Ungit and Orual:

Facts, Mysteries, and Epiphanies
by Kathryn Lindskoog

This article about Till We Have Faces appeared in the August 2000 issue of CSL: THE NEW YORK C. S. LEWIS SOCIETY BULLETIN.

The Narnian Chronicles are the best known of all C. S. Lewis's fiction, but the meanings of the key names Aslan and Tash are not widely known. (Aslan is the Turkish word for lion, and Tash is the Turkish word for stone.) Readers interested in Lewis's mind and creative processes are glad to learn about the etymology and associations of these and other names in the Chronicles -- Emeth, Tisroc, Tashbaan, and Clodsley Shovel, for example.

Shortly after completing the Narnian Chronicles, Lewis wrote his favorite of all his own books, Till We Have Faces. Again, it is possible to value and enjoy his fiction without being aware of the implications of the names Lewis chose. But this is Lewis's most subtle book, and a little understanding of certain names and archetypes will make us more aware of the depth, texture, and psycho-spiritual meaning of the story.

UNGIT

Ungit is Glome's Babylonian-style fertility goddess, equivalent to the Greek goddess Aphrodite. She is a dreadful but holy black stone that is anointed with sacrificial blood. According to tradition, this stone once pushed its way up out of the earth; yet, according to Arnon the priest, Ungit "signifies the earth, which is the womb and mother of all living things." Ungit is the great mother and the great devourer, and her cult is one of darkness.

Surprisingly, Ungit's name is not related to stone or darkness; instead, it is derived from the Latin ungo or unguo, meaning to smear or anoint with any fatty substance. Ungo came to Latin from the Sanskrit word anjana, meaning ointment, and the word anj, meaning to rub or besmear. (The Irish word ongain and the new Irish word ungadh both mean ointment.) English words closely related to Ungit refer to oil. An unguent is an ointment; unguentous means smeared with oil; unctuous means oily; and unction is the act of anointing a person in a religious ceremony or healing ritual to indicate and perhaps bring about a divine spiritual anointing. (Two of the ancient uses of oil are for healing and for light.)

The Old Testament makes much mention of oil, holiness, stones, and anointing. For example:

Genesis 28:18: "And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put for his pillows, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it."

Exodus 29:21: "And thou shalt take of the blood that is upon the altar, and of the anointing oil, and sprinkle it upon Aaron, and upon his garments, and upon his sons, and upon the garments of his sons with him: and he shall be hallowed..."

Job 29:6: ...the rock poured me out rivers of oil...

In his undated poem "Reason and Imagination" (mistitled "Reason" after his death), C. S. Lewis likened Greek mythology's Demeter to human imagination,

. . . But how dark, imagining,
Warm, dark, obscure and infinite, daughter of Night:
Dark is her brow, the beauty of her eyes with sleep
Is loaded, and her pains are long, and her delight.

. . . Wound not in her fertile pains
Demeter, nor rebel against her motherright.
. . . mother
. . . depth
. . . imagination's dim exploring touch

ORUAL

It is Queen Orual's name, not Ungit's, that refers to stone. (Orual was a human being, but she had a stony heart.) The Greek word oruksis means a digging (excavation, ditch, tunnel, or mine), and the word orusso means to dig up or dig through, especially in mines or quarries. Accordingly, Orual uses a pickaxe and descends into the psycho-spiritual underworld late in Till We Have Faces (part 2, chapter 2). She goes down, against her will, to find dark, hidden meanings and truths. One of Orual's major accomplishments as queen of Glome was the success of her silver mines. In the world Lewis lived in, the world in which we read his books, Russia's Ural Mountains are a natural boundary between Europe and Asia. They are rich with ore, and the mid to central section is called the Ore Urals. (There is a Ural language group or family [linguists disagree] named after the mountains.) Similarly, the western Bolivian state of Oruro is primarily known for its tin mining. I don't think the connection of Orual's name to mineral deposits and mining can be coincidental.

