Orual has finally found Psyche, but their meeting doesn’t go as expected, as it turns out they experience life on the Mountain very differently.
S3E8: “Psyche’s Palace” (Download)
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Time Stamps
00:55 – Drink-of-the-week
01:29 – Quote-of-the-week
02:24 – Chit-Chat
10:40 – Chapter 10 Summary
33:15 – Chapter 11 Summary
49:10 – Closing remarks
YouTube Version
After Show Skype Session
This Season, after each episode, Matt and I will be recording a ten-minute Skype conversation:
Show Notes
• Matt’s nickname was “The Flying Dutchman”
• Matt shared the quote-of-the-week:
…the world had broken in pieces and Psyche and I were not in the same piece. Seas, mountains, madness, death itself, could not have removed her from me to such a hopeless distance as this. Gods, and again gods, always gods…they had stolen her.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 11)
• Matt did not see Little Women.
• Christopher Tolkien this week.
• We had our first San Diego Bookclub where we were discussing Till We Have Faces. I shared some of the comments people in the group had made, which included a reference to this passage from Hosea:
For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God, rather than burnt offerings.
Hosea 6:6
There was also a reference to the incident with St. Paul on Mars Hill:
So Paul, standing in the middle of the Are-op′agus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along, and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.\
Acts 17:22-23
• We had a really insightful message from Scott, a listener:
Hi guys, I’ve just begun listening to your podcast and am enjoying catching up with your experience and analysis of Till We Have Faces. This is one of my all time favorite books, and one that has had a profound impact on my life. I wanted to comment on one aspect of the book that I think you guys are missing a bit, and that is the treatment of pagan faith in the book. You guys have tended to be a bit perplexed by how extreme the cult of Ungit seems, like in the “creepy” wooden masks her attendants wear. I believe that “creepiness” is actually how Lewis is communicating the holiness and “otherness” and how far beyond man the gods are, and he is following this trail from a basic understanding that paganism isn’t anti-Christian, but is preChrisitian. I can’t remember if it was God in the Dock or The Abolition of Man where he discussed how much of improvement it would be in our society if they sacrificed a bull to open parliament. I think that that Lewis’ depiction of Ungit’s cult is along those line.
Scott Cunningham, Listener of the show
I went and looked up the passage in Lewis where he wrote about sacrificing a bull at the opening of Parliament:
… When grave persons express their fear that England is relapsing into Paganism, I am tempted to reply, ‘Would that she were.’ For I do not think it at all likely that we shall ever see Parliament opened by the slaughtering of a garlanded white bull in the House of Lords, or Cabinet Ministers leaving sandwiches in Hyde Park as an offering for the Dryads. If such a state of affairs came about, then the Christian apologist would have something to work on. For a Pagan, as history shows, is a man eminently convertible to Christianity. He is essentially the pre-Christian, or sub-Christian, religious man. The post-Christian man of our day differs from him as much as a divorcee differs from a virgin. The Christian and the Pagan have much more in common with one another than either has with the writers of the New Statesman; and those writers would of course agree with me.
C.S. Lewis, Is theology important (God in the Dock)
• I offer my summary of Chapter 10:
While Bardia is afraid, Orual is overjoyed to see Psyche, who invites her to cross the stream. Psyche once again is the one who comforts Orual, and gives her berries and water, which she describes as food “fit for the gods”. Psyche tells her story, of being painted and drugged, taken up the Mountain, chained to the tree, and lamented over by the King. When everyone leaves, she cries, and animals gather around her. At the moment when she has lost all hope, the wind changes, bringing the rain. She sees the West Wind himself, and he takes her to the hidden valley where unseen voices welcome her, “the bride of the god”, to her home. The voices bath and feed her, after which the god comes to her. Orual asks to see this palace…and is shocked to hear that they have been on its steps the entire time…
Summary for Chapter 10 from Till We Have Faces
• Bardia is afraid that Psyche is a ghost:
“Careful, Lady. It may be her wraith [ghost]. It may — ai! ai! — it is the bride of the god. It is a goddess.” He was deadly white, and bending down to throw earth on his forehead.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 10)
• Orual describes Psyche as “brightface”. Some kind of transformation has taken place:
You could not blame him. She was so brightface, as we say in Greek.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 10)
I compared this to Moses on Mount Sinai and Christ on the Mount of Transfiguration.
