In “Till We Have Faces,” myth’s ability to convey truth is invaluable because of the human inability to comprehend the divine. Nevertheless, myths can be obscure or confusing because the truths they express transcend human reason.
In Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis uses myth to illuminate the struggle to comprehend the divine and the universal human desire to be god. Lewis retells Apuleius’s myth of Cupid and Psyche from the perspective of Orual, Psyche’s older sister, who narrates the story. In his novel, Lewis shifts the focus of the myth to the human struggle to understand the divine by making Cupid’s palace invisible to Orual and the other mortals. Several of the characters in the novel construct different narratives about the nature of humanity, the gods, and the world around them as a result of the mysteriousness of the gods. In Till We Have Faces, Orual’s struggle to understand the gods is linked to her struggle against them. Orual must face the reality of who she truly is before she can understand the gods because she is projecting her own character onto them. As a consequence of her desire to be god, Orual seeks to dominate and possess the people in her life.
Lewis has a unique understanding of myth, which affects the way that he writes Till We Have Faces. Lewis never provided a clear or simple definition of myth as he understands it, but in his book An Experiment in Criticism, he gives six characteristics which can help a reader identify a myth. A myth is extra-literary, which means that it has “value independent of its embodiment in any literary work,” and it also delights the reader without “such usual narrative attractions as suspense or surprise” (Lewis, An Experiment 41, 43). Thirdly, Lewis writes that when reading a myth, “we do not project ourselves at all strongly into the characters” (44). This is because myths deal with universal truths rather than particular people, even when a myth tells a particular story. This also fits well with his fourth characteristic of myth, which is that myths are always “fantastic” and deal with the supernatural (44). Lewis’s final two characteristics focus on the reader’s experience and reaction: myth is both “grave” and “awe-inspiring” (44). The second part of Till We Have Faces becomes more numinous and mythic as Orual begins to experience visions and divine revelations. However, the entirety of Till We Have Faces expresses a universal truth embedded in Orual’s individual life story. John Randolph Willis writes, “The main theme is Orual’s psychological journey to self-realization and a conversion that helps her to understand the meaning of the world correctly” (18). Orual’s development is a particular example of humanity’s larger experience.
Besides being a mythic retelling, Till We Have Faces also contains several myths within the story itself. The most obvious of these is the Istra myth, the tale of Cupid and Psyche (Istra), which a simple priest tells Orual in the last chapter of Part 1. This storyline of this Istra myth matches exactly with the traditional Roman Cupid and Psyche story; therefore, it naturally fulfills most of Lewis’s criteria. Charles Huttar notes that when Lewis first considered adapting the Cupid and Psyche myth he “had been reading the Frazer’s Golden Bough and already, as an undergraduate, was interested not just in telling a charming tale but also in conveying a significant truth, for which he would later come to understand myth as the vehicle” (34). In Till We Have Faces, Lewis uses the Istra myth to reveal Orual’s true character, which itself contains a revelation about the nature of human affection.
Although some of Lewis’s characteristics of myth appear largely irrelevant to Till We Have Faces itself, since it is a modern novel with sympathetic protagonist and suspenseful plot, they do apply to certain myths within the novel. Specifically, these characteristics demonstrate that the two primary worldviews held about the gods—the Fox’s philosophy and the Ungit religion—also function as myths in some ways. These worldviews provide non-narrative explanations of the supernatural. As Lewis mentions in An Experiment in Criticism, myths do not need to be a full story in the literary sense, and so these worldviews need not resemble the Istra story to qualify as myths (41). Instead, they can fulfill the function of a myth by imparting truth to the human heart. The Ungit religion is the more mythic of the two because the Fox’s philosophy frequently explains away the supernatural, whereas the Ungit religion embraces the experience of the numinous in people’s lives. The conflict between these two worldviews is clearly shown in Orual’s own heart as she struggles to understand how to view the gods and the world around her. Both these worldviews and the Istra myth reflect different ways of viewing the world, and they all impart different pieces of truth to Orual and to Lewis’s audience.
