At the beginning of the story the stable housed an unwitting Aslanic imposter, and now houses the terrifying god Tash, summoned by unwitting invaders paying lip service to their own god. And Edmund is much more like me than Adam or Eve–if one might substitute chocolate peanut butter balls for Turkish Delight as the shadow temptation of a deeper concern.īut as the appearance of Father Christmas in the first Narnian chronicle seems to blur the lines between the worlds (there is no Aslan birth narrative, after all), so there is a place in the last chronicle where the worlds seem to meet.Īfter the last great battle for Narnia, with the kings and queens and faithful servants of Narnia pressed to the wall against foreign invaders and Narnian traitors, those loyal to the last king of Narnia, Tirian, are forced into a small stable at the top of a hill. It would be more accurate to say that Aslan is what God would be like wrapped in Narnian flesh. The Deep Magic is different in each cosmos. Christ is not Aslan, per se, because what is broken in our universe is not the same thing that is broken in the Narnian universe. Unlike our great great grand-humans, Adam and Eve, the first Narnians did not flee from Eden. Aslan is not Christ, precisely neither is Edmund the biblical Adam or Judas, nor the White Witch the historical Satan. Lewis’ Chronicles are not allegories like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress or George Orwell’s Animal Farm. And the coming of that Narnian Christmas, too is also the beginning of Narnian Easter.īut do not think there is a one-to-one relationship between our world and the world of Narnia. Likewise, the strange, almost incongruous coming of Father Christmas into the Narnian Woods signals the breaking of Narnia’s long winter, the beginning of the end of the curse. Most of the winter lays ahead, yet I somehow have the resources to face it. Christmas is the first day of the Easter season. The turning of the solstice and the coming for Christmas, for me, is really the birth of spring. To never experience Christmas, where all of eternity tilts towards the sun and light grows once again–to me that would be a great curse. Anyone in my part of the world will immediately know that this is a curse: all those dreary winter nights, locked indoors to escape from the bone-chilling cold, the sun squeezing through a frozen sky only a few hours a day. It is not so much blanketed in white as smothered in it, frozen by it. “Always winter and never Christmas.” This is the condition where we first discover Narnia in The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe.