Mercury’s Winged Cap
The Horse and His Boy
The word of God is living and active.
Hebrews 4:12
Imagine you lived in the days before electricity. You have no television, no telephone. There are no electric streetlights outside your house.
Night falls, and you can actually see the planets and stars because there’s no light pollution. You’re not distracted by having to watch the latest DVD—because you have no DVD player. DVDs have not been invented. So what do you watch instead?
You sit outside your house, and you look up at the heavenly bodies in the night sky. Night after night you do this. Year after year.
You notice one particularly small and fast-moving planet. It pops up above the horizon briefly before sunrise. It chases the Sun over the horizon at dusk. Why does it act like that? you ask yourself. You have plenty of time to wonder about such questions because you’re not wasting hours of each day on Facebook. You have no Facebook. The Internet doesn’t exist.
Perhaps that little planet is a young planet, lively and energetic—jumping up and running away again like a child playing outside the window. Perhaps it keeps close to the Sun because it’s a messenger, carrying notes from the Sun to the other planets. Perhaps it’s also conducting business, buying and selling things, as it shuttles back and forth.
These are the stories you begin to tell to yourself, based on what you can see of Mercury. And your neighbors tell similar stories. Everyone you know has been pondering the significance of the heavens for as long as you’ve known them. That’s what people do. It’s what people have always done.
This must have been what it was like to live in the olden days, before electricity, before the telescope, before Copernicus. It’s no wonder each planet gradually acquired a whole host of meanings and myths associated with it.
In Mercury’s case, the planet was deemed “the messenger” and therefore good with words. Mercury was responsible for business. Our word commerce means “connected with Mercury.” He became linked with anything that went to and fro or that came together only to be separated again. He was associated with things as various as theft and boxing and even had a special connection with crossroads!
C. S. Lewis loved “that shining suburb of the Sun,”[1] as he called Mercury in one of his poems. But he found it hard to sum up all of Mercury’s different qualities. Rather than trying to define it in words, he suggested looking at Mercury’s metal, which is—not surprisingly—mercury (also known as quicksilver).
“Take some real mercury in a saucer and play with it for a few minutes,” Lewis advises. “That is what ‘Mercurial’ means.”[2] No one today recommends casually playing with mercury because it is not a very safe thing to do. Still, if you want to understand what Mercury symbolizes, just think of quicksilver—the way it rolls about in glittering drops, rapidly splitting and recombining, a metal that is partly liquid and partly solid.
Mercury is listed in the periodic table of elements as Hg, which stands for hydrargyrum, a word made up of “hydra” (water) and “argent” (silver). Mercury is literally silver-water or watery silver.
Lewis so loved quicksilver that he inserted a reference to it in The Horse and His Boy. In chapter 9, “Across the Desert,” we read, “Under the moonlight the sand, in every direction and as far as they could see, gleamed as if it were smooth water or a great silver tray.”[3]
Lewis cannot tilt this silver tray of water, as he suggests doing to a saucer of brilliant quicksilver, in order to make its contents divide and roll about in sparkling globules. However, he does show us what happens to it when dawn arrives: “Suddenly the sun rose and everything changed in a moment. The grey sand turned yellow and twinkled as if it were strewn with diamonds.”[4]
That is what “Mercurial” means!
The Twins
In Lewis’s poem “The Planets,” Mercury brings about “meeting selves, same but sundered.”[5] This is a very important phrase for helping us understand why he wrote The Horse and His Boy the way he did.
The Horse and His Boy is a story about twin brothers, Cor and Corin, who were separated shortly after birth and are reunited many years later. They are identical. They were parted. They come back together again. “Meeting selves, same but sundered.” Cor and Corin are like drops of mercury.
In Lewis’s novel That Hideous Strength, a couple of characters meet each other “like two drops of quicksilver.”[6] Here in The Horse and His Boy, Lewis doesn’t tell us that the twin brothers are like drops of mercury, but he shapes the whole story out of Mercurial imagery so we feel it from the inside.
And in fact Cor and Corin are not just any old twin brothers; they are based on a very special pair of twins named Castor and Pollux, characters in one of the greatest of all classical poems, The Iliad by Homer. These twins were so famous in ancient times that they are even mentioned in the Bible. In Acts 28:11, the apostle Paul mentions travelling in a ship that has “the Twin Brothers” for its figurehead. This “twin-born progeny,”[7] Castor and Pollux, also appear in one of Lewis’s poems.
In The Iliad Homer describes Castor as a great breaker of horses and Pollux as a mighty boxer. Cor—who is known as Shasta for most of the story—is based on Castor. That’s why Lewis gave him those two names: Cor/Shasta = Castor. Shasta becomes a great breaker of horses over the course of this story.
Shasta doesn’t “break” Bree in the literal sense of taming him: Bree is already a great warhorse. Nevertheless, Shasta is a “horse-boy” who acquires “a true horseman’s seat”[8] and who breaks Bree’s pride and self-conceit. Bree admits, “At least [Shasta] ran in the right direction: ran back. And that is what shames me most of all. I, who called myself a war horse and boasted of a hundred fights, to be beaten by a little human boy—a child, a mere foal.”[9]
And just as Shasta is based on Castor, so Corin is based on Pollux. Corin is a great fighter: he wants to “box” Rabadash; no one “could ever equal Corin as a boxer”; and after he has “boxed” the lapsed bear of Stormness “without a time-keeper for thirty-three rounds,” he gains the nickname “Corin Thunder-Fist.”[10] According to mythology, Hermes (the Greek equivalent of the Roman Mercury) invented boxing.
And what do Castor and Pollux have to do with Mercury? In myth, the two brothers were turned into stars after they died and so became the constellation Gemini (the Twins). And Gemini is one of the constellations that Mercury “ruled.”
This helps explain the other pairs of brothers (Dar and Darrin, Cole and Colin) who appear in the story. Their presence also signifies the Mercurial twinning influence.
Quicksilver
And it is not just twin brothers who are brought together like drops of mercury. Shasta is united with Bree; Aravis is united with Hwin; roaring lions then drive these pairs close to each other. At one point Bree veers off to the right just as Hwin veers off to the left, but they are then forced back together “neck to neck and knee to knee,” “side by side.”[11]
In Tashbaan they separate (Shasta with the Narnians, Aravis with Lasaraleen, the horses with the stable-hand) but are reunited at the Tombs before journeying together across the desert. At the Hermit’s house, Shasta runs on ahead, alone, but returns there later.
The separating and uniting imagery is summed up very amusingly near the end of the book, when we’re told that Shasta and Aravis have become “so used to quarrelling and making up again that they got married so as to go on doing it more conveniently.”[12]
Mercury was the god of the crossroads, and in ancient Greece statues of him were set up as boundary markers or signposts at important junctions. This helps explain why the story so often mentions the taking of different directions. Inside Tashbaan, “everyone seemed to be going either to the left or right.” Aravis and Lasaraleen have to go “either left or right.” Shasta, in the mountain pass, finds that “the road divided into two” and realizes that “if I stay at the crossroads I’m sure to be caught.”[13]
Speed is of Mercury’s essence, and there is a great sense of urgency throughout the tale. The cry “Narnia and the North!” is heard repeatedly. Bree gallops for sheer joy, then for sheer terror. Aravis says, “There’s not a moment to lose”[14] after overhearing Rabadash’s plans. Aslan chases them to the Hermit’s dwelling, causing Bree to discover that he has “not really been going as fast—not quite as fast—as he could.”[15] Aravis mentions “swift horses”;[16] Rabadash refers to the “swiftest of the galleys”;[17] the Tisroc urges his son to “be swift”;[18] a river is “far too swift”[19] for swimming; Aslan is “swift of foot”;[20] Chervy has “speed”;[21] Shasta is told to “run now, without a moment’s rest . . . run, run: always run”;[22] he sees a slope of grass and “a little heather running up before him . . . he had only to run.”[23]
Chapter 9 ends with the word “slowly,” signaling that something is going dangerously wrong. When I read The Horse and His Boy as a child, I disliked this long journey across the desert that seemed to get slower and slower. I now realize that I was meant to dislike it!
One way Lewis tries to get us to feel the character of the planet in each Chronicle is by showing us the opposite of its influence. The un-Jovial winter is there in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe so that we will long for Jupiter’s summery spirit to make itself felt. The un-Martial Telmarines in Prince Caspian (those undisciplined dandies) are there to show us how much better the Martial armies of Aslan are. Bree’s lazy idling in The Horse and His Boy helps us feel how vital it is to be quick in this tale.
Of course, Mercury was swift not for the sake of swiftness but because he was “the messenger.” When Shasta sprints off with his message for the King of Archenland, Lewis wants us to think of the traditional picture of Mercury with wings on his heels. (See photo on page 154.)
