The Seven Heavens
The heavens are telling the glory of God.
Psalm 19:1
My eureka moment happened not in the bath, as was the case with Archimedes, but in my bed. It was nearly midnight one Wednesday in February. At the time I was reading something that had no connection with Narnia—at least on the face of it.
It was a long poem called “The Planets.”[1] Lewis wrote it in 1935, fifteen years before he published the first Chronicle, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I was just about to close the book and turn the light off when, all of a sudden, the light went on. A different light—the light of understanding.
“The Planets” poem is all about how the planets were understood in medieval times, when it was believed there were only seven planets and that they exerted influences over the Earth, affecting people, events, and even the metals in the Earth’s crust.
Few people today think the planets exert influences, but every time anyone mentions falling ill with the flu (influenza) they are referring back to that idea without realizing it. In the Middle Ages, it was thought that the planets influenced people by affecting the air of Earth’s atmosphere. If a doctor couldn’t explain an illness, he would probably say, “It’s caused by the influence in the air right now.” If he was an Italian doctor, he would not say influence, but influenza. The word found its way into English medical dictionaries, and we still use it![2]
According to astronomers in the Middle Ages, each planet exerted its own special influenza. Mars, being associated with war, would turn you into a “martial” warrior. Venus, the planet of love, would help you find your sweetheart. Mercury produced the metal mercury (quicksilver) on Earth. The other planets influenced Earth in yet other ways.
By Jove, I’ve Got It!
The part of the poem that made me do a double take was the section dealing with Jupiter (also known as Jove). Jupiter, according to the poem, influenced the Earth by bringing about:
. . . winter passed
And guilt forgiven.
Those five words leaped off the page at me. I rubbed my eyes. “Winter passed and guilt forgiven”?[3] I had come across those two things in another of Lewis’s works. The passing of winter and the forgiving of guilt are two of the main events in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The White Witch’s winter passes, and Edmund’s guilt is forgiven. This little phrase seemed like a five-word summary of the first Narnia story.
I looked more closely at the lines dealing with Jupiter and its influences. A suspiciously large amount of the imagery in the poem seemed to link up with things in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It mentioned kings and the lionhearted and royal robes and rulers who were “just and gentle”[4] (like King Edmund the Just and Queen Susan the Gentle). Could I possibly, after all these years, have stumbled upon Lewis’s secret code?
I then looked at the sections in the poem dealing with the other six medieval planets. I could see that the other six Chronicles seemed to be summarized there too: one Chronicle for each planet.
I was stunned. How could no one have seen this before? It was so obvious once I noticed it! I spent the next two weeks walking around the University of Cambridge in a daze, hardly able to believe what had fallen in my lap.
Naturally, I had to set aside all the work I’d been doing on my thesis up to that point. This was too big an idea not to explore as fully as I possibly could. I devoted all of the next year to rereading absolutely everything Lewis had ever written. I wanted to check and double-check and triple-check this theory, because, if it turned out to be true, I knew lots of people were going to be interested.
And the more I examined the evidence, the more it showed itself to be correct. I became convinced this wasn’t just a theory; it was a genuine discovery.
I then spent the next four years writing a big, fat book about it! This book that you’re now holding in your hands, The Narnia Code, is the younger brother of that big, fat book. If you want to find further information about anything you read here, please take a look at the much more detailed account I give in Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).[5]
In 1543, Copernicus Changed the Sky We See
Perhaps you’re asking, Aren’t there more than seven planets? Yes, indeed, there are these days, according to modern astronomers. But here is where we need to do a little history.
Back in the Middle Ages, the period that Lewis was such an expert on, astronomers believed they had identified seven planets. They included the Sun and the Moon (odd as that now seems to us), as well as Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.
Each of these seven planets could be seen wandering alone across the sky. (The Greek word for “wanderers” is planetai.) During the day, the Sun took its solitary course from east to west, and during the night the other six “planets” wended their way across the sky, following their own unique paths.
Before the invention of the telescope in about 1610, these were the only seven objects that could be seen wandering about the sky. All the other heavenly bodies were not lonely planetai but stars, either fixed in position like the North Star or members of groups (constellations) that all moved together as one.
Not until 1781 was the planet Uranus identified by an astronomer using a telescope. Neptune was discovered in 1846—although, as I mentioned in the first chapter, John Couch Adams realized that Neptune existed even before he actually observed it. (We’ll come back to Neptune at the end of this book.) Pluto was discovered in 1930 and was included in the standard list of planets until 2006, when the International Astronomical Union decided it should be classified as a dwarf planet.
