Hospitality and Floods

 

This is another place marker post. 

I've been taking a class at the Davenant Institute studying The Chronicles of Narnia. I took it in part to push me along with the Hospitality and Lament project, but also because the professor, Dr. Jason Leporjavi, used Narnia Code by Michael Ward. Narnia Code is the popular version of Planet Narnia, and I have long wanted to discuss it with others. I'm writing this post as a marker for ideas that solidified or arose from the class that I will explore further in later posts.

1) While reading Ward's Planet Narnia around 2010, I expected to see a connection between Jupiter and his role as defender of the practice of hospitality. In Ward's work, I did not find a reference to Jupiter and hospitality. You see a similar role in Ancient Greek society based on Zeus as a defender/punisher/rewarder of hospitality or xenia. This was the cause of the whole Trojan War. Xenia was the practice of hospitality that includes responsibilities of both host and guest in the practice. More on that later. 

2) Sometime in the past, I made a connection between Ovid's poem Baucis and Philemon and the Dimbles in That Hideous Strength. Common to both was an older childless couple who practiced hospitality in its most life-giving form. Offering food, shelter, and fellowship in their poverty and childlessness. I had not connected until I recently re-read both was the common destruction by flood of those the leaders and their town for the leaders' corruption of, dismissal of, and lack of hospitality. Flood is an archetype of the destruction of wantonly corrupt societies going back to the oldest stories in antiquity, including the Jewish/Christian story. I also connected during my re-reading between the couple becoming oak trees at their death and Hermes, who, along with Jupiter, visited Baucis and Philemon. My other connection was to see that the Beavers in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe could be based on Baucis and Philemon. Both are childless, poor, and gracious in hospitality. I see here three couples who, in their poverty and childlessness, did not become bitter for childlessness and poverty are real sorrows. Instead, their woes became the ground where humility and hospitality flourished.  

3)When writing a paper for the Narnia class on the role of myth in Lewis's writing and thought, I began to see that Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader became a different boy because myth worked in him; not because as his mother thought from the influence of the Pevensie children. By participatory knowledge, he learned to look along the sunbeam when he traveled on the Dawn Treader instead of looking at the world. This will all make sense when I edit the paper for posting here.

The next post will be on the foundation of hospitality and lament, God as Good.