Mirror or Moonshine?
The Silver Chair
The moon will shine like the sun . . . when the LORD binds up the bruises of his people.[1]
Isaiah 30:26
In the Bible we read these intriguing words:
The sun will not harm you by day,
nor the moon by night. Psalm 121:6, NIV
It’s obvious how the Sun can harm us: it can cause sunburn and skin cancer; it can leave us dehydrated.
But how can the Moon harm us?
Here is where we need to remember the old view of the heavens—the pre-Copernican view.
Because the Moon changes shape and size so quickly and moves about the night sky so rapidly, sometimes disappearing altogether, it became a symbol of madness. A mentally unstable person—someone who was always changing, never the same—was thought to be under the influence of the Moon, or “Luna,” to use another of the Moon’s names. In short, he or she was a lunatic.
Jesus healed “lunatics” on at least two occasions, according to the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 4:24; 17:15, KJV). Modern translations of the Bible usually translate lunatic as “epileptic.” But this is misleading. A friend of mine suffers from epilepsy, and he is certainly not crazy!
If you look at the original Greek word Matthew used, you see that the people Jesus healed were “Selenites,” or “those who had been Selenized”—they were under the influence of Selene, who was believed to be a goddess of the Moon. That was how the Moon could hurt you by night. You could go crazy—stark-raving bonkers!
When C. S. Lewis wrote The Silver Chair, he constructed the story out of Moon imagery, which is why the tale contains not one but two lunatics. One of them is the headmistress of Jill and Eustace’s school, Experiment House, and the way Lewis writes about her is very funny. At the end of the story, the headmistress is found “behaving like a lunatic”[2]—she has hysterics and phones the police with tales about a lion escaped from the circus and escaped prisoners who broke down walls and carried swords:
After that, the Head’s friends saw that the Head was no use as a Head, so they got her made an Inspector to interfere with other Heads. And when they found she wasn’t much good even at that, they got her into Parliament where she lived happily ever after.[3]
But the other lunatic in The Silver Chair is much more serious. This is the lost Prince Rilian, who says:
Every night there comes an hour when my mind is most horribly changed. . . . I become furious and wild and would rush upon my dearest friends to kill them, if I were not bound. . . . I myself know nothing of it, for when my hour is past I awake forgetful of all that vile fit and in my proper shape and sound mind.[4]
As it happens, Prince Rilian is not telling the truth. His hour of madness is actually his only moment of sanity. The fact that he lies about this (without even knowing he is lying) is part of his lunacy. It leaves Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum totally confused.
When Rilian begs them in Aslan’s name to free him from his bonds, they don’t know what to do. “Could Aslan have really meant them to unbind anyone—even a lunatic—who asked it in his name?”[5]
We will return to Prince Rilian later, but first let’s explore further why the Moon was connected to madness. We’ve already noted the Moon’s changeableness. There were two other symbolic links to lunacy: one has to do with water and one with “moonshine.”
Wet, Wet, Wet
If you look at what Lewis wrote about the Moon in his poem “The Planets,” you will see how strongly it was associated with water. The poem mentions dew and drenching and drizzling, showers and moisture. The link between the Moon and wetness came about because of the Moon’s influence upon Earth’s tides. Our seas and rivers are affected by the Moon’s gravitational pull.
Lewis has the Moon’s drenching, drizzling, dewy effects in mind throughout The Silver Chair. The theme is introduced at the very start of the story, when we first meet Jill Pole, who is crying on a “damp little path.”[6] Eustace joins her, sitting down on “grass [that] was soaking wet.”[7] Lewis also describes drops that “dripped off the laurel leaves,” that “drip off the leaves,” and of “drops of water on the grass.”[8] These images, seemingly irrelevant to the plot, are there to help create a definite atmosphere.
