Brass armillary sphere and a dark globe on a wooden desk beside a worn leather book and blank cards, faint fire-rings over a quiet planet in a stone window

Tool Alpha

C. S. Lewis’s Cosmology

Where Lewis’s heavens follow Scripture, where they come from the medieval picture of the cosmos, and where he made them up.

Thulcandra, the silent planet Earth is the one world whose ruler went bent, was bound in its air, and was cut off from the rest of the heavens.
Every world has an Oyarsa Each planet has a ruling spirit. Lewis takes the word from a twelfth-century Platonist and the idea from the medieval heavens.
Maleldil the Young and the Old One On Mars the creatures know who made the world: Maleldil the Young, who lives with the Old One. The Earthman is the one who needs the catechism.
My name also is Ransom On Perelandra, when Ransom realizes he may have to fight, the Voice tells him the name he bears is also the name of the one who paid the price for his own world.
The eldila Beings of light whose bodies move so fast that ours look like cloud to them. Lewis gave angels a physics.
Aslan sings Narnia into being In The Magician's Nephew, Narnia is made by a song. The stars appear singing, and the Lion's voice calls the land, the animals and the waters into being.
The Bent One Earth's Oyarsa went bent before any life appeared on Earth, made war on the heavens, lost, and was bound. Lewis's word for the devil is a word for something warped.
A fallen power and animal pain Lewis's prose guess that a fallen spirit corrupted the animal world before man appeared. John Lennox quotes it in his book on Genesis 1.
Enemy-occupied territory Lewis's plainest statement of the cosmic war: not two equal powers, but a civil war, a rebellion, and a world held by the rebel.
The Deep Magic The White Witch claims Edmund by the law built into Narnia. Aslan dies in his place, and a deeper magic undoes death. Lewis drew the shape from the popular atonement drama of the Middle Ages.
Perelandra, an unfallen world A second Eve on a world of floating islands, with one command: do not stay overnight on the Fixed Land.
The Un-man Weston arrives on Perelandra and something else is wearing him. Lewis's tempter argues tirelessly and wins by attrition.
Ransom fights the Un-man Ransom concludes that the only way to stop the tempter is to destroy the body it is using, and fights it with his fists. He comes home bleeding from the heel.
The Screwtape Lowerarchy Devils as an organization, with ranks, reports and quotas. Lewis opened the book by naming the two ways to get devils wrong.
Tash is real The Calormene god turns out to be an actual being, and he comes when he is called.
Emeth A Calormene who served Tash all his life finds himself welcomed by Aslan. Lewis's most debated scene.
That hideous strength and Babel The title comes from a sixteenth-century poem about the Tower of Babel, and the novel ends with Belbury's leaders speaking gibberish at a banquet.
The heavens, not space Ransom finds that space is not dead and dark but an ocean of light, and decides the old name was better.
The descent of the gods In That Hideous Strength the planetary rulers, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter, come down to St. Anne's. They are on God's side.
The macrobes are the bent eldila Belbury's scientists believe they are in contact with a higher form of life. The household at St. Anne's knows what they are: Earth's own fallen eldila.
The Great Dance Perelandra ends with a vision of everything that exists moving in a pattern so large that every part is the centre.
The stars are people Ramandu is a retired star. Coriakin is a star being punished. Lewis's Narnian stars are persons with histories.
Myth and fact On Perelandra the line between myth and fact disappears. Lewis's hero comes to think that what is myth in one world may be fact in another.
The fall as a Socratic myth In The Problem of Pain Lewis offers a picture of the fall: an animal form perfected over ages, then made man. His word for it is a myth in the Socratic sense.