And in case we are in any doubt about the Mercurial theme of the book, Lewis makes it unmistakable in chapter 4, when Shasta sees a Narnian lord wearing a special hat. It is a steel or silver cap “with little wings on each side.”[24] This is an obvious reference to Mercury’s winged headgear. It was called the “Petasus, or Mercurial hat,”[25] according to Lewis in one of his academic books.
Pauline Baynes, who illustrated the Narnia books, drew a picture for the first edition of The Horse and His Boy showing this winged cap but never knew why Lewis included it. Before she died in 2009, I wrote and asked her, and she said he never told her anything about the planets. In fact, he didn’t tell her what to draw at all. In another letter, this one to Lewis scholar Walter Hooper, Baynes said, “I had rather the feeling that, having got the story written down and out of his mind, that the rest was someone else’s job, and that he wouldn’t interfere.”[26]
Lewis’s silence on this point is ironic since Mercury was believed to make people skilled in speech. This is why, in America, there are Mercury cell phones and why in Britain the main telecommunications company has an image of Mercury as its corporate logo. In “The Planets,” Lewis calls Mercury the “lord of language.”[27] And this aspect is very much at the fore in The Horse and His Boy, as we will now see.
The Lord of Language
From the very start of the story we learn how un-Mercurial the Calormenes are in the way they speak. The Calormenes liked “talking to one another very slowly about things that sounded dull.”[28] We are told of their “loquacity” and “idle words.”[29] We hear their vain repetitions about the Tisroc (“may he live forever”) and are informed by Bree that this is “slaves’ and fools’ talk,” “Southern jargon.”[30]
Here are some examples of Calormene proverbs:
Application to business is the root of prosperity, but those who ask questions that do not concern them are steering the ship of folly toward the rock of indigence.[31]
As a costly jewel retains its value even if hidden in a dung-hill, so old age and discretion are to be respected even in the vile persons of our subjects.[32]
Nothing is more suitable to persons of gravity and decorum than to endure minor inconveniences with constancy.[33]
In contrast, Narnian proverbs are brief, pithy, and witty:
Easily in but not easily out, as the lobster said in the lobster pot![34]
Maybe Apes will grow honest.[35]
Come, live with me and you’ll know me.[36]
Nests before eggs.[37]
At the end of the story Shasta and Aravis attend the grand feast at Anvard. They expect to be bored as the bard and his fiddlers step forward, “for the only poetry they knew was the Calormene kind, and you know now what that was like. But at the very first scrape of the fiddles a rocket seemed to go up inside their heads.”[38]
Rocket is a word that Lewis likes to use in connection with Mercury. For instance, when Mercury descends to Earth in That Hideous Strength, he sets off “skyrockets of metaphor and allusion”[39] in people’s minds, and Lewis uses the word again in relation to Mercury in his book on sixteenth-century literature.
In The Horse and His Boy, the theme of language can also be seen in the way Lewis presents the two horses. Both Bree and Hwin pretended, while living in Calormen, not to be talking animals. Early on, Shasta says to Bree, “I wish you could talk, old fellow.” Bree reveals that he can indeed speak but that, ever since he was taken captive by the Calormenes, he has been pretending to be “dumb and witless like their horses.”[40] As the story progresses and they escape to Narnia, Mercury (that is, Aslan-as-Mercury) frees them from that silent state.
Hearing the Silent Music of Mercury
When we ask why Lewis chose to structure The Horse and His Boy out of Mercurial imagery, the most obvious factor to consider is the depiction of Aslan. The first time Aslan speaks in this story is when he meets Shasta in the mountain pass. It is night, and Shasta doesn’t know who it is who is talking with him in the darkness.
Shasta asks his unwelcome fellow traveler, “Don’t you think it was bad luck to meet so many lions?” Aslan replies, “There was only one lion.” Shasta is confused: “What on earth do you mean? I’ve just told you there were at least two the first night, and—”
He is interrupted: “There was only one; but he was swift of foot.” “How do you know?” asks Shasta.