In the second chapter, water has a more obvious role to play, as seen in Jill’s tears and the stream from which she is desperate to drink. After she has quenched her thirst, Aslan blows her down from his high country above the clouds into Narnia, and in his breath she can move as freely “as you can in water (if you’ve learned to float really well).” She is blown into the “wet fogginess” of a cloud and emerges with wet clothes; she is then splashed by a wave of the sea “drenching her nearly to the waist.” She exclaims at the very end of the chapter, “How wet I am!”[9]
We needn’t go through every other reference to water and wetness in the book, but others include Jill’s baths in chapters 3 and 8, her wet pillow, the frequent rain (mentioned at least six times), Caspian’s “watery”[10] eyes, the fountain where Rilian’s mother was killed, the marshes in chapter 5 with their “muddy water” and their “countless channels of water,”[11] and above all the Marsh-wiggle Puddleglum.
Not only does Puddleglum’s name indicate his link with the Moon, but he also does “watery” work and is three times described as a “wet blanket.”[12] He imagines that Jill and Eustace have come to him because there’s been a flood, he says his firewood may be wet, his pipe smoke trickles out of his bowl like “mist,” he mentions the river Shribble and its lack of bridges, predicts “damp bowstrings,”[13] snores like a waterfall, and wonders if rain is on its way.
Puddleglum leads Jill and Eustace on their quest. They ford the Shribble (which makes Jill wet to the knees), pass “countless streams” on Ettinsmoor, and are “never short of water.” They spot a river “full of rapids and waterfalls” and become “sick of wind and rain.” On their way to Harfang, they endure “nasty wet business” and everyone gets wet, “too wet by now to bother about being a bit wetter.” The gnomes of Bism row them in a boat on an underground sea; Rilian’s words are “like cold water down the back,” but later they are glad to find real “water for washing.”[14]
Eventually a flood does indeed come to destroy things, as Puddleglum had feared at the start, but it is the Witch’s kingdom, not Narnia, that is drowned. Even at the end of the story Puddleglum is still continuing to point out that “bright mornings” bring on “wet afternoons.”[15]
The wetness of the Moon’s influence is everywhere in this story, and it helps reinforce the idea that things are constantly at risk of sinking into lunacy. Water, by definition, isn’t solid; it’s liquid. It moves, it changes, it’s unsupportive. In that respect it’s like the unstable mind of a lunatic.
There’s an ever-present danger in The Silver Chair that things are going to tip over from sanity into madness. “Lady Luna, in light canoe”[16] is how Lewis writes about the Moon in “The Planets.” Think of how a canoeist capsizes and so is suspended head down in the water until he is able to right himself. Becoming permanently capsized is the terrifying prospect facing everyone in this story.
By the Light of the Silvery Moon
Another way in which this danger is conveyed is through the imagery of the Moon’s silvery light. In the pre-Copernican model of the heavens, the Moon was responsible for making silver on Earth, just as the Sun was responsible for gold.
The most obvious silver thing in the book is the chair of the title—though there are many other objects, such as Trumpkin’s “silver ear-trumpet,” Rilian’s “silver mail,” and the lamp in Jill’s castle room that hangs by “a silver chain.”[17]
The silver chair, where Rilian is tied every night for an hour, is a clear symbol of madness. Why so? Given that Rilian’s only time of sanity is the hour when he is tied to the chair, how does the chair symbolize lunacy?
It suggests lunacy because Rilian is bound to the chair. He is not free. The one hour in the day when he ought to be able to escape to Overland, he is unable to do so. It’s as though a canoeist had to stay head down in the river all the time. It’s not crazy to capsize, but it is crazy to stay capsized.
Rilian says, “Let me out, let me go back. Let me feel the wind and see the sky. . . . There used to be a little pool. When you looked down into it you could see all the trees growing upside-down in the water, all green, and below them, deep, very deep, the blue sky.”[18]
Rilian’s mind is the wrong way up. The highest metal he knows is silver, when in fact silver is not the highest or best metal; the highest is gold. But there is no real gold in his world, just the Witch with her “silver laughs.”[19]
The Witch won’t allow Rilian to think about gold or the sun. When she takes him up to travel in Overland, he has to wear a heavy black suit of armor, with his visor down. And when they are in Underland, the Witch denies that the golden sun even exists.
“What is this sun that you all speak of? Do you mean anything by the word?” the Witch asks.