Lewis changes Apuleius’s version of the Cupid and Psyche tale to reflect what he saw as the primary issue of the myth: the human inability to perceive the divine. He felt comfortable reinterpreting the story because he regarded Apuleius simply as the transmitter of the myth, not its author (Menzies 28). In Apuleius’s version, Psyche’s sisters persuade her to betray her husband Cupid because they are jealous of her beautiful palace and her happiness (Clark 108). Lewis’s retelling significantly shifts from Apuleius’s version by emphasizing that Orual could not see Psyche’s palace: “The central alteration of my own version consists in making Psyche’s palace invisible to normal, mortal eyes—if making is not the wrong word for something which forced itself upon me, almost at my first reading of the story, as the way the thing must have been” (Lewis, Till We 356). Before his conversion to Christianity, Lewis believed the older sister (eventually the character Orual) was right not to believe in the invisible divine things because they did not exist, according to his materialistic understanding of the world (Schakel, Till We 282). After his conversion, however, Lewis’s affirmation of supernatural reality causes him to condemn rather than condone Orual’s inability to understand the gods. Peter Schakel points out that “Psyche’s sisters could not have seen the god’s palace because they did not believe in divine mysteries” (283). Orual’s struggle to understand the gods becomes a significant part of Till We Have Faces.
Because people cannot perfectly or clearly comprehend the divine, humans can hold very different understandings of the gods. In the kingdom of Glome, there are two primary views of the gods, neither of which Orual herself completely agrees with. The first view is the religion of Glome and the worship of its primary deity Ungit, a fertility goddess who demands human sacrifice: “I came to tell him all about Ungit, about the girls who are kept in her house, and the presents brides have to make to her, and how we sometimes, in a bad year, have to cut someone’s throat and pour the blood over her” (Lewis, Till We 8). The worship of Ungit centers around sexual relationships (whether marriage or prostitution) and blood sacrifice, i.e., the act of creating life and the fluid of life. Her primary worshipper is the old Priest, who recognizes the relationship between sacrifice and fertility as well as the inaccessibility of the gods: “[Greek wisdom] brings no rain and grows no corn; sacrifice does both… Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood” (58). Chad Schrock identifies this quality of mystery and rational incomprehensibility as holiness according to Rudolph Otto’s definition, entailing darkness, awe, dread (14). This is the center of the religion of Ungit: a faceless, unknowable goddess demanding love and blood.
The second worldview is expressed by Orual’s Greek tutor, the Fox, who advocates for rationalism and embodies a combination of Stoicism and aspects of Platonic thought. David Clark writes that “Lewis brought the Fox into the story to represent the logic made so famous by Greek philosophy,” and the Fox teaches Orual to use her intellect to reason out what she thinks is right (118). Based off his logic, the Fox directly opposes the mystical religion of Ungit with its conflation of love and devouring, sacrifice and procreation: “‘Do you not see, Master, said the Fox, ‘that the Priest is talking nonsense? A shadow is to be an animal which is also a goddess which is also a god, and loving is to be eating—a child of six would talk more sense’” (Lewis, Till We 57). As a Stoic, the Fox is a rationalist and a materialist. He encourages Orual in her belief that the palace is not real because it is invisible (Schakel, Reason 84). An often-overlooked part of the Fox’s philosophy is the tension between his love for beautiful poetry about the gods and his Platonic (or at least Socratic) contempt for the poets’ depictions of the gods acting like people: “Not that this ever really happened… It’s only lies of poets, lies of poets, child. Not in accordance with nature” (Lewis, Till We 9). This is the Fox’s only Platonic belief; his Stoic materialism makes him opposed to Plato’s world of pure forms (Myers 210). His belief in the separation between the Divine Nature and human acts or characteristics revolts at the idea of Psyche’s unseen lover being a god, which he describes as profane and ridiculous (Lewis, Till We 162). For the Fox, the divine is not personal and is therefore unknowable and not present in human lives.
In the first part of Till We Have Faces, Orual struggles to discern which of these worldviews is true. Schrock points out that Orual intuitively despises the gods because they disgust her physical senses with their stench and blood and they revolt her morality with their capricious behavior towards their devotees (15). However, even in her childhood Orual instinctively disagrees with the Fox’s view of ethereal, impersonal gods who do not feel human emotions. The Fox can say Psyche is “prettier than Aphrodite herself” without fear of divine retribution because he believes “the Divine Nature is not like that. It has no envy” (Lewis, Till We 27). Orual’s disagreement with him is based on sensory impressions—“at his words, though on that summer day the rocks were too hot to touch, it was as if a soft, cold hand had been laid on my left side”—not rational argument: “But whatever he said, I knew it is not good to talk that way about Ungit” (27). This seemingly small moment reveals Orual’s belief that the gods wish to preserve the distinction between themselves and humans, her fear of divine retribution at human over-reaching, and that her opinions of the gods are more informed by her senses and instincts than the Fox’s rational argument.