Orual's devotion to Psyche resembles Dante's devotion to Beatrice. Her descent into the earth is reminiscent of Dante's descent in the Inferno, and her finding Psyche alive on a mountain top -- "the real Mountain" -- resembles Dante finding Beatrice alive in the Garden of Eden on top of Mount Purgatory. Orual and Dante had to cross a little stream to join Psyche and Beatrice on the other side. (See Till We Have Faces, chapters 9-10, and Purgatory, cantos 30-31.)

Orual's teacher from Greece called her Crethis; in Greek the closest word to Crethis is xreo, meaning need, desire, or longing. In the Cupid and Psyche myth, the older sister becomes a destroyer because she is jealous about love Psyche receives from Eros; and in Till We Have Faces she becomes a destroyer because she is jealous about love Eros receives from Psyche. At one point in Orual's story she hears herself admitting that, figuratively speaking, she has devoured those she loved: "I am Ungit." As her teacher used to tell her, "We're all limbs and parts of one Whole. Hence of each other. Men, and gods, flow in and out and mingle." In this book that is true.

MYSTERIES AND EPIPHANIES

Ungit is an example of the earth-womb archetype. Lewis wrote about the earth as a womb in his little-known three-stanza poem "Break Sun, My Crusted Earth," published in 1940 in the anthology Fear No More and, unfortunately, omitted from Lewis's posthumous poetry collections.

Break, sun, my crusted earth,
Pierce, needle of light, within,
Where blind, immortal metals have their birth
And crystals firm begin.

To limbs and loins and heart
Search with thy chemic beam,
Strike where the self I know not lives apart
Beneath the surface dream.

For life in secret goes
About his work. In gloom,
The mother helping not nor hindering, grows
The man inside the womb.

(In my opinion the six-stanza poem "A Pageant Played in Vain" that Walter Hooper published in 1964 cannot possibly be Lewis's revision of "Break Sun, My Crusted Earth" as claimed. To begin with, it is not about the same subject; secondly, it is an inferior poem.)

The main key to "Break Sun, My Crusted Earth" can be found in part two of Lewis's superb essay "Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages," a lecture he gave on July 17-18, 1956. It was first published in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966).

Medieval man looked up at a sky not only melodious, sunlit, and splendidly inhabited, but also incessantly active: he looked at agents to which he, and the whole earth, were patients.... First, on the physical side, the beams of each planet (which penetrate through the Earth's crust) find the appropriate soil and turn it into the appropriate metal; Saturn thus producing lead, Mars iron, the Moon silver. and so forth. The moon's connection with silver, and the Sun's with gold, may be real survivals (at many removes) of prelogical, pictorial, thinking. Venus is, perhaps, a maker of copper because she was, centuries earlier, Kupris, the lady of Cyprus, and that accursed island produced copper in ancient times. Why Saturn made lead, or Jove tin, I do not know.

In "Break Sun, My Crusted Earth" Lewis is using this medieval cosmology (unfamiliar to most readers today) as allegory or symbol for spiritual and psychological realities. In the strictly spiritual sense, this poem seems to me to express the receptiveness of the Virgin Mary at the Annunciation; Renaissance paintings sometimes portray the conception of Jesus with beams of golden light from heaven striking Mary. (In Florence see Lorenzo Monaco's Annunciation, c. 1425, in the Salumbeni Chapel, Santa Trinita; Alesso Baldovinetti's Annunciation, 1457. in the Galleria degli Uffizi; and Mariotti Albertinelli's Annunciation with God the Father, 1510, in the Gallaria dell' Accademia.)

In asking the sun to pierce his own crusted earth, Lewis is asking God to create spiritual gold in his deep inner self. I may be wrong, but I suspect that he is simultaneously asking God to create within him what Paul called a "new man" (Ephesians 2 and 4; Colossians 3).

Sixteen years after Lewis wrote "Break Sun, My Crusted Earth," hints of the same haunting imagery appeared (with or without Lewis's conscious awareness) in his strange story about Orual, the virgin queen of Glome. I think the third stanza of "Break Sun, My Crusted Earth" can relate to Orual:

For life in secret goes
About his work. In gloom,
The mother helping not nor hindering, grows
The man inside the womb.

