I have arrived back in the same territory as the corrupted sporoi in L'Engle's A Wind in the Door, the sporoi who refuse to grow into senes as they're supposed to. Refusing to grow up is akin to wanting The Fall undone—the prelapsarian fallacy that it's possible to go back to Eden somehow, maybe by building a New Eden (after fleeing the undesirables, or purging them.)

Perelandra by #CSLewis is a prelapsarian narrative, one set on Venus no less and involving a tastefully cleaned-up version of Adam and Eve, the King and Queen of Venus (there's no one else on the planet, not counting Elwin Ransom or Prof. Weston) who decide not to Fall. They stay obedient, and thus according to the Christian interpretation of The Fall they stay forever tame and in ignorance of forbidden knowledge, and therefore desexualized (because Christians sexualize the Fall to a degree that would be comical if it hadn't resulted in so many corpses.)

(cont'd)

I have talked extensively about how worldly and secular the contemporary hardline Christians have become, to the point that they're even pretending to be the true guardians of secular scientific knowledge and intellectual traditions. One could say merely that they were "corrupted by The World" (I've said it myself, many times) but...their backs are to the wall, for the simple reason that the Christians are still waiting. The Second Coming has been just round the corner for a wretchedly long time, and the impatience has been worsened by the popularization of apocalyptic narratives (e.g. "The Last Battle" of #CSLewis.)

What a terrible book, full of sins, but none so worse as the appalling ending. Jack Lewis wants to end on a high note even though he's just detonated #Narnia, deliberately blew his meager subcreation to smithereens to give his evangelical American Christian readership a taste of what they wanted: the certainty of Heaven.

(cont'd)

There's also an awkward conflict with the right-wing Christian habit of accusing their worst enemies, e.g. Muslims, of merely being possessed by devils (cf. #CSLewis, who attributes Islam to devil-worship in "The Chronicles of #Narnia").

Demonic possession gives Christians a way of explaining why non-Christians can be so relentless and determined, even though it's an article of faith with them that non-Christians are all broken and miserable persons who've crippled themselves by their purported hatred of God. Demons are spiritual beings, created by the Christian God just like the angels in the Christian cosmogony, so demons just keep going and going. Demons are horrible, in fiction, because they're symbols of the unstoppable and the unrestrained—always hungry, never satiated.

So why would someone demonically possessed take their own life calmly and deliberately?

(cont'd)

In a sense, it's the same thing they've done with Miracles (which #CSLewis explained all neatly and thoroughly, he proves that miracles exist and even that God exists in that particular book): the extreme Christians have scaled down their martyrdoms, so that they're capable of extracting a sensation of martyrdom from (say) beholding a rainbow flag in a shop window.

And thus neither the miracles nor the martyrdoms have much substance left to them. If "miracles" include stock-market windfalls and if "martyrs" include pharmacists refusing to fill out prescriptions, then all the sparkle of specialness has gone out of them. Miracles are meant to be rare, and martyrs aren't even supposed to be happening at all.

But they want martyrs, these Christians. They need to feel like martyrs in order to give their formless shapeless discontents and fears some sort of justification. They need to know it's all adding up to something for them and sadly...martyrdom is all that they were taught to want for themselves. It's been drilled into them, this awful notion that they're warriors who must die on the battlefield...which seems slightly familiar, huh, where have I come across that particular trope before....

(cont'd)

I speak bluntly but I hope truthfully: the legacy of Tolkien has become plainly subordinate to that of #CSLewis. They need Tolkien because he was actually an imaginative and forceful writer and his world-building is in fact painstaking and therefore believable. Jack Lewis was none of those things, but HE is the one whom the Christians must uphold as the truest example of a "good Christian" who is also a great creator and imaginative storyteller.

Once again I reminded that Jack Lewis liked playing Father Christmas. He was a publicity-hound, and thus the right-wing U.S. Christian machine ate Lewis right up. The real Clive Staples Lewis is nowhere to be seen, because his place in the public eye has been taken by the tasteless plaster statue version of C. S. Lewis, the converted pagan, the Apostle to Skeptics, the passionate romancer of Joy Davidman (coughs and almost chokes for a moment), et cetera.

Now that Peter Jackson's made those movies, there's hardly any actual need for Tolkien any longer. Boring writer anyway.

(cont'd)

They've all become far too dependent upon material reality to reinforce a faith that was supposedly pure and abstract: these particular Christians need to SEE their miracles, and thus they're starting to see actual dragons and demons. And that's not...great. I've skirted the edge of such perceptual territory, and my elder sibling was plagued by unwanted visions. It's not fun, but sometimes one can extract a bit of acid humor from commenting on one's own shaky grip on reason. I suspect that at least some of these folks are starting to perceive glitches and liminal perceptions that another person would call simple hallucination—

—ah yes. THAT word. I have a hypothesis as to why the #AI geek community lit upon that disastrously misused word "hallucination" for its confabulating LLM thingies, but I'll have to develop that some other time.

For decade after decade, right-wing Christianity has been marinating in popular fiction that plays havoc with one's sense of reality. They consume vast amounts of horror and, thanks to #CSLewis and imitators, they also have gotten into fantasy in a big way.

(cont'd)

See also #CSLewis again, who has fauns and ægipans and Maenads dancing through #Narnia along with Dionysos. The fearful Lord Dionysos is also terrifying, a god of primordial transformation who laughs at such things as clear distinctions between the "biological sexes", and anyone who's read Euripides's The Bacchae knows just how scary Dionysos really is—so what the heck is he doing prancing through Narnia like he was doing a guest-appearance in a Hallmark Christmas movie?

I don't want to get into Jack Lewis right now but I want to close with this: I think he trifled with forces that were beyond him, thinking that all that stuff was safe and dead and thus could be used to decorate a lightweight children's fantasy. And that causes me to wonder just what Lewis's private life was like, in all the squalid details. I don't want to be prurient but there's already so many signs of trouble, like the Mrs. Moore business which all the modern-day Lewisites (see what I did there?) just sorta kinda sweep under the rug along with other issues such as Tolkien's poor opinion of Lewis's work.

~Chara of Pnictogen