On Reading C.S. Lewis Mythically

Fiction, Theology, and the Williams Question

I’ve rewritten this essay now three times in an effort to cut out all of the weeds I keep getting lost in. Hopefully this one succeeds.

Last week on Patterns for Life, I agreed with Left Brain Mystic Alex that “divine masculine and feminine” frameworks are harmful and that their projection of biological sex differences onto cosmic principles is a profound category error. I also talked about how Orthodox Christianity is free from the entrapment to these beliefs that are otherwise so common in the religious landscape.

Something that Alex talked about, but I didn’t have time to explore in my other essay, was this idea that these principles of gendered spirituality, especially as we understand them now, are largely esoteric and new age. If this is true, then how did they end up codified in mainstream Christian belief?

Photo by NASA Hubble Space Telescope on Unsplash

This was one of the light-bulb moments for me in Alex’s essay, because I think I know, and I hinted at this in my original restack of Alex’s essay: I think C.S. Lewis helped baptize it, specifically in his Space Trilogy.

I say this as someone who appreciates most of Lewis’s work. I have no beef with recognizing The Chronicles of Narnia as a timeless classic, especially after looking under the hood with Dr. Michael Ward’s phenomenal exposition in Planet Narnia. It’s also true that Lewis’s apologetics have opened doors for countless people, myself included.

There are things he’s said, though, that have caused me to scratch my head. The last time I reread That Hideous Strength was one of those times, especially since the Lewis I had read immediately prior was the masterpiece Till We Have Faces. I know That Hideous Strength is being celebrated right now as being particularly prescient about the state of technological oligarchy, and I agree that it’s interesting, but I’ll be completely frank with you. The character of Jane Studdock does absolutely nothing for me, and I’m just not impressed with any of the female characters in The Space Trilogy. Especially compared to the complexity of Orual. The difference is so stark, I’ve even privately remarked that Orual is the first woman Lewis wrote half-believably, and I’ve wondered if his relationship with Joy Davidson had anything to do with it.

Plus there’s all the gendered planetary symbolism, some of it quite explicit.

And this is where I want to pause and think out loud about the difference between fiction and theology, between literary device and doctrinal claim, and about what happens when readers (and entire movements) fail to make that distinction.

I say this as someone who writes both fiction and non-fiction, who moves constantly between what Lewis himself called writing “along the beam” (direct theological/philosophical exposition) and “across the beam” (imaginative literature that evokes rather than explains). One of the creative tensions I live with is wanting to use the full palette of human imagination in my fiction—including symbolism, myth, and even esoteric imagery—without being accused of teaching heresy every time a character says something theologically questionable.

Perhaps Lewis faced the same tension. And perhaps the problem isn’t primarily what Lewis wrote, but how we’ve read it.

The Space Trilogy As Literary Experiment

Dr. Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia demonstrates conclusively that Lewis used medieval planetary symbolism throughout his fiction. This wasn’t accidental or casual, it was deliberate craft, drawing on the rich imagery and vocabulary of medieval cosmology.

In the Space Trilogy, Lewis made this symbolism explicit and theological in ways he didn’t in Narnia: Ransom receives instruction about planetary governance, and Jane Studdock is taught about masculine and feminine principles, for example. The novels don’t just use planetary imagery as atmosphere, they explain it as cosmology.

But was Lewis making explicit theological claims, or was he conducting a literary experiment? Was he saying “this is how reality actually works,” or was he exploring “what if the medieval cosmos were literally true—what kind of story would that create?”

The distinction matters enormously.

It was Alex’s essay that finally gave me a clue to all of this: there’s a strong twentieth century occult history behind this idea of gendered spirituality, one that already drew upon medieval symbolism but took it to very different existential conclusions. And because of Dr. Sorina Higgins over at The Oddest Inkling, I know exactly how that connects to C.S. Lewis.

The Williams Connection

Charles Williams was Lewis’s close friend during the 1940s—the Inklings period when Lewis wrote the Space Trilogy. Williams was deeply involved in occult practices: Rosicrucian ritual, Hermetic mysticism, and what he called “Romantic Theology.” It wasn’t casual dabbling—Williams practiced ritualized exercises with female students that involved physical contact and spiritualized sexual energy.

Williams’s theology explicitly centered on divine masculine and feminine as fundamental cosmic principles. In both his fiction and non-fiction works, he articulated a vision where gender polarity is a force of creation, where masculine and feminine forces must be properly aligned for spiritual growth. (If you want to learn more about Charles Williams, I again have to send you over to The Oddest Inkling, plus tell you to keep an eye out for her forthcoming book. I can’t do it justice here.)

Their correspondence shows that Lewis was absolutely enchanted by Williams during this period. And when we read the Space Trilogy—particularly Jane Studdock’s arc in That Hideous Strength, where she must learn to embody feminine submission to masculine authority—I don’t think we’re reading the medieval Christianity we assume that C.S. Lewis refers to. I think we’re reading Williams’s Romantic Theology baptized with Christian language.

Do I think C.S. Lewis was promoting occult teaching? Absolutely not.

When I think it through, here’s where I think the parallel metaphors get murky. Medieval cosmology used gendered planetary associations as a participatory descriptive metaphor. It’s one thing to feel connected with the physical universe surrounding you, to notice the wheel of the stars and the change of the seasons, and to feel like one is a part of a greater whole and use poetic language to describe this ecstatic awareness. But modern occultism transformed this into a normative, prescriptive ontology—it began talking about masculine and feminine spiritual energies as things we needed to do or ways we needed to be. Some parts of modern psychology took this kind of normative thinking and ran with it, too.