The similarity of the name Glome to the word gloom is obvious to many readers of Till We Have Faces who have never heard of "Break Sun, My Crusted Earth." In naming Orual's kingdom Glome, Lewis may have had in mind the word gloaming, which means twilight or dusk. (Gloaming is derived from the Teutonic root glum.)

Although Orual was biologically barren, life (spiritual life) was secretly growing inside her. (The person "inside the womb" for Orual reminds me of the person described by the Apostle Paul in Colossians 3:10-11 "...the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him: Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.")

There is no overt reference to Christ in Till We Have Faces; in fact, there is not even any reference to Hebrew monotheism. But there is a clear reference to Eros, the "Brute" bridegroom of Psyche. (In Christian tradition, the divine bridegroom is Christ: "...as the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God rejoice over thee," Isaiah 62.5.) Just before Orual's transfiguration, she heard voices say "He is coming. The god is coming to his house. The god comes to judge Orual." Suddenly "The air was growing brighter and brighter about us; as if something had set it on fire. Each breath I drew let into me new terror, joy, overpowering sweetness. I was pierced through by the arrows of it." "The only dread and beauty there is was coming, was coming." This echoes Dante's experience at the end of Paradise: "So my mind hung in abeyance, staring fixedly, immovable. intent, its ardor increasingly enflamed by the sight. Anyone who sees that Light becomes a person who would not possibly consent to turn away to any other sight; for the good that is the object of all desires is ingathered there in its fullness, and elsewhere it falls short of its perfection."

Midway between "Break Sun, My Crusted Earth" and Till We Have Faces, Lewis published another favorite book of his, The Great Divorce (1946). In this story Lewis left a twilight city (a predecessor of Glome) and travelled to the foothills of "the real Mountain." In the last chapter, Lewis sees a great assembly of motionless figures standing forever around a silver table, watching the actvities of little figures that resembled chessmen. "And these chessman are men and women as they appear to themselves and to one another in this world. And the silver table is Time. And those who stand and watch are the immortal souls of these same men and women." In a sense, the beautiful Orual figure at the end of Till We Have Faces is the queen's immortal soul. Orual's transformation is like a fulfillment of 1 John 3:2: "... we know that when He appears we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is."

The sunrise ending of The Great Divorce is strikingly similar to the ending of Till We Have Faces. In The Great Divorce Lewis heard spirits sing, "It comes! It comes! Sleepers awake! It comes, it comes, it comes." Then "...the rim of the sunrise that shoots Time dead with golden arrows and puts to flight all phantasmal shapes." Like Orual after her encounter with God, Lewis awakened on earth after his near encounter with God. Dante, too, had awakened back in this world after the crescendo of light that climaxed with his finally seeing God. In each of these three books, Paradise, The Great Divorce, and Till We Have Faces, reawakening into life on the little silver table was the protagonist's temporary withdrawal from the real awakening.

In The Great Divorce Lewis had George MacDonald say 'The picture is a symbol: but it's truer than any philososphophical theorem (or, perhaps, than any mystic's vision) that claims to go behind it." Lewis's poem "Reason and Imagination" is about the inadequacy of either reason (the Fox: philosophical theorems) or imagination (Ungit: mystic vision) to show us reality.

Oh who will reconcile in me both maid and mother,
Who make in me a concord of the depth and height?
Who make the imagination's dim exploring touch
Even report the same as intellectual sight?
Then could I truly say, and not deceive,
Then wholly, say, that I BELIEVE.

For Orual (and C. S. Lewis), the answer is an encounter with divinity himself. At the end of her adventures, Orual realizes that before the face of God all questions die away and even all words die away. But we who are readers of Till We Have Faces are not yet at the end of our adventures and questions. Until we finally meet the gods face to face for ourselves, we continue to mine Lewis's deep words for wisdom.

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Links to view artwork

View Lorenzo Monaco's Annunciation at the Encylopedia of Art, jonessquare.com

View Alesso Baldovinetti's Annunciation at the Virtual Uffizi

View Mariotti Albertinelli's Annunciation at the Web Gallery of Art

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