Rilian replies, “You see that lamp. It is round and yellow and gives light to the whole room; and hangeth moreover from the roof. Now that thing which we call the sun is like the lamp, only far greater and brighter. It giveth light to the whole Overworld and hangeth in the sky.”
“Hangeth from what, my lord?” asks the Witch, and while Eustace, Jill, Puddleglum, and Rilian are all still thinking how to answer, she adds, with a soft, silvery laugh, “You see? When you try to think out clearly what this sun must be, you cannot tell me. You can only tell me it is like the lamp. Your sun is a dream; and there is nothing in that dream that was not copied from the lamp. The lamp is the real thing; the sun is but a tale, a children’s story.”[20]
This is the very definition of lunacy. The Witch is determined to pretend that her silver kingdom is the highest reality. She wishes there to be no sunlight, but only moonlight—which is madness because the Moon can only shine if the Sun first shines upon it. The Moon has no light of its own. As Lewis wrote in another place, moonlight “is only sunlight at second hand.”[21]
In one of his earliest poems, Lewis wrote that the Moon is “a stone that catches the sun’s beam.”[22] And throughout his works he uses the term moonshine to mean “nonsense, stupidity.” To think that the moon shines with its own light is ridiculous. Yet this is what the Witch wishes to make Rilian and his rescuers believe.
The Witch is also known as the Lady of the Green Kirtle. She is actually a snake, the snake “green as poison”[23] that killed Rilian’s mother. And her green attire adds another little touch of Lunar imagery. Shakespeare writes in Romeo and Juliet of the clothes “sick and green” that are worn by “the envious Moon.”[24] Green is the color of envy, and here Lewis suggests that lunacy is the result of the Moon’s being envious of the Sun.
Lewis explicitly refers to another of Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet, when he writes that Prince Rilian is “dressed in black and altogether looked a little bit like Hamlet.”[25] In his academic writings, Lewis refers to Hamlet as a lunatic, a man “with his mind on the frontier of two worlds . . . unable quite to reject or quite to admit the supernatural.”[26] And this idea of the frontier is another important aspect of Lunar symbolism.
In pre-Copernican astronomy, the Moon marked a major frontier. Above the Moon, everything was believed to be perfect, certain, and permanent. Below the Moon, everything was thought to be subject to doubt, confusion, and change. And it’s because the Moon stood at the boundary between those two worlds that Lewis structured The Silver Chair the way he did.
The difference between Aslan’s country and Narnia is clearly modeled on this divide. We read of “the freshness of the air” in Aslan’s country, which leads Jill to believe “they must be on the top of a very high mountain” even though “there was not a breath of wind.”[27] As they look down, Jill and Eustace see little white shapes far beneath them. At first they appear to be sheep, but they are actually clouds.
Aslan gives Jill four signs to help her and Eustace find Prince Rilian. He then gives her a warning: “Here on the mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind. And the signs which you have learned here will not look at all as you expect them to look, when you meet them there.”[28]
In fact, Eustace does not realize that the old man he sees departing on a ship is the same Caspian whom he had known as a young king. The adventurers do not perceive that the trenches they fall into are really huge letters carved in the rock.
Ignorance, forgetfulness, rain, wind, and snow all help befuddle the travelers’ minds, and Jill gives up repeating the signs to herself. The confusion continues until, in chapter 10 (“Travels Without the Sun”), their situation gets even worse. They descend into a yet more confusing world when they fall down into Underland, having built a barrier between themselves and Narnia.
In Underland Jill feels she is being “smothered”; the place is “suffocating”; they begin to wonder whether “sun and blue skies and wind and birds had not been only a dream.” As she, Eustace, and Puddleglum are repeatedly told, “Many fall down, and few return to the sunlit lands.”[29]
Sunlessness, madness, silver, envy, wetness, and wanderings dominate this Lunar tale. One final touch Lewis includes to suggest the Moon’s influence is in the names of the two horses that the prince, Puddleglum, Eustace, and Jill ride once the Witch is dead. They are based on the two horses, one pitch black and the other pure white, that in mythology drew the Moon’s chariot across the heavens. Lewis calls them Coalblack and Snowflake.