After the sacrifice of Psyche, Orual switches between both worldviews in her battle against the gods. Although Orual allows herself to be persuaded by the Fox’s rationalism in the case of Psyche’s invisible palace, it is only an excuse to escape the truth about the gods. She is willing to believe anything except the truth, so she finds both Bardia’s explanation that Psyche’s husband is the horrible Shadowbrute and the Fox’s explanation of that he is an escaped convict “too plain and evident to allow me any hope of doubt” (164). Later, Orual resolves that choosing between Bardia’s view and the Fox’s is irrelevant because “both thought that some evil or shameful thing had taken Psyche for its own” (172). This is exactly what she wishes to think to justify her taking Psyche back. It does not matter which worldview Orual chooses to believe in this moment because she can twist either to support her war with the gods.
As queen of Glome, Orual employs tactics she associates with the Ungit as well as the Fox’s rationalism in her fight with the gods. The primary characteristic of Ungit that Orual adopts is choosing to always go veiled as “a sort of treaty with [her] ugliness” (205). Schakel notes that her physical veil eventually becomes a way to symbolically hide her inner ugliness and bury her old identity, transforming Orual into the Queen (Reason 56). Through the wearing of her veil, Orual mimics the gods’ holy mystery, inspiring fear in the King, respect in Arnom the priest, fascination in Prince Trunia, and terror and admiration in her subjects (Lewis, Till We 210, 212, 259-60). Schrock writes that Orual is not consciously imitating the gods, but she is fully aware of her veil’s religious effect, and it is implied that she thinks the gods may be hiding ugliness behind their mystery as well (24). Orual imitates the gods when she fights them because she wants to be god herself. Curtis Gruenler applies Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic rivalry to Till We Have Faces to argue that Orual’s “unrecognized rivalries with Psyche and the god make her at once doubt the existence of the true god and aspire to be a sort of god in competition with others for the lives of her subjects” (256). Orual attempts to make Glome more Greek and more rational so that make she and her kingdom are not dependent upon the gods. Orual wishes to be a divine benefactor where those she loves—Psyche, Bardia, the Fox—depend on her for their happiness and well-being but she herself needs nothing from anyone.
In Part 2 of Till We Have Faces, Orual learns through a series of revelations that the evil she saw in the gods was a projection of her own identity and not reflective of the gods’ true nature. Orual’s first revelation is the identification of herself with Ungit, who Orual has despised as the devouring love goddess. Bardia’s wife Ansit confronts Orual with the greedy devouring nature of Orual’s own love and compares it to the gods: “Perhaps you who spring from the gods love like the gods. Like the Shadowbrute. They say the loving and the devouring are all one, don’t they?” (Lewis, Till We 300). In the vision that follows this encounter, Orual is forced to gaze at her reflection in a mirror, and she sees that “It was I who was Ungit. That ruinous face was mine I was that Batta-like thing, that all-devouring, womb-like, yet barren thing” (315). The very thing which Orual has hated in the gods is her own nature. The second half of Orual’s revelation is that the gods are not like her. The evil she projected onto them was hers alone, and their nature is entirely different than the dark, sensuously disgusting holiness she perceived in them. The god—Psyche’s husband—who arrives to judge Orual is accompanied by brightening air and sweet smells; his presence brings terror and joy; and the god himself is “the most dreadful, the most beautiful, the only dread and beauty there is” (350). The true Divine Nature transcends the paltry, reductive explanations of the Fox’s rationalistic worldview and the dark, ugly, bloody mysteries of the Ungit religion.
