I always thought C.S. Lewis was saying achieving “heaven” was a matter of true and honest faith, no matter the interpretation or the deity being worshiped. His Narnia had a sharply dualistic belief system. There was Aslan, to whom all “good deeds” went, and Tash, who was the opposite of Aslan and accepted all “bad deeds.” Good things done in the name of Tash went to Aslan and the believer got to go to heaven. Bad deeds done in the name of Aslan went to Tash, and Tash consumed the evil-doer. Here’s a quote from a speech by a guy from Calormen who believed in Tash:
“…The Glorious One [Aslan] bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with his tongue and said, Son thou art welcome. But I said, Alas, Lord, I am no son of thine but the servant of Tash. He answered, Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me…not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him…” (The Last Battle, 188-189).
There are some very obvious and (in my opinion) somewhat misguided parallels on the author’s part to Christianity (Aslan as Christ), and its ancient and on-going rivalry with fellow monotheistic faith Islam (the desert land of Calormen and their “misguided” Tash-based religion), although I happen to think that a comparison to the dualism of the Zoroastrian religion may be a better analogy for this book. Here’s why:
According to Zoroastrian beliefs, “there is one universal and transcendental God, Ahura Mazda, the one Uncreated Creator to whom all worship is ultimately directed. Ahura Mazda's creation—evident as asha, truth and order—is the antithesis of chaos, evident as druj, falsehood and disorder. The resulting conflict involves the entire universe, including humanity, which has an active role to play in the conflict.
“Active participation in life through good thoughts, good words and good deeds is necessary to ensure happiness and to keep the chaos at bay. This active participation is a central element in Zoroaster's concept of free will.
“Ahura Mazda will ultimately prevail over evil Angra Mainyu / Ahriman, at which point the universe will undergo a cosmic renovation and time will end. In the final renovation, all of creation—even the souls of the dead that were initially banished to "darkness"—will be reunited in Ahura Mazda returning to life in the undead form. At the end of time a savior-figure [a Saoshyant] will bring about a final renovation of the world, and in which the dead will be revived. There will then be a final purgation of evil from the Earth (through a tidal wave of molten metal) and a purgation of evil from the heavens (through a cosmic battle of spiritual forces). In the end good will triumph, and each person will find himself or herself transformed into a spiritualized body and soul.
Those who died as adults will be transformed into healthy adults of forty years of age, and those who died young will find themselves permanently youthful, about age fifteen. In these new spiritual bodies, humans will live without food, without hunger or thirst, and without weapons (or possibility of bodily injury). The material substance of the bodies will be so light as to cast no shadow.
All humanity will speak a single language and belong to a single nation without borders. All will experience immortality (Ameretat) and will share a single purpose and goal, joining with the divine for a perpetual exaltation of God’s glory. [compare all this to the destruction of Narnia scene in
The Last Battle and Lewis’s later descriptions of how Jill seemed to look older and the Professor and Polly younger in their “true” forms, etc.].
“In Zoroastrian tradition the malevolent is represented by Angra Mainyu (also referred to as "Ahriman"), the "Destructive Principle", while the benevolent is represented through Ahura Mazda's Spenta Mainyu, the instrument or "Bounteous Principle" of the act of creation” (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroastria ... ic_beliefs).
The poor, misguided donkey, Puzzle, who dressed up in a lion skin and pretended to be Aslan (and later a blasphemous amalgamation Shift called Tashlan) was a false idol taken advantage of by a cruel, opportunistic false prophet: the ape Shift. Puzzle got to go to “heaven.” Shift, a wrinkled old ape who claimed to be a man, was consumed by Tash. This perhaps reflects Lewis’s opinion that evolution was the “central and radical lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives” (C.S. Lewis on Creation and Evolution: The Acworth Letters, 1951:
http://www.asa3.org/aSA/PSCF/1996/PSCF3-96Ferngren.html).
Here’s the thing, though. Although a lot of the dualistic nature of the Narnian religion and afterlife appears to have been inspired by Zoroastrianism, the image of the “afterlife” or “heaven” C.S. Lewis described in
The Last Battle was taken, as he said, directly from the
Allegory of the Cave in Plato’s Republic. “It’s all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools!” (The Last Battle, 195). He was saying the world we experience every day is only a series of projected shadows that we take to be reality because we don’t know any better. The world the characters entered at the end of the book is the world of real objects that cast those shadows, and the further in you go, the more layers you peel away, the realer everything gets.
Narnia was a shadow world, “just as our own world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan’s real world” (195). And all the characters were merely shadows of their real, internal selves—their “souls”—until after they crossed over into the “realer” Narnia.
Lucy described it like this: “This is still Narnia, and more real and more beautiful than the Narnia down below, just as it was more real and more beautiful than the Narnia outside the stable door! [the shadow version that was destroyed] I see…world within world, Narnia within Narnia…
“Yes,” said Mr. Tumnis, “Like an onion: except that as you continue to go in and in, each circle is larger than the last” (207).
From their Narnian reality, the characters could also see the “real” England—and visit it if they wanted to. That’s where Peter, Susan, Lucy, and Edmund’s parents went when they died, because “in that inner England, no good thing is destroyed” (208). According to Mr. Tumnis, “All the
real countries are only spurs jutting out from the great mountains of Aslan. We have only to walk along the ridge, upward and inward, till it joins on” (209). So every reality, every afterlife, every heaven is connected in C.S. Lewis’s imagination.
As for Susan—the reason she isn’t there at the end is simply because she didn’t die along with everyone else. Lucy, the Professor, and Polly were on a train—the same train as Lucy’s parents (who were on their way to Bristol), although Lucy didn’t know they were there. Edmund and Peter were standing on the train platform waiting for them to arrive. Peter thought the train was taking the curve into the station too quickly. Edmund heard “a frightful roar and something hit me with a bang, but it didn’t hurt…And then, we were here” (158). They, and their parents, were all killed in a terrible train accident. Jill and Eustace crossed over to the "afterlife" directly from Narnia. Susan wasn’t on the train, the platform, or in Narnia, and so she wasn’t killed with the rest of her family. When she does die, she most likely would go to the same afterlife as her parents—the “inner England”—because she long ago cut her ties with Narnia and the other “funny games we used to play when we were children” (154). Susan grew up to become an ordinary, average, completely non-magical, somewhat vain and rather unimaginative young woman. She’s not evil, but her true home is the fast-paced, mechanized, superficial “real” world of 20th century Earth, not Narnia. There, Lewis infers that Aslan, the King of Beasts, appears as Christ, the King of Kings. The others, by contrast, never felt at home in their own world again after leaving Narnia, and allowed their desire to return to Narnia consume and even stunt their lives in England. So, when they died, Narnia was for them, just as London was for their parents and, eventually, for Susan.
As for Jewel the unicorn, he was King Tirian’s best and most loyal friend. Sometimes a unicorn is just a unicorn.
That’s basically my interpretation of
The Last Battle, anyway. I worked it out way back after I first read all seven Narnia books out loud to my brother and sister and I found I was unable to really clearly explain
The Last Battle to them when they started asking me questions. That frustrated me like crazy, and I spent about a day obsessively researching all the imagery in the book. This is some of the stuff I came up with. I could be wrong about some of it or even all of it, but hey, it’s a theory, and I just thought it might be fun to share. Sorry it's so long, but once I started writing it all came pouring out!
6/22/11 USM#160
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