But for many thousands of years before the invention of the telescope, when you had to scour the heavens with your naked eye, there was no Uranus, no Neptune, no Pluto, and—most bizarrely—no Earth!
Earth was not considered a planet in those days because people believed that the Earth was fixed at the very center of the universe. Therefore, it did no wandering. The Earth didn’t go round the Sun: the Sun went round the Earth.
Everyone thought this way until 1543, when Polish astronomer and canon of Frauenburg Cathedral Nicholas Copernicus wondered whether the Sun, rather than the Earth, might be the center of the universe. Copernicus published his theory in a book called On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres.
His theory was a revolution in its own right. It has been described as the biggest change ever in the history of human thought. Until Copernicus’s time, the Earth was viewed as the center of everything. After Copernicus, the Earth was on the sidelines, and the Sun was at the center. You could say that, in a sense, Copernicus single-handedly moved the whole Earth! Following the Copernican Revolution, astronomy became divided into two great epochs: the pre-Copernican and the post-Copernican. Before. And after.
C. S. Lewis was fascinated by the Copernican Revolution because it happened during the century he studied so much. Lewis’s book English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama opens with a long discussion of the “new astronomy.”
Lewis points out that the universe as it was understood in pre-Copernican times was “tingling with life,”[6] whereas in post-Copernican times the universe is thought of more like a machine. When Lewis says the universe was “tingling,” he is having a private joke. The Old English word tingul means “star,” and usually when Lewis uses the word tingle or tingling, he is suggesting something special about the stars. (Look for further references to tingling later in this book.)
The title of another of Lewis’s academic works, The Discarded Image, refers to the pre-Copernican “image,” or model, of the universe, which, of course, was gradually discarded as Copernicus’s theory was explored, tested, and eventually proved correct by the Christian astronomer Galileo.
But although this image was discarded once it was disproven scientifically, Lewis thought it was vital we remember it; otherwise, we would cut ourselves off from our own past. We need to know where we’ve come from in order to know where we are. Having an accurate knowledge of history (including the history of science) helps save us from making certain mistakes in the modern day. For instance, how old is space?
A Waste of Space
If I told you that space is less than four hundred years old, you would think I was crazy. Well, here goes: Space is a good deal less than four hundred years old.
Am I crazy? No! Astronomers didn’t use the word space in this sense until the seventeenth century. Before then they used other words such as firmament and heavens. In The Discarded Image, Lewis points out how different we would feel if we took a walk under the sky at night and looked up at the planets believing that pre-Copernican astronomy was actually correct. We would feel as if we were looking into the heavens. These days, with our modern astronomical beliefs, we feel as if we’re looking out at the blackness of empty space.
There is a big difference between “space” and “the heavens.” Space suggests a shapeless emptiness in which Earth has no particular seat of honor. Earth is now just one of many planets, endlessly revolving around a not-very-special star that we call the Sun. In that sense, modern space is a kind of chaos or wilderness as far as Earth is concerned.
But before Copernicus, Earth was securely located in its own very special place. Earth was not just another wanderer in empty space but the fixed heart of an intricately patterned cosmos.
The word cosmos comes from a Greek word meaning “to organize, to arrange.” It’s where we get the word cosmetics. When a woman applies cosmetics to her face—lipstick, eyeliner, blush—she is bringing out the shape and the pattern of her facial features, “organizing” her appearance to make it look more attractive.
Cosmologists bring out the shape and the pattern of the universe, as they believe that shape and pattern to be. And before the time of Copernicus, cosmologists thought that not only was the Earth at the center—the focus of every created thing—but also that it was surrounded by a series of heavens or transparent spheres. The universe was a bit like a gigantic onion, with Earth being the middle of the onion and the heavens being the rings surrounding that central core.
There were seven heavens, and each heaven had a different planet rotating within it. So instead of formless and vacant space, there was a series of spheres, one inside the other (rather like Russian nesting dolls) all the way up to the edge of the created order.
The pre-Copernican list of the seven planets runs like this (in their supposed order from the static and central Earth):
1. Moon
2. Mercury
3. Venus
4. Sun
5. Mars
6. Jupiter
7. Saturn
The diagram on page 149 illustrates this arrangement.
Occasionally you still hear people say of something that has made them very happy, “I was in the seventh heaven!” It would be delightful to be in the seventh heaven, according to pre-Copernican ways of thinking, because there you would be in the planetary sphere farthest from Earth and nearest the home of God, outside the created order altogether.
