I really have to wonder what stories these Japanese illustrations are telling.
First, someone in a caped costume meant to depict a skeletal ape menaces miniature children standing in teacups.
Then, a cyclops lady with a flying, detachable head spews freezing breath
at a stage magician and a teenage boy.
Anyone have a clue?
Cocktails, or mixed alcoholic drinks, are one of those workhorse culinary items whose exact origin is unknown. Most pinpoint it to the United States in the early 19th century. But it wasn’t until the 20th century until they really took off, especially after WWII when boozing and socializing went hand-in-hand with the middle class suburban set. Home bars and mixology waned in popularity after Woodstock, eclipsed by pot and coke. Cocktails were seen as fusty, old-fashioned, and establishment. If alcohol was served at parties, it was guzzled, not savored.
But mixed drinks made a surprising resurgence post – 9/11, reaching new and baroque heights like the Bloody Mary concoction in the picture, which comes with chicken wings, avocados, and battered shrimp on a stick. In recent years The Sugar Factory chain of restaurants upped the ante with rainbow-hued, highly alcoholic drinks that spumed smoke and dripped with toys and candy. Sadly, the COVID pandemic brought all this to a screeching halt. Can the cocktail survive personal distancing and closed social venues?
In case it does, here’s a list of mixed drinks that might come to be.
| Texas Flirt
Psycho Monty Singapore Shake Chocolate Dawn Hairpuller White Jungle Harvey Gumshoe Rolling Redhead Rumpled Bed Sugarplum Slip Salty Sniper Sleepy Hustler Ruby Shaker Barnstormer Burning Nun Brazilian Hipster Spendy Mistress Moscow by Moonlight Hawaiian Uncle Raspberry Sucker Whiskey Shooter Fruit Yeti Frisco Cola |
Acapulco Ice
Sour Cherry Slammer Ugly Bastard Red Crawler Lazy Thunder Slippery Wolf Russian Licorice Toejammer Timely Swinger Screwy Sandy Pink Bliss Northern Yoga Cranberry Screamer Blue Shag Carpet American Newton Lazy Bastard Hairstreaker Brooklyn Brown Jamaican Rosie Blown Kiss Miami Red Lemon Margaret Jackfruit Tommie |
“Why yes, they’re veneers. I’ve got a good dentist.”
Carnival in Bolivia, with sumptuous masks and costumes.
Guess I can’t stretch this summer out any further, can I? It’s time to say farewell to Narnia, at least for this year.
I still have some articles to finish and will be doing that.
Tash is the antithesis of Aslan the lion. In The Last Battle he’s the principal god of Calormen, a horrid epitome of an ancient Middle Eastern deity who receives sacrificial victims in bizarre and novel ways, like being tied up inside a brass bull which is heated by a wood-burning fire from below. He’s cut from the whole cloth of the Bible as much as Jadis is. Historically, he’s Moloch, Marduk, and Tanis combined… though in truth Lewis must have have been most influenced by Nisroch, an Assyrian deity with an eagle’s head.
Nisroch
Pauline Baynes was the first to illustrate Tash and her vision is the iconic one. Her Tash is skeletal yet ornate, wearing a wide metal collar, earrings, and a headress, with a fancy loincloth covering his privates and a tattered, fluttering cape. He has cat’s paws for feet but his hands are the talons of a predatory bird, and though unwinged he bristles with sharp, curving spines. Though described in the text as vulture-headed, his beak resembles that of an ibis, like the Egyptian god Thoth.
Tash, ink drawing by Pauline Baynes
It’s not a bad depiction of an ersatz-Middle Eastern god. But Baynes’s depiction owes more to Aztec than Assyrian history. Her Tash looks more like an Eagle Warrior, the elite of the Aztec Emperor’s fighting force.
Aztec Eagle Warrior
All those spiny things coming out of Tash’s back are really decorative feathers like those on a Las Vegas showgirl. I guess the part about a bloody human sacrifice on an altar influenced her. And the mass blood sacrifices of the Aztecs certainly were horrifying, though they did not think of them that way.
In any case, Rishda Tarkaan is correct to be out of his mind in fright at seeing a being he had long dismissed as a plebian conceit in the live and actual flesh. Bayne’s drawing is horrific, but it’s humorous too. A dark humor and perhaps the darkest she got in the series.
This version of Tash adheres to Bayne’s in its depiction of the god’s feet, collar, and headdress, but here he seems a more active, wily, and athletic opponent, like a giant crow. Not bad but also not as alien and horrific.
This Tash is more Nisroch than Aztec warrior, even being modeled in stone. It’s creepy to think of a giant stone statue gliding slowly through the forest without means of propulsion. I like it.
A nearly-naked Tash with a vulture’s head as described in Lewis’s text and zombielike, rotting flesh exposing his ribcage.
A humorous but very angry Tash wearing chain mail. Again, he keeps the headress, earrings, and collar.
This takes the prize as the weirdest Tash… a giant skeleton that is crumbling apart even as it advances, and a head resembling a Styracosaurus skull.
Tash regards his enemy face to face in this Lovecraftian depiction. Note the pyramid and eye symbol on his belt buckle lifted from American currency.
This must be an Indian edition of The Last Battle, as Tash looks more than a little like Garuda.
A supremely weird but effective Tash with his head covered in a cowl of barnacles or pebbles.
Woodpecker Tash? But I like the energy of this one even though he’s missing the extra pair of arms.
This idol isn’t Tash — it’s a god of Carthage from the 1914 Italian silent film Cabiria. But with its golden plating, oversized scale, and army of spectators watching a sacrificial rite, it could be straight from the book.
Eustace keeps Jill from falling into hysteria as Tash passes by
In The Last Battle, Lewis introduces the reader to Narnia’s equivalent of Satan: Tash. Tash is the foremost deity of the desert nation of Calormen, mentioned first in The Horse and His Boy. However, in that book we are not told what he looked like, only his temple: it has a silver-plated roof and sits at the apex of the royal city of Tashbaan, which is named after him. That he is the most powerful god of the Calormene pantheon is evident, but in the text, he’s just a bit of Orientalist window-dressing.
In The Last Battle, though, we get to see more.
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They have a god called Tash. They say he has four arms and the head of a vulture. They kill Men on his altar. |  |
I’d forgotten about the human sacrifice bit, thinking it was fanon. The idol that oversees this bloody business is said to be “… carved in stone and overlaid with gold [with] solid diamonds for eyes.”
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It was roughly the shape of a man but it had the head of a bird; some bird of prey with a cruel, curved beak. It had four arms which it held high above its head, stretching them out Northward as if it wanted to snatch all Narnia in its grip; and its fingers—all twenty of them—were curved like its beak and had long, pointed, bird-like claws instead of nails. It floated on the grass instead of walking, and the grass seemed to wither beneath it. | |
This apparition appears ahead of the physical manifestation that pops out of the stable. It’s smoky and translucent and emits a deathly smell that makes Jill – but not any of the other characters – physically sick.( I remember thinking less of Jill, who still remains my favorite protagonist, at this mention.)
The illustration above depicts this moment, albeit takes liberties with it: it’s a statue of Tash rather than Tash himself, and is not smoky like the text says. Furthermore, it seems oversized. But this makes it all the more spooky, IMO.
In another world, perhaps one accessed through the Wood Between the Worlds, there might have been manifestations of Aslan and Tash like this.
| GOOD
Isphom, a kindly gray wolf with long, hairy eyebrows Alona, a giant, good-natured snail with long, tufted ears and a pearly shell that reflects the light Asbia, a beautiful bird with an ivory horn on her forehead Umlan, a powerful bear with a flowing golden mane Avnaa, a mischievous white dragon with the power to change his size from small to large Asperi, a wise silver-scaled serpent with tufts of long, silky hair on his jaws and chin Uslan, a gentle white lioness with eyes that are all white with no pupil or iris EVIL Mshver, a maiden with the head of a baboon and eight clawed arms N Nanju, a terrible, armored human warrior with the head of a centipede that has a huge mouth and mandibles Vash, a crocodile with the tail of a scorpion Sharaz, an apelike skeletal being with bat’s wings Bhranu, a demonic centaur with the head of an elephant and six legs Khaph, a giant black horse with the scaly legs of a fowl and a flaming mane and tail Dzach, an obese human man dressed in rich robes, with the head of a hyena |
If Charn was modeled on the cities of North Africa, it surely would have looked like this.
Lewis ended the Narnia Chronicles after seven books. Not only that, he burned that bridge behind him: In The Last Battle, both Narnia and the child protagonists are destroyed.
But what if he made a never-ending series of Narnia, or allowed other writers to carry on his work, as L. Frank Baum did with Oz? We now might be reading books like these.
| A Proud and Stupid Kingdom
Journey to the Silver Forest The Sweet Wager of Walter the Sailor The Mouse Trainer and the Mouse Reepicheep and the Singing Donkey Wood to Wood Anian, the Prince of Stags Aslan of Cair Paravel Tash the Hawk Snowgray the Unicorn The Iron Gem Horatio the Outlaw The Glass Stable The Adventures of Susan in the Utter East A Witch of the Northern Woods A Princess of the Sun Queen Valida of Terebinthia Prince Rabadash and the Magic Feather Jill the Lioness Rumblebuffin is Missing The Hills of Telmar A Fire-Winged King Hamadryad Wood The Tisroc’s Slave The Invisible Storm Rhince of Galma Prince Percivalian The Parchment Hound Queen Safarra of the Brass Horn All the Orchards of Glasswater |
Tapestry designed by Narnia illustrator Pauline Baynes for Plymouth Congregational Church in Minneapolis. It was part of a series that took 40 years to stitch, and the subject of recent controversy.
