth Durst is the author of Enchanted Ivy and Ice from Simon & Schuster and Into the Wild and Out of the Wild from Penguin Young Readers, fantasy adventures that include neither wardrobes nor lampposts but are chock-full of magic polar bears, witches, princes, and were-tigers. She began writing fantasy stories at age ten after many failed attempts to find magical kingdoms inside her closet. She holds an English degree from Princeton University and currently lives in Stony Brook, NY, with her husband, her children, and her ill-mannered cat. She also has a pet griffin named Alfred. (Okay, okay, that’s not quite true. His name is really Montgomery.) For more about Sarah, visit her online at www.sarahbethdurst.com.

  Could it be true? Could the magic be real? Does evil stalk our world in much the same way it stalks the worlds of fiction? Have men and w
omen lived through a real-life war of Light and Darkness? I’ve delved into some of history’s gloomiest corners to show that C. S. Lewis may have themed his work on a magical conflict he actually experienced.

  The War of Light and Darkness

  HERBIE BRENNAN

  The Chronicles of Narnia is a seven-book tale of good versus evil—the age-old war of Light and Darkness. It’s a story you’ll also find in the Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter series, and many other fantasy novels—a heady brew of myth and magic, brave heroes, dark villains, mystic artifacts, and occult powers.

  But that’s all just fiction—right? You’d never get black magicians, mystic artifacts, and occult powers in the real world, would you?

  Well . . .

  The author of the Narnia chronicles, Clive Staples Lewis, fought in the First World War. He joined the British Army in 1917, and was commissioned an officer in the third Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry. He fought at the Somme and was subsequently wounded during the Battle of Arras.

  He was forty years old when the Second World War broke out, a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. Just four years after the war ended, he began writing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first of his Narnia Chronicles. Was the book inspired, at least in part, by the war he’d just lived through?

  Before we tackle that important question, we need to ask another: could World War II be reasonably described as a War of Light and Darkness?

  Conventional historians dismiss the notion. They see it as a conflict arising out of political, social, and economic issues. Your school history books will typically lay emphasis on the Treaty of Versailles (which ended World War I with humiliating terms for Germany), on the doctrine of lebensraum (living space) which fuelled Hitler’s expansionist policies, on secret Nazi rearmament, on the Allied policy of appeasement that encouraged Nazi ambitions.

  But while all these factors were unquestionably relevant, there were deeper, darker forces at play, still largely unsuspected more than sixty years later, yet perhaps sensed by the finely tuned instincts of an author who lived at the time. Let’s examine the evidence for those forces now.

  In October 1907, an eighteen-year-old Austrian schoolboy applied for admission to the Viennese Academy of Art and was turned down because his test drawings were poor. Instead of returning to his home at Linz, he stayed in Vienna. Even after his money ran out in 1907, he hung on, living like a tramp, for six more years.

  The boy was Adolf Hitler. Your history books won’t mention it, but during that period he became a black magician.

  According to Dr. Walter Johannes Stein, who was confidential adviser to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill during WWII, Hitler developed an interest in Medieval magic and made a profound study of Oriental mysticism, astrology, yoga, and hypnosis. One of the places where he followed these interests (claims the U.K. historian Trevor Ravenscroft) was the secondhand bookshop of a man named Ernst Pretzsche.

  Pretzsche was a baddie to match the worst villains of Narnia—a fat, sinister, toad-like hunchback with warts. He had something of a reputation for encouraging students along the troubled road of occult practice. When he saw the sort of books Hitler looked at, he took an interest at once. Before long, Pretzsche had become the young man’s teacher of the dark arts.

  As a sorcerer’s apprentice, Hitler quietly abandoned any leanings he might have had toward mysticism and yoga and turned instead to what’s called the Western Esoteric tradition, a body of magical lore passed down the centuries by European wizards. He embarked on a daily routine of graded meditations and visualization exercises based on secret symbolism Pretzsche claimed to have discovered in the Grail Cycle—the ancient body of stories told in Medieval times about King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.

  The training took years and may well have been the thing that kept Hitler in Vienna long after any sensible young man would have gone home. But the day eventually came when Pretzsche told Hitler he was ready for initiation into the deeper mysteries of magic. And at this point their relationship took a distinctly sinister turn.

  Pretzsche’s father was a botanical chemist who had spent much of his career in Mexico studying the peyote cactus. Pretzsche himself lived for many years in South America and, upon his father’s death, brought back specimens of the cactus to Europe, where it was completely unknown at the time. He still had these specimens when he met up with Hitler.