Seven Deities a Week
In pre-Copernican times, Christians believed (as we still believe) that God ruled the universe. But as Lewis explains in The Discarded Image, medieval Christians believed that, in addition to man, God had made spirits of various kinds, sometimes called gods, deities, intelligences, or angels, to have authority under Him. Today, Christians often talk about angels but tend to avoid using the word gods, assuming that it can refer only to “pagan gods.” However, the Bible itself sometimes uses the word gods without referring to something occultic or evil. The most obvious place is in John 10:34-36, where Jesus quotes Psalm 82:6 (“Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, you are gods’?”).
Medieval Christians believed that not only had God created these various spirits but that He had put seven of them in charge of the seven planets. Each planet was governed by its own god or angel, who in turn ruled over a different day of the week. Saturn ruled Saturday. The Sun ruled Sunday. The Moon ruled Monday.
You’ll be able to work out how the remaining four days of the week relate to the other four planets if you know French or Spanish. Mars provides the name for Tuesday, which is called Mardi in French and Martes in Spanish. Even in English we sometimes talk about Mardi Gras (Shrove Tuesday), the day before the beginning of Lent. The Norse equivalent of the Roman Mars is Tyr or Tiw, and so we get the name Tuesday.
Mercury is the planet for Wednesday, which is called Mercredi in French and Miercoles in Spanish. The Norse version of Mercury is Woden, and so we say Wednesday in English. Thursday’s planet was Jupiter (or Jove), and Thursday is Jeudi in French and Jueves in Spanish. The Norse version of Jupiter is Thor, giving us Thursday. And Friday’s planet was Venus, Friday being Vendredi in French and Viernes in Spanish. The Norse equivalent of Venus is Freya or Frigg (Friday).
So, in fact, we refer to this sevenfold system of the planets every day of our lives! Most of us have forgotten the connection, if we ever knew it. And yet C. S. Lewis was very much alive to this old tradition because of his work studying the literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Let’s not forget, that was his professional career. It was what he was paid to think about. It should come as no surprise to us that Lewis knew a great deal about this old image of the universe, with Earth at the center, which so influenced the poems, plays, and myths he studied as a professor.
Many of the old writers Lewis studied took the planetary gods and used them as symbols for God. As Lewis notes, “Gods and goddesses could always be used in a Christian sense.”[7] In fact, in Shakespeare’s time, writers had to use the gods when talking about God. An Act of Parliament in 1606 made it illegal to utter God’s name on the stage, so Shakespeare started using the names of the planetary gods, particularly that of Jupiter (or Jove), whenever one of his characters needed to mention God. Lewis commented, “The gods are God incognito and everyone is in the secret.”[8]
But Lewis didn’t just study this old system of the cosmos and the way writers used it symbolically. He also loved it! He wrote in The Discarded Image:
I have made no serious effort to hide the fact that the old Model delights me as I believe it delighted our ancestors. Few constructions of the imagination seem to me to have combined splendour, sobriety, and coherence in the same degree. It is possible that some readers have long been itching to remind me that it had a serious defect; it was not true.
I agree. It was not true.[9]
Nevertheless, Lewis valued the model very highly. Why?
Good Heavens Above
There are three main reasons why Lewis loved the pre-Copernican cosmos.
The first is that many of his favorite poets from medieval times loved it. The most famous poem in which this old cosmos appears is The Divine Comedy by the Italian poet Dante (1265–1321). In the final part of The Divine Comedy the main character climbs up through the seven heavens in his ascent to God’s throne. Lewis hugely admired this poem and described it as “the highest point that poetry had ever reached.”[10] We will mention The Divine Comedy again in chapter 10.
A second reason Lewis loved this old astronomy is because the seven planets provided a set of colorful and meaningful symbols. The meanings that people attached to each of the planets weren’t dreamed up out of nowhere. You can see how the Sun, because of its color, would have become associated with gold and therefore with riches—not just money, but also mental and spiritual wealth. Accordingly, the Sun was thought to play a role in making people into philosophers and theologians.
Venus, which is especially beautiful, became a symbol of all that is most pure and lovely. I remember the first time I knew I was looking at Venus. It was early one morning, just after dawn, and someone pointed out to me what looked like a huge diamond glittering above the horizon. It’s no surprise that “the Morning Star”—one of Venus’s names—is used in the Bible as a way of describing Jesus Christ (see, e.g., 2 Peter 1:19).
The silvery Moon—also known as Luna—became linked to mental instability because of the way that the Moon changes shape and size and moves about the sky so quickly, disappearing totally once every month. A “lunatic” was someone under the influence of Luna.