Lewis heavily drew on pulp SF and fantasy tropes to create the masterpiece that is Charn; but he also drew on the good old-fashioned fire and brimstone of The Bible.
Since it was, and may still be, the most-read book in Western Civilization, it’s natural that many of its stories influenced fiction of a fantastic bent that came later. Westerners who never even picked up a Bible still know it through cinema epics, church sermons, and Sunday School… not to mention contemporary allusions, satires, and parodies. It’s safe to say the big, bad Biblical cities of Ninevah and Uruk, Sodom and Gomorrah, Jericho, Alexandria, Byblos — and especially Babylon — still bubble in the subconscious of most Westerners and create eerie resonance upon reading the descriptions of Charn.
Which, I think, is what Lewis wanted. Charn is an ancient city, a desert city, filled with temples, pyramids, chariots, slaves. It was intended to invoke humanity’s first city, the largest and grandest of them all, of which all subsequent cities are but a pale copy.
As for the actual Biblical cities, the jury is still out on which is the oldest or how populous they were. All we have are ruins to go on today, which are much less impressive than Charn’s as they have not lain undisturbed in a sterile planet for millennia.
To the original, uncredited writers of the Bible, however, the first cities must have filled them with awe. From within they might have seemed to stretch out forever, as Charn does. The feeling of hugeness, human variety, luxury and vice must have been overpowering. When they went to describe it to the farmers and shepherds back home, they must have used superlatives, not objective descriptions that could be quantified.
Lewis the storyteller took those gasped-out superlatives and made them real. Like those ancient witnesses, he waxes into hyperbole. Charn isn’t just huge; it covers the Earth. It really is that massive, that rich, that wicked. Charn is Babylon on steroids.
Babylon has a bad rep in the Bible, of course, especially in Revelations; but most of that is due to the authors’ politics. In actual history, it was learned and cosmopolitan, the New York City of its day. And like that present-day city, it had a reputation for excess that translates into irredeemable wickedness and punishment from God.
Let’s take the Tower of Babel, an Old Testament story that tells of a city of humans seeking to reach heaven by building a gigantic tower. Like Sodom and Gomorrah, God smites them, by destroying the edifice and, furthermore, scrambling their capacity to all speak the same language. The Book of Genesis does not mention the city’s name, but modern archaeologists equate it with a ziggurat built to honor the god Marduk in Babylon. Babylon strikes again!
Two versions of the Tower. The one at top is a modern digital creation, the bottom one the famous depiction by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The modern one is ominous yet sterile, with oversized architecture and a dull, red atmosphere that would serve well as Charn’s. Bruegel’s Tower is, in contrast, wildly out of proportion and uses forced perspective, to no avail, to give a sense of the tower’s height. But it’s delightful nonetheless, giving the impression of an immense building that sort of… folds back into itself, and into the clouds, rather than proceeding upwards. Again, very Charnlike.
Artwork by Soenke Maeter.
Some fans picture Charn as a version of Egypt. This is just wrong, IMO. Egypt never fell into disaster, it remained robust and its own entity into the modern day. Egypt was too religious and ceremonial a model for freewheeling Charn. Charn’s models are Assyria, Sumer, the cities of the Levant.
When Charn was alive, it may have looked like this.
This is assuming, as per my private hypothesis, that Charn’s sun was bright and yellow when the city was at its height.
Charn with a redder sun.
Like Babylon, Charn inspires gravid, potentuous prose: “Such was Charn, that great city, the city of the King of Kings, the wonder of the world, perhaps of all worlds.”
“I have stood here when the whole air was full of the noises of Charn; the trampling of feet, the creaking of wheels, the cracking of the whips and the groaning of slaves… “
“This was the old banqueting hall where my great-grandfather bade seven hundred nobles to a feast and killed them all before they had drunk their fill. They had had rebellious thoughts.”
As the last Queen of Charn, Jadis embodies another trope of the Bible: The Whore of Babylon.
“Bottoms up!”
Raised a Catholic (as Lewis was) I know exactly where he was coming from with Charn and its Queen. She’s at once the inspiration of all the unnamed wickedness and also part and parcel of it.
Jadis is not literally a whore, of course. Lewis doesn’t mention sex, so Jadis could be a virgin Queen for all we know. But the emphasis on her superhuman beauty and physique, and penchant for luxuries, is certainly female and sensual. She’s also a Warrior Queen, her Empire swallowing up other nations and enslaving or destroying them, and as the last Queen, a prefigure to End Times. She even requests a dragon to ride in The Magician’s Nephew, a symbol of female power, while her archetype in Revelations makes do with a seven-headed horned beast.
Queens Jezebel, Zenobia, and Semiramis certainly played a role in Jadis’s conception as well, and it’s telling that these powerful female rulers were assumed by later, male-dominated eras to have let their sexual appetites fly.
Lest we get too serious about Jadis and Biblical scholarship, I’ll close with this:
