Sooner or later, though, your luck will run out. You’ll find yourself up against a mastermind who puts more faith in a 9mm slug than in an elaborate laser deathtrap, who considers a knife in the belly more efficient than an exotic Oriental assassin’s projectiles and poisons, and who really isn’t interested in games or speeches. When that happens, the mistakes we have pointed out here really may be critical. They may well be what gets you killed. Your forty-year streak of luck may not last forever.
Which brings us to something we’ve wondered about. You know, 007, most operatives don’t last forty years in the field. Even those who survive every assignment generally retire before reaching that particular milestone. Usually there’s some incident, a call a little too close, a rescue a bit too narrow, that prompts them to say, “That’s it, then; time to pack it in.” Sometimes it’s just the obvious encroachment of age—the need for reading glasses to make out the hidden message, perhaps, or turning down a job because it conflicts with scheduled gall bladder surgery. You, it seems, don’t have those little warnings. You don’t appear to be susceptible to the normal ravages of time.
That may be your most critical mistake of all. Your repeated rejuvenations and refusal to age beyond a certain point are quite amazing, and we really don’t understand how you manage it, but in the end this may be your undoing. It’s just odds. If you keep doing this forever, sooner or later your luck will run out.
If you were to age like a normal human being, then you’d be forced to retire, to live out your days in peace and honor, instead of continuing to risk your neck for Queen and country. We wouldn’t keep sending you out there to face man-eating sharks, orbital death rays, steel-toothed killers, and the like.
For that matter, with your record you could retire right now if you chose, ageless or not, and no one would think the less of you. That you choose not to demonstrates either remarkable patriotism, adrenalin addiction, or a death-wish—or perhaps all three.
Perhaps you prefer to die in harness. If so, then just keep on as you are, letting everyone know who you are, blasting everything in sight, falling into bed with every attractive female you see, accepting every assignment. Even if you continue to somehow stave off old age indefinitely, sooner or later, the odds will catch up with you.
It may be fun, 007, but it can’t last forever.
Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
On the Origins of Evil in Narnia
Originally published in Narnia Revisited
“The Lion growled so that the earth shook (but his wrath was not against me) and said, It is false. Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him, for I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted.”
—The Last Battle, Chapter XV
In Narnia’s final days, a Talking Ape named Shift and a Calormene nobleman called Rishda Tarkaan declared that Aslan, the Lion of Narnia, and Tash, the vulture-headed god of the Calormenes, were two aspects of the same being, and convinced many Narnian creatures of this.
Aslan himself explicitly denies it, as quoted above. Aslan was the true creator of Narnia, and Tash was the god of all that is vile, and the two are opposites, not parts of a larger whole.
But that leads to an inevitable question: Then where did Tash come from?
There can be no doubt that Tash does really exist; he appears onstage in The Last Battle, and eventually carries Rishda Tarkaan off to a hideous, if unspecified, fate. But how did he come to be in the world of Narnia, a world Aslan created?
Lewis never explains that.
In fact, Lewis tells us very little about Tash. He is never mentioned in five of the seven books in the series. In the fifth, The Horse and His Boy, Tash is referred to repeatedly as the chief god in the Calormene pantheon, but we are given no reason to believe he actually exists at all; other Calormene deities, such as Zardeenah and Azaroth, are spoken of, often literally in the same breath as Tash, and we never do see any sign that they have a basis in reality. There are no tales about visits from Tash, no mention of his appearance anywhere. Aslan does tie the punishment of the despicable Prince Rabadash to the temple of Tash in the Calormene capital of Tashbaan, but that is clearly Aslan’s doing, and not evidence of Tash’s existence.
But then, in the final volume, Tash follows his worshipers into Narnia, where he can be seen and his presence felt by most (though not all) of the characters. The rest of the Calormene pantheon does not accompany him; in fact, they’re never mentioned at all, even by the Calormenes.
How does that work?
Was Tash present all along, and simply not concerned with the doings of mortals, or at least not the ones we read about, while the other Calormene gods were mere myth? That would seem to fit the evidence well enough—were it not for the sixth Narnia book, The Magician’s Nephew.
In that story, we get to see the creation of Narnia’s world. Aslan, the great Lion, son of the Emperor-Over-The-Sea, sings Narnia into existence—a genesis interestingly similar to the one Lewis’ friend and compatriot, J.R.R. Tolkien, gave his own Middle Earth in the tales collected in The Silmarillion. In this beginning was not just the word, but the melody, as well.
One major difference, however, is that Narnia’s creation is witnessed by four people and a horse from our own world, as well as a wicked witch from the dead world of Charn. Aslan’s reaction to the witch’s presence is to note that an evil has been brought into this new world, not yet five hours old.
The implication would certainly seem to me to be that there was no evil in it before that—and therefore no Tash.
Then where does Tash come in? How does he fit the story?
In some ways, the history of Narnia parallels the Biblical account of the history of our own world. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first book in the series, while ostensibly a fairy-tale adventure, retells in its way the Passion of Christ—The Great Lion, Aslan, son of the Emperor-over-the-Sea, gives up his life that others might be saved, and then returns from death.