• Orual crosses the stream and I compared it to the River Styx from Greek mythology:
“…the coldness of that water shocked all the breath out of me; and the current was so strong that, but for Psyche’s hand, I think it would have knocked me down and rolled me under. I even thought, momentarily amid a thousand other things, “How strong she grows. She’ll be a stronger woman than ever I was. She’ll have that as well as her beauty.”
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 10)
It also reminded me of a very similar incident from The Great Divorce.
• We find out over the course of these chapters that the two sisters experience the events very differently.
• Psyche asks Orual the same question that Orual had heard in her heart as she ascended the mountain:
[Orual asked] “…what are we to do now?” [and Psyche replied] “Do? Why, be merry, what else? Why should our hearts not dance?”
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 10)
I suggested that you see a bit of a Mary-and-Martha dynamic between the two sisters. Psyche wants to rest in the joy, but Orual wants to make plans:
Solemn Orual,” said Psyche mockingly. “You were always one for plans….”
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 10)
I suggested that she’s probably a Type A personality!
• Psyche tells Orual her story, beginning with being drugged and painted:
…the painting on my face helped the dreaminess too. It made my face stiff till it didn’t seem to be my own face. I couldn’t feel it was I who was being sacrificed.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 10)
Psyche describes the experience as dream-like, but she is now awake and she will help Orual wake up too:
I saw you, Orual, at the top of the stairway, but I couldn’t lift even a hand to wave to you; my arms were as heavy as lead. And I thought it didn’t matter much, because you too would wake up presently and find it was all a dream. And in a sense it was, wasn’t it? And you are nearly awake now. What? still so grave? I must wake you more.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 10)
…
“It’s more likely everything that had happened to me before this was a dream. Why, Glome and the King and old Batta seem to me very like dreams now”
• Matt then paraphrased the following saying, which seems to be attributed to many different people:
“For those who understand, no explanation is needed. For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible.”
Ziad K. Abdelnour? Jerry Lewis? Aquinas? Augustine?
• When Psyche suggests that the priest might become a god when he’s wearing his mask:
Then a great bird-headed man, or a bird with a man’s body — ” “That would be the Priest,” said I. “Yes. If he is still the Priest when he puts on his mask; perhaps he becomes a god while he wears it.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 10)
Matt said that it made him think of Mere Christianity where Lewis references a story about a man who wore a mask and eventually his face became conformed to the shape of the mask. The C.S. Lewis Facebook Group I’m a part of recently helped Andrew Lazo discover that the story alluded to by Lewis was The Happy Hypocrite: A Fairy Tale for Tired Men.
I said that Psyche’s description was somewhat analogous to the Christian belief in the doctrine of In Persona Christi.
• Psyche says that when she was being sacrificed, something happened with the King:
“….shrieking and wailing and tearing his hair. And do you know, Maia, he actually looked at me, really looked, and it seemed to me he was then seeing me for the first time”
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 10)
The confirms what the Fox says about the King’s actions not being wholly feigned. It also made me wonder whether his comments about Psyche following the Sacrifice were really from the heart.
• I compared Psyche’s despair at the Holy Tree to Christ’s cry of lament on the cross:
“At first I was trying to cheer myself with all that old dream of my gold and amber palace on the Mountain . . . and the god . . . trying to believe it. But I couldn’t believe in it at all. I couldn’t understand how I ever had. All that, all my old longings, were clean gone.”
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 10)
Matt pointed out that when Jesus cries from the cross, he’s quoting Psalm 22 where the supplicant’s prayer is heard and the Lord’s servant is vindicated:
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Psalm 22: 1, 24
Why art thou so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?
…
For he has not despised or abhorred
the affliction of the afflicted;
and he has not hid his face from him,
but has heard, when he cried to him.