“I was the lion.” And as Shasta gaped with open mouth and said nothing, the Voice continued. “I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the Horses the new strength of fear for the last mile so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you.”[41]
Aslan sums up—or we might say he incarnates—the spirit of Mercury in his own person. Aslan is “swift of foot”—much swifter than anyone else in this story. Shasta had thought there were several lions, but it turns out they were all one lion. In America the national motto is e pluribus unum—“out of many, one.” The fifty states make up one Union: the United States of America. The United Kingdom is made up of the four nations of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. The many lions and cats in The Horse and His Boy make up one Aslan. Again, this is an example of Mercury’s qualities, that “merry multitude of meeting selves,”[42] as Lewis puts it in “The Planets.”
But Mercury’s influence works both ways. Sometimes he makes one out of many. At other times he makes many out of one. And this helps explain the following exchange between Shasta and Aslan:
“Who are you?” asked Shasta.
“Myself,” said the Voice, very deep and low so that the earth shook: and again “Myself,” loud and clear and gay: and then the third time “Myself,” whispered so softly you could hardly hear it, and yet it seemed to come from all round you as if the leaves rustled with it.[43]
In this passage, Lewis very cleverly uses the Mercurial imagery to suggest that Aslan has three aspects. He is reminding us that God is one God in three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
In mythology, the Greek version of Mercury was sometimes called Hermes Trismegistus, which means “Thrice-Great Hermes,” or “three times great Hermes.” Christians in the Middle Ages, looking back at the classical past, thought that the ancient Greeks had been given a glimpse of the Trinity. This “thrice-great” version of Mercury was—so some people thought—a rough impression of the true God. Jesus Christ taught His disciples to baptize people “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). Three persons but one God.
As well as allowing Lewis to say something about the Holy Trinity, the imagery of Mercury also allowed him to say something about “the divine Word.”
“In the beginning was the Word,” says John at the start of his Gospel (John 1:1). The Word is a title for God, and it is interesting to note that Aslan is not referred to as “Aslan” during his encounter with Shasta in the mountain pass. He is called “the Large Voice,” and finally just “the Voice.”
Shasta, in contrast, has barely any voice at all: “‘Who are you?’ he said, scarcely above a whisper.” In reply, Aslan utters his first recorded words in the story, and they are significant: “One who has waited long for you to speak.”[44]
As Lord of language, Aslan has come both to speak and to be spoken to, but what kind of words does Shasta use when he learns that the Voice in the darkness is the lion who chased him? Shasta doesn’t talk at all. He “gaped with open mouth and said nothing”; then, “after one glance at the Lion’s face he slipped out of the saddle and fell at its feet. He couldn’t say anything but then he didn’t want to say anything, and he knew he needn’t say anything.”[45]
A similar silence falls on Aravis and the horses after their meeting with Aslan at the Hermit’s house: “Strange to say, they felt no inclination to talk to one another about him after he had gone. They all moved slowly away to different parts of the quiet grass and there paced to and fro, each alone, thinking.”[46]
When the Mercurial Aslan gives people the gift of his word, they do not start chattering excitedly. Rather, they are moved to silence. This silence is not, however, simply an absence of words; it is an eloquent silence. This reflects the same spirit the apostle Paul writes about in the letter to the Romans: “We do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8:26).
In his book on prayer, Lewis said that “prayer without words is the best,”[47] and in one of his poems, “The Apologist’s Evening Prayer,” he addresses God as “thou fair Silence,”[48] asking God to free him from all his excessively wordy thoughts.
This is how we should understand what happens in The Horse and His Boy. Aslan, the divine Word, descends upon the children and the horses, or elevates them into his own manner of speech. The characters are thereby saved from being “dumb and witless” and are now able to communicate most truly. They speak through their behavior. Their actions speak louder than words.
Shasta says all he needs to say to Aslan when he slips out of the saddle and falls at his feet. This is a language that is lived or enacted. It is like the language Jesus spoke when he lived and died and rose again. Lewis called Christ’s incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection “a language more adequate”[49] than any other.
After all, what are mere words if they are not filled with the Holy Spirit? Jesus taught His disciples: “In praying do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard for their many words” (Matthew 6:7).
That Lewis never told Pauline Baynes how The Horse and His Boy speaks the language of Mercury should not surprise us. He was imitating something very important about God’s own nature. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). When God’s Son, Jesus, was born into the world as an infant, what happened? The word infant literally means “speechless” (infans in Latin). In other words, the Word became wordless.
Lewis never tells us that Mercury runs throughout The Horse and His Boy, but the Mercurial spirit is nonetheless sounding everywhere in this brilliant story—and those who have ears to hear, let them hear!