The next four books really are mostly just fairy-tale adventures, though Aslan is always there, putting things right in the end. Then in The Magician’s Nephew, Lewis goes back to show us Narnia’s Genesis, complete with a walled garden and forbidden fruit, and Jadis of Charn playing the role of the Serpent—but Digory, unlike Adam and Eve, resists temptation, and does not eat the apple, so that Narnia’s history is happier than our own. The presence of the White Witch ensures that it’s not all happy, by any means, but it’s better.
And the final volume, The Last Battle, is Narnia’s Apocalypse, with Shift the Ape as the Anti-Christ, Stable Hill as Armageddon, and Tash as Satan, the dragon. Lewis even calls it The Last Battle; how can it be about anything but Armageddon?
It’s not a retelling or recasting of the whole of Revelation, of course; even had he wanted to, Lewis probably couldn’t have worked the whore of Babylon into the story, nor are there angels opening seven seals. Besides, Lewis said in his other writings that he did not mean the Narnia stories as allegory; they aren’t biblical history in a clever disguise, but the history of another world where God is present in the form of the lion Aslan, rather than the man Jesus.
But all created realms must have a beginning and an end, and Narnia’s were clearly meant to be similar, but not identical, to God’s plans for our own world. There is a final battle, and there is a beast—poor Puzzle the donkey—and his false prophet, Shift the Ape, who rule over Narnia just as the Anti-Christ in Chapter Thirteen of Revelation shall rule all the world except the saved.
Revelation 13:15 can be seen as a passable description of Shift’s hold over the Narn
ians: “And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.” Shift’s ability to present his false Aslan is what compels the Narnians to obey him, and the Calormenes kill those who resist.
Tash, then, is pretty obviously equivalent to Satan the deceiver, the dragon whose servants make war on the righteous. Chapter Twenty of Revelation tells us Satan will be cast into the bottomless pit when judgment is at hand, and so Aslan sends Tash away.
So that’s the role Tash plays, but the problem remains: Where did Tash come from? He wasn’t there at the creation of Narnia; in The Magician’s Nephew the role of Satan the corruptor and tempter is filled by the White Witch, not by a vulture-headed god. And the White Witch was killed, quite thoroughly, in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; Narnia should have been free of evil after that.
But we know it wasn’t.
In our world, in the Christian view, Satan was present from the start; it was Satan who took the form of a serpent and tempted Eve. In Narnia, the only tempter seen was the White Witch; Tash was not there.
Lewis carefully explained how the White Witch arrived in Narnia. In Prince Caspian he made a point of explaining that the Telmarine invaders who ruled Narnia were descended from a band of pirates from our world. Narnia was created without evil, and without a human race—but a married couple from our world provided the human inhabitants of Narnia and Archenland, and the White Witch brought in evil. The pirates of Telmar later added more of both.
But where did Tash come in?
For that matter, where did the Calormenes who worshiped Tash come from? And the Emerald Witch who ensorcelled Prince Rilian in The Silver Chair? They’re never explained, either. The Calormenes are first mentioned (spelled with a K instead of a C) in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and not described beyond the fact that they buy slaves; we get much more about them in The Horse and His Boy, but no explanation of how they came to be running a great empire to the south of Narnia. And the Emerald Witch is assumed by Prince Rilian to be of the same kind as the White Witch—but since we learn in The Magician’s Nephew that Jadis was the last survivor of the world of Charn, we know that can’t be correct. There must be another explanation.
Well, the easiest explanation for the Emerald Witch and the Calormenes is simply that there were openings to other worlds now and then—perhaps our own, in the case of the Calormenes, perhaps others we know nothing about. There is no proof that the Calormenes were, as Lewis called us, sons of Adam and daughters of Eve—when Aslan speaks to the Calormene Aravis in The Horse and His Boy, he never calls her “daughter of Eve,” though almost all the girls from our world are addressed as such at some point.
Lewis never tells us whether this explanation is the correct one or not—but then, why should he? It’s not part of the stories he tells us. Aslan says in The Horse and His Boy, “I tell no one any story but his own,” and it seems likely that Lewis, too, preferred to stick to one story at a time.
So while we’re never told, it’s perfectly reasonable to say that the Emerald Witch and the Calormenes wandered in from other worlds, just by happenstance, and stayed, either because they liked the world they found themselves in, or because they couldn’t find the way back.
Tash, though—could he be there by simple chance? He’s no mere enchantress, nor a man of any sort. He is plainly, if not actually a god, something more (or less) than mortal. Surely, divinities of any sort do not accidentally walk through transmundane portals.
Aslan says Tash is his opposite; how thoroughly does he mean that? Aslan created Narnia—and Aslan destroyed it, in the end, so it’s not an issue of creation versus destruction. Nor are they equal—Aslan is clearly superior, in that when he orders Tash to begone, Tash is gone. No, it appears to be purely in moral terms that the two are opposites, Aslan the incarnation of all that is good, Tash the embodiment of evil.
But perhaps there’s something more. The one time we hear Tash speak, he says, “Thou hast called me into Narnia, Rishda Tarkaan. Here I am. What hast thou to say?”