A medieval Christian might observe that someone’s temperament was inclined to Mars, but an occultist would take it further and say that Mars channels a specific energy connected to the male biological sex, that defines both a person’s nature and their spiritual path.

I think all of this was probably quite clear and obvious to Lewis, but he wanted to play with the symbolism in his fiction in a way he couldn’t do in his non-fiction. And I think we’re making a mistake when we read his fiction in theological mode when it was rather written in mythic mode.

In mythic mode, you can have planets governed by angelic beings with gendered characteristics. You can explore what it would mean if cosmic masculine and feminine were real forces. You can put characters through arcs that embody these principles. This is legitimate literary exploration— taking an idea seriously enough to see what kind of story it generates.

The problem comes when readers—especially readers looking for theological authority—extract the mythic framework and treat it as doctrinal teaching.

Ironically, Lewis himself wrote extensively about how to read fiction well. In An Experiment in Criticism, he distinguishes between “using” a book (extracting information, finding confirmation for what we already believe) and “receiving” it (entering the imaginative world on its own terms, letting it show us something we couldn’t see before).

Lewis warned against treating imaginative literature as a vehicle for extracting propositions. He knew that fiction works differently than exposition; that it operates through image, symbol, and resonance rather than argument and claim.

Yet this is precisely what I think happens with the Space Trilogy. Readers can use it as a source of theological propositions about gender when Lewis was instead inviting them to contemplate it as mythic exploration of medieval cosmology, flavored with the intense symbolism of one of his admired friends.

The Tell: Compare Lewis’s Fiction to His Theology

If we want to know whether Lewis actually believed in cosmic masculine/feminine as theological reality or was experimenting with it in a literary way, we should look at his non-fiction.

In Mere Christianity, Lewis talks about gender in terms of social roles and biological complementarity. He doesn’t invoke cosmic principles or planetary forces. He’s quite conventional, especially for his time, and even disappointingly so by modern standards, but he’s not doing what Williams does—he’s not making gender into metaphysics.

In The Four Loves, Lewis discusses masculine and feminine in cultural and psychological terms, not cosmic ones. He acknowledges differences in how men and women typically approach relationship (also conventional for when he was writing), but he’s describing patterns, not prescribing essences.

In his literary criticism and scholarly work, Lewis treats medieval planetary symbolism as exactly that— medieval symbolism, useful for understanding Dante and Milton, not cosmic reality that modern people should organize their lives around.

The gendered cosmology appears almost exclusively in his fiction. This suggests it was a literary device, not a theological commitment. But because we treat Lewis as a theology authority even when he is a fiction writer conducting experiments, we can mistakenly scaffold an entire anthropology on what may have been his mythic imagination at play.

Where Tolkien Saw More Clearly

J.R.R. Tolkien pulled away from Lewis during the Williams period, and while he was diplomatically vague about why, the timing matters. Tolkien didn’t like Williams’s theology and worried about his influence on Lewis.

Significantly, Tolkien’s own fiction is notably free of gendered cosmology. Middle-earth has powerful women and men, but they don’t “embody” cosmic principles. The Valar have masculine and feminine forms, but these are presentations, not essences. When Éowyn defies gender expectations by riding to war, the narrative celebrates her courage— it doesn’t suggest she’s violating her cosmic feminine nature.

Tolkien understood something important: You can use gendered imagery and even medieval cosmology in your fiction without claiming cosmic gender is metaphysically real. You can have queens and warriors and wise women without suggesting they’re channeling divine feminine energy.

Perhaps Tolkien recognized that Lewis was playing with fire— that readers wouldn’t maintain the distinction between literary device and theological claim. Or perhaps Tolkien simply had better instincts about which medieval elements were safe to imaginatively embrace and which ones carried occult freight that even literary distance couldn’t fully neutralize.

Maybe another problem is the way we interact with authority in our culture. People desperately want authoritative voices to solve theological questions definitively. Lewis became that authority in the late twentieth century— his apologetics were so effective, his Narnia so beloved, that readers assumed everything he wrote carried equal theological weight.

So when Lewis imaginatively explored gendered cosmology in the Space Trilogy, readers didn’t receive it as mythic experiment— they extracted it as doctrine. They used his literary authority to justify complementarian theology that Lewis himself never articulated in his actual theological writing.

This might be how an occult idea entered Christian consciousness: not through direct teaching, but through imaginative literature being read in theological mode. Williams’s Romantic Theology, which was genuinely rooted in Hermetic esotericism, entered modern Christian thought through Lewis’s fiction being treated as Lewis’s theology.

My Own Tension As a Writer

I write fiction that uses religious imagery, explores spiritual themes, and sometimes puts theologically questionable statements in characters’ mouths. I write about the enchanted cosmos, about reality having layers, about the spiritual world intersecting the material in ways that sometimes look more like folklore than theology. I draw on Orthodox Christian tradition, but also on fairy tales, mythology, and yes, sometimes esoteric imagery that has power precisely because it’s vivid and resonant.

It’s one of the perennial challenges of being both an artist and a Christian. I think we all recognize that we are working with terribly powerful tools, and we recognize that when those tools are misused, souls hang in the balance. Maybe part of the answer to this tension lies in talking more about modes of reading, and making sure we can distinguish between mythos and theology, engaging with each when it’s right to do so.

In any case, the possible connection between The Space Trilogy and twentieth century esotericism is fascinating, and helps me root out more of the harmful gender stereotypes that keep trying to pass themselves off as archetypes! I'd love to hear your thoughts - especially if you've wrestled with these same questions as a reader or writer.

Happy New Year, everyone!

P.S. — For a list of related essays, look here!