• Psyche says that there was something that she held onto during the dark time:
“The only thing that did me good,” she continued, “was quite different. It was hardly a thought, and very hard to put into words. There was a lot of the Fox’s philosophy in it — things he says about gods or ‘the divine nature’ — but mixed up with things the Priest said, too, about the blood and the earth and how sacrifice makes the crops grow. I’m not explaining it well. It seemed to come from somewhere deep inside me, deeper than the part that sees pictures of gold and amber palaces, deeper than fears and tears. It was shapeless, but you could just hold onto it; or just let it hold onto you
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 10)
I wasn’t sure to what she was referring, but Matt said that it’s something even deeper than her longing for palaces. Perhaps it was her longing for communion with the Divine?
But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him,”
1 Corinthians 2:9
• The wind and the rain come and Psyche is rescued by The West Wind himself, who is something like a man in the brief glimpse she gets of him. She says it was like comparing heathy people and lepers. This naturally reminded me again of The Great Divorce and the difference between those who come up from the grey town and those who come down from the heavenly mountain. I said it also reminded me of this section of Letters to Malcolm:
Our souls demand Purgatory, don’t they? Would it not break the heart if God said to us, “It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drip with mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you with these things, nor draw away from you. Enter into the joy.”? Should we not reply, “With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I’d rather be cleaned first.” “It may hurt, you know”–“Even so, sir.”
C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm (Letter 20)
Psyche describes his arms as “burning” but somehow they don’t hurt her, and this reminded me of the incident in The Great Divorce between the angel and the ghost with the lizard on his shoulder.
• Orual thinks that Psyche imagined her rescue by the god, but she asks her sister how, then, she escaped from the tree?
• Psyche says that the Palace was better than anything she imagined:
And it wasn’t, you see, just the gold and amber house I used to imagine. If it had been just that, I might indeed have thought I was dreaming. But I saw it wasn’t. And not quite like any house in this land, nor quite like those Greek houses the Fox describes to us. Something new, never conceived of
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 10)
She says that voices welcome her, which I said reminded me of Beauty and the Beast:
The voices bathe and feed Psyche, which seemed to me to have allusions of Baptism and Holy Communion.
• Orual still doubts Psyche and asks to see the Palace. When she asks if it is far, Psyche drops the bombshell that she’s right beside it:
“But this is it, Orual! It is here! You are standing on the stairs of the great gate.”
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 10)
Matt pointed out that Psyche had the opportunity to reject her experience and she also was afraid that she was being mocked. However, unlike her sister, Psyche continues to trust. Matt quoted something which I said on one our our videos, that faith is holding on in the darkness to what you’ve seen in the light:
• I shared my summary of Chapter 11:
After an awkward silence, Psyche and Orual begin to argue. It becomes clear that the two sisters have been experiencing very different realities. What Psyche gave as wine and honey cakes, Orual received as berries and water. Psyche remembers that her husband said that Orual may not be able to see things clearly. She says that she will beg for his help, but Orual is enraged. It begins to rain. When Orual offers Psyche her cloak, she reminds her that they are indoors. Orual sees this moment as a decision-point, and she rejects what Psyche is saying, thinking she is mad. She tries to force her sister to leave, but Psyche is too strong. As sunset approaches, Orual returns to the other side of the stream, but is bidden to return again soon.
Summary for Chapter 11 from Till We Have Faces
• I commented that the previous chapter ended with the two sisters sitting close to each other, holding hands and this one begins with them standing with space between them, symbolic of their growing divide.
• Orual reveals that she doesn’t want Psyche’s story to be true:
…my whole heart leaped to shut the door against something monstrously amiss — not to be endured. And to keep it shut… “We must go away at once. This is a terrible place.”
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 11)
• Orual tries to manhandle Psyche, but fails as she is too strong. I again compared this to The Great Divorce, as well as Prince Caspian where the children regain their strength from breathing Narnian air.
• The sisters argue over the food and drink which Psyche gave to Orual. To Psyche it was honey cakes and red wine in a cup, but to Orual it was berries and water in Psyche’s own hands. Something very similar happens at the of The Last Battle with the dwarfs. I didn’t want to say anything more as Matt hasn’t read it yet!