When people call on Aslan, he often doesn’t answer; he is not a tame lion. He may summon others, as he several times summons English children to aid Narnia, but he is not himself subject to summons.
Tash, however, is summoned by Rishda Tarkaan, even though the Tarkaan himself did not believe in Tash’s existence. I would hardly go so far as to say he’s a tame monster, but might it be that this is another way in which he is Aslan’s opposite? Perhaps he does not guide men; rather, he is guided by them.
He is in Narnia because the Calormenes summoned him thither. He is in Narnia’s world, in Calormen, because the Calormenes unknowingly summoned him. Just as Digory brought the first evil into an innocent world, in the form of Jadis of Charn, later known as the White Witch, so did the people of Calormen, through their ferocity and cruelty, bring in Tash. It might even be that some Telmarine magician inadvertently brought the Emerald Witch to Narnia’s northern frontier, that all the evils visited upon that land were brought by men.
It’s a theory that fits the facts, but Lewis does not tell us, so it remains only a theory.
It’s a theory, however, that fits not just what we’re told about Narnian history, but also suits Lewis’ theology. In his other writings about Christianity he sets forth very plainly the idea that all good comes from God, and all evil from mankind’s refusal to accept God. As will surely come as news to no one familiar with the Narnia books, in the world of Narnia Aslan is the Son of God, for the Emperor-over-the-Sea can be nothing and no one other than God the Father.
Aslan created Narnia, but right from the start there were those who refused to acknowledge him—Digory’s Uncle Andrew did not allow himself to understand Aslan’s words, and convinced himself that the song of creation itself was just a lion’s roaring. Jadis, the White Witch, knew perfectly well who and what Aslan was, but refused to concede his authority, and tried to claim the world he had created as her own. Both rejected the joy Aslan offered in favor of their own pre-existing selfishness.
And that, to Lewis, was the essence of evil—selfishness, the inability to put anyone else’s needs or wants above one’s own. Nor did he see this as a small thing, easily escaped. In his short fantasy The Great Divorce he described damned souls allowed to visit Heaven, and given a chance to stay if they could, just for a moment, really think of someone other than themselves—and most of them can’t do it. Selfish evil, even very petty evil, can be seductive, addictive, something that traps a soul and separates it forever from divine grace.
In many ways The Great Divorce is a direct ancestor of The Last Battle—the descriptions of Heaven in The Great Divorce are very similar to the descriptions of Aslan’s country, the true Narnia, in the final chapters of The Last Battle, and many of the issues confronted by the ghosts in Divorce are reiterated among the Talking Animals and other Narnian creatures in how they react to the false Aslan. In particular, the Dwarfs in The Last Battle and their refusal to see the salvation Aslan offers them are very much like the ghosts who refuse to accept the reality of Heaven in Divorce, and quickly board the bus that will take them back to Hell—or who decide not to take the bus out of Hell in the first place.
So, if The Great Divorce is considered a look at Lewis’ views of Heaven, and what determines whether a soul is damned or not, and The Last Battle is a presentation of how those theories apply to Narnia, is there anything in The Great Divorce that might provide an explanation for the presence of a real Tash? Is there a Satan who rules over Lewis’ dismal, rainy Hell, dragging the souls of the damned down into its dreary grey streets?
No. There isn’t. This is, in fact, pretty much the only point of theological disagreement between the two stories. Hell, in The Great Divorce, is an anarchy created by its inhabitants; no one rules, there are no demons, no devils, but only unhappy people making each other miserable. The only character who could possibly b
e construed as a lord of the damned is the bus driver, and it’s quite clear that he’s a power for good, rather than evil—either one of the blessed, or an angel, giving the damned another chance at salvation.
But that’s not to say there are no demonic creatures in The Great Divorce; on the contrary, there are several. There’s an evil little lizard who whispers in a ghost’s ear, representing his addiction to lust, and a sort of marionette that takes over one poor dead soul, representing the victim persona he puts on.
And all of these were created by the people they torment.
Perhaps, then, the Calormenes created Tash. Their centuries of rejecting Aslan and calling him a demon, their selfish and brutal society built on slavery, eventually made their evil manifest as an actual Tash. Uncle Andrew was able to transform the speech of the beasts, including the Lion himself, to mere growling and roaring; the Dwarfs could see and feel the interior of the stable rather than the realm that truly lay beyond the door. Why, then, could not the Calormenes create their own deity?
This would be yet another way in which Tash would be Aslan’s opposite; Aslan created the world’s inhabitants, and the world’s inhabitants created Tash.
Naturally, as the world’s creator, Aslan would still be infinitely more powerful than this monstrous godling.
This theory would also explain why Aslan called Rishda Tarkaan “lawful prey” for Tash—because it was Rishda Tarkaan and his kind who had summoned Tash into existence in the first place, through their own evil. Thus it was Rishda Tarkaan’s own evil that truly carried him off to a hideous and unknown fate, and that’s exactly how Lewis says, in almost all his writing, that reality works. Each of the damned creates his own Hell.
And Tash is the Hell the Calormenes have created for themselves, thereby providing the Satan needed to oppose God in the last battle.
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