CS Lewis' decidedly weird novel, Till We Have Faces, I first read when I was nineteen or twenty. It quite messed with my head but in some very good ways. I read it again while living in the house in Mount Pleasant and along with George Macdonald's "Lilith" and "The Four Gated City" by Doris Lessing it became for me a thematic work of fiction.
Till We Have Faces was published in 1956, the year of my birth. It is subtitled "A Myth Retold" because it is Lewis' spin on the Greek myth of Eros and Psyche. Look up the myth on Google if you want because I am not going to describe it here, but CS Lewis' take on it.
In an ancient kingdom, likely somewhere in Eastern Europe, north of Greece was the Kingdom of Glome. The king was like a figure from Shakespeare, perhaps Lawrence Olivier or Richard Burton playing Richard III. He had three daughters: the oldest, Orual, was very ugly; Redival, the second daughter, was very pretty, and Psyche, the youngest, who was their half-sister was extraordinarily beautiful. Orual, upon the childbed death of her stepmother, took Psyche under her care, though she was still herself a child. A tight, almost incestuous bond formed between them.
They were educated by a wise Greek who had been purchased by the king, the girls' father as a slave. Orual, with an incredible thirst for knowledge and wisdom, became deeply attached to him. Redival was more interested in attracting boys. Psyche, as she grew, like her elder half-sister became an eager student of the Fox (the Greek's nickname, though he was really named Lysias.)
Just when Psyche reaches puberty, and has become lovelier than ever, there is a great drought in the land. The priest claims that the gods are angry because Psyche has been compared to their great goddess Ungit and that now she is jealous and demands payment. It is decreed that Psyche must be sacrificed to Ungit's son, the God of the Mountain.
Psyche is taken up the mountain where she is tied to a tree. The God of the Mountain has her rescued and receives her into his palace as his bride. Meanwhile Orual after some weeks of morning goes up to the mountain to see if she can bury the remains of her sister. Instead she meets Psyche, alive, well and radiant with joy and good health though she is dressed in rags. Orual is unable to see the palace or the riches or the beautiful clothes that Psyche is wearing. She insists that Psyche is deluded, gives her a knife and a lamp and tells her to expose the god and kill him. The god has appeared to Psyche only in darkness. She has never seen him and he has sworn her to secrecy about him. Psyche waits for him that night, lights the lamp when she hears her husband approach. Suddenly everything is destroyed, a huge storm destroys the palace and Psyche wanders out into the wide world, a weeping exile.
In the meantime Orual begins to go out in public wearing a veil because she is deeply shamed both by her ugliness and by her betrayal of the being she loved more than anything in the world. Her father dies and she becomes queen, an accomplished stateswoman and warrior both. No one sees her face and eventually many strange and wondrous myths arise about her face. It is eventually thought that she must be a woman of great beauty. She is a wise and able ruler and there are parallels between herself and her father and Queen Elizabeth I and Henry VIII. She never marries and lives and reigns for many long years always carrying in a secret place of her being the unyielding guilt that she destroyed her half-sister's happiness.
Orual becomes old and soon death approaches. In a series of dreams and visions she meets with her sister Psyche, who has become a goddess. She has been writing a long manuscript which she calls her complaint to the gods: that they act in secret, that they are capricious, that it is so hard to discern their true will and desire for humankind. Finally she writes, how can we expect that the gods will show themselves to us until we ourselves have faces...and then she dies.
Reading this amazing novel over and over again has done much to reinforce to me the importance of yielding up those things that are dearest to us and that by not doing so we end up enslaving ourselves. It tells me about the importance of trust, of trusting in God regardless of how dark and unknowable appear his will and his counsels. It tells me that as long as we ourselves remain unknowable to ourselves that we can hardly expect that God should ever reveal himself to us.
Tomorrow I will write about the Four Gated City.
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