Besides gaining a true understanding of herself and the gods, Orual receives a revelation about the worldviews of the Fox and Ungit. After she makes her complaint, the specter of the Fox confesses to her and the gods that he is to blame for Orual’s misunderstanding because he taught her to speak glibly about the gods—to profess an empty, reductive philosophy as “thin and clear as water” (336). The Fox also reveals the falsity of the Ungit religion but says that it has more truth than his maxims: “The Priest knew at least that there must be sacrifices. They will have sacrifice—will have man. Yes, and the very heart, centre, ground, roots of a man; dark and strong and costly as blood” (336). The Fox’s philosophy was a weak, watered-down misrepresentation of the gods; the Ungit religion was confusing and ugly with its murderous and promiscuous rituals. Mark Elgin argues that “according to the Fox’s teaching—all that is valid comes through reason, including the understanding of divine nature” (100). Thus, the Fox’s admission about his philosophy’s emptiness reveals the futility of trying to comprehend the gods through reason alone. The Ungit religion, which confuses the rational Fox, comes closer to describing the gods because it deals with deeper matters than human reason. The opposing worldviews of Ungit and the Fox contain some truth about the world and the gods but do not describe them fully or accurately.
Both of these narratives represent some aspects of Lewis’s concept of human myths, which convey truth but distort it with human misconceptions. Clark writes that Lewis believed the significant pagan myths of Western Civilization prepared those cultures for Christianity, the myth made fact (44). Likewise, both the morals of the Fox’s philosophy and the Ungit religion’s sacrifices helped prepare Orual to understand the true nature of the gods. Neither of these worldviews are myths in a literary sense as they do not contain a story. However, Lewis defines myths primarily by their effect on the reader, which he acknowledges means that not all readers will share the same mythic experience (An Experiment 45). Orual is deeply affected by the Fox’s philosophical account of the world and the fantastical teachings of the Ungit worshippers. Both of these accounts communicate different parts of truth to her: Ungit displays the necessity of sacrifice while the Fox exposes the filthy elements of Glome’s religion (Lewis, Till We 336). Neither account contains the full truth about the gods, nor are they based upon factual events.
This divide between mythic truth and factual truth is the catalyst for Orual’s decision to write out her complaint against the gods. The priest at Istra’s temple tells Orual the mythic version of Psyche’s story, which, like Apuleius’s account, attributes the sisters’ jealousy to the sight of Psyche’s beautiful palace (176). Orual is outraged because this is factually incorrect since she could not see Psyche’s palace. She sees the Istra myth as a propaganda piece in which the gods falsely accuse her of jealousy over Psyche’s divine palace. This story still contains mythic truth despite its factual inaccuracies. By the end of the book at least, the reader can see the truth in the Istra myth’s tale of Orual’s jealousy: her jealousy was not caused the visible beauty of Psyche’s palace but by Psyche’s ability to see divine things when Orual could not. For Lewis, only the Christian religion combines mythic truth with factual truth through the Incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ (Menzies 38).
In Till We Have Faces, myth’s ability to convey truth is invaluable because of the human inability to comprehend the divine. Nevertheless, myths can be obscure or confusing because the truths they express transcend human reason. Myths constructed by humans can also corrupt or distort the truths they contain. Lewis’s primary deviation from Apuleius’s myth is his clarification of Apuleius’s inconsistent depiction of the divide between the gods and the mortals. The very hiddenness and mystery of the gods is an act of mercy towards humans, who are unable to withstand the gods’ beauty and power because of mortal frailty. In the character of Orual, Lewis unites an epistemological struggle to understand the divine with the sinful inclination to pride and idolatry. Orual does not worship the gods because she does not know their true nature, but she does not wish to worship them because she wants to place herself in their position of divinity. The myths which Orual has been taught prepare her mind and heart for the full revelation she receives later in life. In the end, it is only through an act of divine mercy that Orual is able to understand and accept the gods.
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The featured image is “Psyche Opening the Door into Cupid’s Garden” (1903) by John William Waterhouse, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Works Cited
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—– Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold. William Collins, 2020.
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Myers, Doris T. Bareface: A Guide to C. S. Lewis’s Last Novel. University of Missouri Press, 2004.
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——“Till We Have Faces.” The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis. Edited by Robert MacSwain and Michael Ward. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
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Willis, John Randolph. “Pleasures Forevermore: The Theology of C. S. Lewis.” Loyola University Press, 1983.