Gradually over the centuries, all seven planets had meanings attached to them. C. S. Lewis viewed these meanings as permanently valuable. And he was right. Even today you can still see them being used as symbols. I recently watched a film called The Madness of King George and noticed how the director had deliberately included a huge bright moon in one particular scene as a way of showing that King George III had become a lunatic. Perhaps it was the loss of the American colonies that tipped him into insanity. . . .
In the next seven chapters, I will take you through the seven planets and their meanings and show you how (so I believe) C. S. Lewis constructed each Narnia Chronicle out of these ancient symbolic associations.
But before we start that process, let me mention one last reason why Lewis particularly loved the pre-Copernican cosmos. It relates to what I just said about Venus being an image of the beauty of Jesus Christ, a picture of the divine.
Lewis thought that pre-Copernican astronomy was in some ways a more complete kind of science than modern astronomy. That’s because the old model was interested in the idea of spiritual meanings and qualities in the universe.
Modern astronomy tends to look at the universe as a machine that obeys the impersonal laws of physics. We now usually think of the stars and planets in a materialistic way—made up of so much carbon, nitrogen, or other chemical material.
In the older view, the universe was viewed more like a body, or an organism, with its own intentions and spiritual significance. In those days, the planets moved (so it was thought) like birds flying away from and then back toward their nests. These days scientists consider planetary movements to be more like cogs in a clockwork mechanism. “The ‘space’ of modern astronomy,” Lewis said, “may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie; the spheres of the old [astronomy] present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony.”[11]
Both ways of thinking have value. But Lewis thought the older view was especially worth remembering because it allowed scientists to think about qualities as well as quantities when they investigated things. Consider the way the star Ramandu gently rebukes Eustace in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader.” Eustace is surprised to meet a literal star and tells him, “In our world a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” Ramandu replies, “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”[12]
The point Lewis is trying to make is that we shouldn’t reduce stars to their physical parts. If we do, we will have lost something of the truth. A fuller picture of the truth is to be found in the Bible’s way of viewing the heavens—and that’s what we’ll look at now in the final sections of this chapter.
The Heavens Are Telling the Glory of God
From the very start of the Bible, the stars have great significance. In the Creation story, we’re told that God creates the stars “for signs and for seasons.” God makes the sun to “rule the day” and the moon to “rule the night” (Genesis 1:14, 16).
These heavenly bodies have a purpose: they indicate “days and years.” A day, obviously, is the period between one sunrise and the next. A month (a lunar month) is the period between one new moon and the next. A year is the time it takes for the sun to return to rising from the same point in the east.
But as well as signifying periods of time, the starry heavens signify other things too. The “morning stars sang together” when God created the world (Job 38:7). And one special star sang a very special message, as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew:
Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, saying, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the East, and have come to worship him.” . . . And lo, the star which they had seen in the East went before them, till it came to rest over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy; and going into the house they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh. (Matthew 2:1-2, 9-11)
The Star of Bethlehem led the wise men to Jesus. It was a guide, a signpost. And this should not surprise us, because in the Psalms we read that “the heavens are telling the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1). Echoing verse 4 of Psalm 19, the apostle Paul seems to say that the heavens do not just tell the glory of God; they speak the word of Christ (Romans 10:18).
In the book of Judges, the stars are portrayed as angels who can act in human affairs. The Israelites were oppressed for twenty years by a man called Sisera, commander of the armies of Canaan, who was eventually defeated because, according to the song of Deborah, “the stars in their courses fought against Sisera” (Judges 5:20, KJV). Lewis refers to this verse in his book Out of the Silent Planet,[13] one of three novels he wrote about interplanetary adventures.
Many centuries after Sisera, Jesus pointed to the stars and warned people to look up at the heavens if they wished to know when the time of tribulation would come: “[In] those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken; then will appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven” (Matthew 24:29-30).
And in Revelation, the apostle John writes about a vision he had in which he saw the Son of Man holding “the seven stars in his right hand” (Revelation 1:16, 20; 2:1). What is meant by these seven stars? One suggestion is that these seven stars referred to the seven wandering stars, the planets. As already pointed out, there has been a special connection between the seven planets and the seven days of the week since the earliest recorded history. If this is a correct way of understanding Revelation, Christ is being shown as the Lord of time, holding all the days of our lives in His hands. Lewis’s good friend Austin Farrer, who was a biblical scholar, interpreted the verse in this way.
Throughout the Bible, then, we see that the stars have meanings and qualities that can be studied for good and godly purposes. And it is very important to remember all these things whenever C. S. Lewis mentions that easily misunderstood word astrology.
