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

And then somehow, by the mid-20th century, it was possible to sing hymns to Pan in the faces of Caltech rocket boys—that does mean something special, to me. It's a sign of the kind of stubborn faith in a god and a creed which Christians had previously claimed was only possible with them. The old gods were supposedly dead, irrelevant, no more capable of sustaining a faith than a spent popsicle stick. #CSLewis famously claimed that he himself was a converted pagan (as per usual, he massively exaggerates upon reality) who was talked round into believing that paganism was totally superseded now. Christianity was the realization of Classical paganism, somehow, all that was best in it.

I sort of made myself believe that, enough so that I could go through with Catholic conversion. My taste of Seattle neo-paganism had been dispiriting, and I thus was disposed to believe in Lewis's declaration, supposedly due to Tolkien's saving influence, that Christianity was the true inheritor of the Classical pagan traditions.

But I was wrong! Lewis was wrong, and Tolkien was wrong. "Reconstructed" paganism turned out to have more life in it than I'd guessed; there's small groups and organizations not just in the United States or Great Britain but in many places round the Mediterranean. Neo-paganism is managing to take root even in Greece, in the teeth of fierce opposition from the Greek Orthodox Church.

(cont'd)

There's no use denying it or complaining about it; the deed is done and now there's a substantial body of human beings who have wrenched themselves loose from what better educated persons think of as historical and documented, so that they can play around in a past that's far more colorful and magical, and #Tolkien has gained a lot of new fans of that sort—greatly assisted by Peter Jackson, whose films of The Lord of the Rings are wretched as literary adaptation but superb at making Middle-Earth, some warped corporate version of Middle-Earth anyway, feel like a very real place which exactly resembles parts of Aotearoa (New Zealand).

Racists have thoroughly colonized and corrupted the Tolkien fandom. But perhaps it's worth asking whether Tolkien merited "fandom" in the first place, while numerous other great works of fantasy go without press notices. Why was Tolkien elevated to such extreme heights? I suspect that the answer may lie with the extremist #Christians, because in assisting with the exaltation of J. R. R. Tolkien they were in fact preparing a special place for their darling, #CSLewis. Tolkien's reputation has become chained to that of Lewis, for Tolkien has been awarded the dubious prize of being the fellow who brought Lewis to Jesus.

But not to Catholicism, thank heaven for that. That's why Tolkien must always be second banana to Jack Lewis in the end: he's not the right sort of Christian for that crowd.

(cont'd)

I'm sorry but that juicy little detail suggests an obvious conclusion: Cunanan went on his murder spree because he thought Jesus wanted him to do it. He'd lived a profligate life—I'm not saying that as a moral judgment on profligacy, it's just the truth in this case—at odds with his Catholic mother from whom he'd run away, and perhaps when Cunanan snapped he figured he was going on a one-man revenge spree against degeneracy, bolstered by his admiration for #CSLewis.

Now that's pure speculation and unprovable, because it seems that Cunanan left behind no evidence of planning or forethought for his crimes. There's no way to know just what his reasons were, but...well, he did haul a lot of Jack Lewis books with him, as he was doing it. Make of that what you will.

Heaven only knows what Cunanan saw happening round him, especially in a filthy-rich whıte hideaway like La Jolla. He might have had good reasons for thinking he'd fallen deep into a pit of corruption and maybe ought to do something about it.

(cont'd)

I can't imagine that this existence permitted Cunanan much dignity or respect, certainly not among the right-wing whıte aristocrats of La Jolla. One day in 1997 some limit was reached, something gave in Cunanan's psyche, and after that he went on a multi-state spree that ended in Miami Beach with the murder of Versace; several days later Cunanan ended his own life, leaving no note or explanation.

To quote a Maxim article about the end of Cunanan's spree:

Police found no motive for the killings in Cunanan's belongings, which amounted to some hydrocortisone cream and the books of CS Lewis.

...excuse me, what?

q.v. https://web.archive.org/web/20120

The FBI found only a few personal belongings near Cunanan's body, including a large collection of C.S. Lewis books and a few tubes of hydrocortisone cream.

q.v. https://abc13.com/post/andrew-cunanan-inside-the-twisted-and-mysterious-versace-murders/2193155/

WHAT? Cunanan didn't merely own a collection of #CSLewis books, but he took it with him on a murder spree??

(cont'd)