• This incident with Psyche gives Orual nightmares for years to come:
Years after, I dreamed, again and again, that I was in some well-known place…and everything I saw was different from what I touched. I would lay my hand on the table and feel warm hair instead of smooth wood, and the corner of the table would shoot out a hot, wet tongue and lick me. And I knew, by the mere taste of them that all those dreams came from that moment when I believed I was looking at Psyche’s palace and did not see it. For the horror was the same: a sickening discord, a rasping together of two worlds, like the two bits of a broken bone.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 11)
Both Matt and I thought of Spider-Man: Far From Home where Mysterio makes Peter see things which aren’t there:
I suggested that a similar experience might be when you’re walking around in the dark in an unfamiliar house.
• The divide between her and her sister is Orual’s chief complaint against the gods:
…the world had broken in pieces and Psyche and I were not in the same piece. Seas, mountains, madness, death itself, could not have removed her from me to such a hopeless distance as this. Gods, and again gods, always gods . . . they had stolen her.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 11)
• Orual briefly considers that Psyche is worthy of the gods, but she doesn’t care because she doesn’t want to share her (much like the Mother from The Great Divorce):
Was she not worthy of the gods? Ought they not to have her?
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 11)
• Psyche’s constant reference to her husband irritates Orual:
…she was saying he every moment, no other name but he, the way young wives talk
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 11)
She demands proof:
“Where is this god? Where the palace is? Nowhere — in your fancy. Where is he? Show him to me? What is he like?”
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 11)
• When Psyche affirms that she has never lied to Orual (which should probably put us in mind of Lewis’ Trilemma, as well as the conversation with the Professor about Lucy), she responds:
“No, you don’t mean to lie. You’re not in your right mind, Psyche. You have imagined things. It’s the terror and the loneliness . . . and that drug they gave you. We’ll cure you.”
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 11)
Psyche asks Orual to explain how she has survived thus far:
“If it’s all my fancy, how do you think I have lived these many days? Do I look as if I’d fed on berries and slept under the sky? Are my arms wasted? Or my cheeks fallen in?”
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 11)
• Orual hates what’s happening and feels the distance growing between her and her sister:
“I don’t want it!” I cried, putting my face close to hers, threatening her almost, till she drew back before my fierceness. “I don’t want it. I hate it. Hate it, hate it, hate it….” “Oh, Psyche,” I sobbed, “you’re so far away. Do you even hear me? I can’t reach you. Oh, Psyche, Psyche! You loved me once . . . come back. What have we to do with gods and wonders and all these cruel, dark things? We’re women, aren’t we? Mortals. Oh, come back to the real world. Leave all that alone. Come back where we were happy.” “Is it nothing to you at all that you are leaving me, going into all that . . . turning your back on all our love?”
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 11)
Orual doesn’t want to share Psyche. Matt referred to A Severe Mercy which has a similar sort of conflict.
• Psyche says that the change must happen in Orual:
“No, no, Maia. I can’t go back to you. How could I? But you must come to me.”
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 11)
This reminded me of Sarah Smith and the Tragedian
Here is joy that cannot be shaken. Our light can swallow up your darkness: but your darkness cannot now infect our light. No, no, no. Come to us. We will not go to you. Can you really have thought that love and joy would always be at the mercy of frowns and sighs?
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Chapter 13)
• It begins to rain. Orual offers her cloak, but Psyche points out that they’re inside! Orual had expected the gods to speak, but Matt points out that the rain may well have been their response. She then says one of the darkest lines in the book:
I learned then how one can hate those one loves.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 11)
She tries again to manhandle Psyche, but to no success.
• Psyche tells her to come back soon and comments that she doesn’t think the King will be much hindrance in the next few days. After Orual crosses the stream, she starts begging Psyche to come with her, but she responds:
“I’m not my own. You forget, Sister, that I’m a wife. Yet always yours, too. Oh if you knew, you’d be happy. Orual, don’t look so sad. All will be well; all will be better than you can dream of. Come again soon. Farewell for a little.”
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 11)
Psyche is saying that her love for Orual and her husband are not in competition, but she cannot understand it.
“What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.”
C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew
• Matt used the Biblical phrase of “casting your pearls before swine” from Matthew 7:6. I explained that this passage was used in the Early Church to refer to the Eucharist, which was why they had a “closed” communion.
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• Next week we will be discussing Chapters 12 and 13…
