“Things are not as they appear. We will not know ourselves or our beauty until we see God.” C.S. Lewis (“Till We Have Faces”)

C.S. Lewis loved secrets, symbols, layers of meaning, and mystery. In 2008, Michael Ward, currently Senior Research Fellow at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford, announced his discovery of a possible new connection between Lewis’s 7 fiction books, The Chronicles of Narnia. Based on Lewis’s love of the stars, cosmology, and time spent in the Oxford observatory, Ward believes that Lewis’s 7 fictional Narnia series are united by a symbolism based in medieval cosmology. Ward sees each book as reflecting one of the 7 planets in the medieval solar system.*

A penchant for layers of symbolic meaning inspired me to create a similar structure using medieval alchemy in t…