  Peyote is a hallucinogenic plant that, today, is seen as part of the world’s “recreational” drug problem. Pretzsche used it for a very different purpose. During a ritual ceremony of initiation, he fed it to Hitler as a religious sacrament. To an unsuspecting youth from a culture that knew nothing whatsoever about psychedelic drugs, the effect must have been devastating, whirling him out of ordinary consciousness into a vision of his destiny that would later plunge the whole world into war.

  The experience changed Hitler profoundly. August Kubizek, a young man who occasionally shared rooms with him, remarked, “I was struck by something strange which I had never noticed before . . . it was as if another being spoke out of his body and moved him as much as it did me.”

  Hitler left Vienna in 1913. When WWI broke out the following year, he enlisted in the First Company of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. A fellow volunteer was Rudolf Hess, a young German with occult contacts about whom we’ll hear a little later.

  Hitler acted as a motorcycle courier throughout most of the war, and was twice wounded and once decorated for bravery. Shortly after the conflict ended he met up with Dietrich Eckart, a central figure in the Thule-Gesellschaft, one of Germany’s most powerful secret societies.

  Thule-Gesellschaft was a society with some very weird practices. Members involved themselves in ritualistic séances—special meetings, the purpose of which is to make contact with the dead—using a Russian peasant woman as a spirit medium. Past members of the Thule Group, returning from beyond the grave, were called up during these nightmarish rituals and delivered messages through the medium. One such spirit was the Comtesse von Westarp, a former secretary of the Group who had been murdered by the Communists. Her ghost announced the coming of a new Messiah, a leader preparing to take charge of the Thule, and, indeed, the whole German nation.

  Dietrich Eckart searched diligently for the new Messiah and soon decided he had found him in Adolf Hitler. The willing pupil was swiftly initiated, taught the secret doctrines of humanity’s ancient history, and instructed in the techniques of modern sorcery.

  With his mystical background, his training at the hands of Pretzsche, his drug-induced contact with spirit worlds, and his steely conviction of his personal destiny, Hitler proved an apt choice. Before long, the Thule Group was searching for a political front that would enable them to seize power over the entire nation. They found it in the German Workers’ Party, a tiny right-wing group Hitler had investigated in his post-war work with the German government in 1919.

  Toward the end of the First World War, Hitler fell victim to a British gas attack in France. Temporarily blinded and in a state of collapse, he was removed to a hospital where he eventually learned of the German surrender on November 11, 1918.

  After his discharge from hospital, he remained in the army for a short time, drawing army rations and wearing an army uniform. He volunteered for guard duty at a prisoner-of-war camp, but by the end of January 1919 the camp was closed. He returned to Munich and drifted into a job as Instruction Officer with the army’s Seventh District Command. It was as much a political as military post—he was required to indoctrinate the troops against socialist, pacifist, and democratic ideas.

  Part of his job was to investigate some of the small political parties that were mushrooming in Germany at the time, largely with a view toward finding out which of them was Communist inspired. One that caught his attention was the suspiciously named German Workers’ Party.

  The Party was not, however, Communist or otherwise leftist in its views. If anything, it stood as far right a
s Hitler himself. It was tiny and poor (at the time of Hitler’s investigation, the treasury stood at less than eight marks), but it exercised sufficient fascination for him to join within weeks.

  With Thule Group backing, the German Workers’ Party grew dramatically. By 1920 it had changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—or, as it is better known today, the Nazi Party. By 1921, Hitler was its undisputed leader.

  In November 1923, as head of a private army of several thousand storm troopers, Hitler attempted to take over the government of Germany by force—his famous but completely unsuccessful Kapp Putsch. The fiasco might well have ended National Socialism for good, except that Hitler used his remarkable powers of oratory to turn his subsequent treason trial into a propaganda victory of international proportions. He constantly harped on the idea that only strong leadership by someone like himself could solve Germany’s current economic and political problems. As a result, he received no more than a short jail sentence and won the support of large numbers of his fellow countrymen.

  Ominously, the Thule Group’s Dietrich Eckart remarked on his deathbed just one month later, “Follow Hitler. He will dance, but it is I who have called the tune. I have initiated him into the secret doctrine, opened his centres of vision and given him the means to communicate with the Powers. Do not mourn for me: I shall have influenced history more than any other German.”

  Hitler emerged from jail in 1925 to find his National Socialist Party in such a mess that he practically had to rebuild it. From 1926 onward, it showed a small, steady growth, slowed by laws that put severe limits on its activities. Then, toward the end of 1930, an economic storm broke over Germany. Unemployment skyrocketed and social structures began to crumble. The development was to prove good news for Hitler. Frightened people swarmed to his cause. Soon he began to attract a type of mass following he had never achieved before.