Wise Men and the Stars
What is astrology? Many people, especially Christian people, think astrology is at best foolish and at worst very dangerous. These days astrology is connected with silly horoscopes in the back pages of magazines. Astrology in that sense is superstitious nonsense and has nothing to do with astrology as Lewis meant it.
Lewis understood astrology in the same way that he understood biology or geology. In biology you study bios—the Greek word for life. In geology you study ge—the Greek word for the Earth. And in astrology, you study the astral bodies, the stars.
Astrology means “study of the stars,” and astronomy means “law of the stars.” The two branches of study were intermingled in pre-Copernican times. Lewis explains it this way:
The spheres transmit (to the Earth) what are called Influences—the subject-matter of Astrology. Astrology is not specifically medieval. The Middle Ages inherited it from antiquity and bequeathed it to the Renaissance. The statement that the medieval Church frowned upon this discipline is often taken in a sense that makes it untrue. Orthodox theologians could accept the theory that the planets had an effect on events and on psychology and, much more, on plants and minerals.[14]
Lewis is then quick to explain that the medieval church absolutely opposed astrology if it led people to worship the planets and if it was used for “the lucrative, and politically undesirable, practice of astrologically grounded predictions.”[15] The church also opposed astrology where it led to determinism, for while Christians until the time of Copernicus generally believed that the stars influenced us, they didn’t think the stars controlled us. The stars might give a disposition or a tendency, but they couldn’t overrule a person’s free will and responsibility before God. In many ways, those living in medieval times thought of stars much as we now think of our genes.
There was—and is—nothing necessarily wrong, foolish, or dangerous about studying an aspect of God’s creation such as the stars. It all depends what you do with that study. If it leads you to worship Christ, as was the case with the wise men who followed the star to Bethlehem, it can be sensible. If it leads you to worship the stars themselves, then you should stop immediately, since the Bible strictly forbids that practice![16]
So we need not be frightened by the word astrology. We just need to be very clear how we are using it. Like Lewis, we use it here in the pre-Copernican and Christian sense implied by Psalm 19: “The heavens are telling the glory of God.”
Lewis didn’t literally believe in the medieval planetary influences, but he did think that the planets, because of their traditional associations, were powerful symbols. After all, God had made the planets and so it was only right and proper that they should signify more than just themselves.
Lewis once said, “The characters of the planets, as conceived by medieval astrology, seem to me to have a permanent value as spiritual symbols.”[17] When he calls them “spiritual symbols,” he means they are useful images or summaries of God’s sovereignty, beauty, power, wisdom, and the like. And their usefulness as symbols isn’t just for people in earlier times. No, the planets have a permanent value as spiritual symbols. That’s no small claim.
And Lewis’s high view of the heavenly bodies comes through in the Narnia books, where he often makes a special connection between Aslan and the Narnian stars:
In The Magician’s Nephew, Aslan says, “I give you the stars and I give you myself.”[18]
In The Silver Chair, when the children are lost in the Underworld, they remember the “sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself.”[19]
In The Last Battle, Roonwit the Centaur says, “If Aslan were really coming to Narnia . . . all the most gracious stars would be assembled in his honor.”[20]
But it is not just the Narnian stars that have a special significance in the Chronicles. I believe Lewis used the symbolism of the seven heavens of this world as he wrote the Narnia books. He structured each Chronicle, I think, so that it would embody and express the spiritual quality of one of the seven planets. He kept silent about it, but that is to be expected, since the heavens themselves were believed in medieval times to be constantly singing a music that was effectively silent as far as people on Earth were concerned. Pre-Copernican astronomers called it “the music of the spheres,” and Lewis described it as a perpetual Gloria[21] eternally exchanged between the angelic spirits who guided the planets in their paths. Paradoxically, it is never heard on Earth because it is always heard. We have no negative with which to contrast our positive hearing of this music. It fills our ears every minute of every day and every night.
People who live next door to a railway line don’t hear the trains. People who live next to Niagara Falls don’t hear the water. And people who lived on Earth before the time of Copernicus didn’t hear the music of the spheres. Yet it was always sounding.
Lewis wrote about the music of the spheres in his academic works. He loved the idea of music you are always listening to but can never hear. And when he came to write the Narnia Chronicles, his own version of the music of the spheres sounds on every page of every story.
His favorite planet was Jupiter, and it was out of the spiritual symbolism of Jupiter that he formed the first of the seven Narnia Chronicles, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
And that will be the subject of our next chapter—by Jove!