Hearing the Silent Music of Luna
This is all very interesting, you may say, but what’s the point? Didn’t Lewis say that the Narnia books were about Christ? What does all this Moon imagery have to do with Christ?
The message Lewis conveys in The Silver Chair can be summed up in Jesus’ words: “Seek first the kingdom of God” (Matthew 6:33, NKJV). In other words, put first things first. Do not think that this world, the Earth, is eternal. As the apostle Paul writes in Colossians 3:2, “Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things” (NIV).
Aslan doesn’t appear bodily in Narnia in this story. Apart from one brief appearance in Jill’s dream, Aslan is confined to his own high country above the clouds. The children encounter him in person only before they enter Narnia and after they leave it.
And what Aslan says at the start of the book is absolutely central to Lewis’s Christian purpose in this story. Aslan tells Jill:
Remember, remember, remember the signs. Say them to yourself when you wake in the morning and when you lie down at night, and when you wake in the middle of the night. And whatever strange things may happen to you, let nothing turn your mind from following the signs.[30]
This is similar to God’s advice to the people of Israel in the Old Testament: “And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise” (Deuteronomy 6:6-7).
In some ways the children and Puddleglum fail to learn this difficult lesson. For example, they can’t resist thinking about the warm baths and the tasty hot meals the Witch promises will await them at Harfang. As a result they temporarily forget the signs and almost get eaten by giants!
They come very close to failing again once they are in the Underworld. The Witch argues that the supposed supernatural realities—what she calls “fancies”[31] (a term Lewis often used when writing about the Moon)—are taken from Underworld images (sun from lamp, lion from cat) and that the higher world of Narnia does not really exist: “You can put nothing into your make-believe without copying it from the real world, this world of mine, which is the only world.”[32]
Rilian, who had earlier won freedom for himself by recalling “the bright skies of Overland . . . the great Lion . . . Aslan himself,”[33] is now overpowered again by the lulling words of the Witch, the soft thrumming of her music, and the sweet smell from her fire.
Eustace struggles to recall “the sky and the sun and the stars.” But he, too, is soon overpowered, declaring there “never was such a world.”[34]
Then Puddleglum remembers the heavens: “I’ve seen the sun coming up out of the sea of a morning and sinking behind the mountains at night. And I’ve seen him up in the midday sky when I couldn’t look at him for brightness.”[35]
“What is this sun that you all speak of?” asks the Witch. “There never was a sun.”
“No. There never was a sun,”[36] said the prince, Puddleglum, and the children.
However, Lewis’s message is not simply that the Witch is wrong and the rescuers are right. He wants to show how they finally manage to clear their heads. The Witch’s “false, mocking fancy”[37] (as Lewis describes the Moon in his early poem “French Nocturne”) is extremely convincing. How can they possibly avoid ending up as lunatics?
Only obedience can do it. Painful obedience. Puddleglum stamps on the fire. “He knew it would hurt him badly enough; and so it did.” But “the pain itself made Puddleglum’s head for a moment perfectly clear and he knew exactly what he really thought. There is nothing like a good shock of pain for dissolving certain kinds of magic.”[38]
By reaching for his memory of Overworld through an excruciating act of self-denial, the heroic Marsh-wiggle avoids becoming a lunatic. He ends up limping with the pain, but that is better than submitting to the Witch. As Jesus says in the Gospels, “It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell” (Matthew 5:29, NIV).
As a result of Puddleglum’s bravery, order is restored: first things are put first and second things second. In the final chapter, “The Healing of Harms,” Jill and Eustace find themselves again in “a great brightness of mid-summer sunshine”[39] in Aslan’s high country above the clouds. It reminds us of the description of his country at the start of the story where Jill and Eustace see a “blaze of sunshine” that pours upon them as “the light of a June day pours into a garage when you open the door.”[40]
Lewis once wrote that, in relation to God, we should be like “a mirror filled with light,”[41] or like “a body ever more completely uncovered to the meridian blaze of the spiritual sun.”[42]
The question The Silver Chair asks of us is this: will we reflect God’s light in our lives or make ourselves out to be suns of our own creating?
Mirrors? Or moonshine?