My apologies for the lag time in posting; my excuse is talks I’m prepping or giving, applications I’m filling out, and Muggle work to pay the rent. As I’m beginning a seven week adventure in Monday night talks about each of the Chronicles of Narnia the first day of April — and I keynote the Potter watch 2013 and MISTI-Con fan conventions in that time frame, I’m afraid it isn’t going to get much better soon.

Having said, here is a note sent me today by a ‘Chris C’ that merits our attention, especially those of us neck deep in the Narniad:

Dear Mr. Granger,

I’m writing in concern about something interesting related to Michael Ward’s brilliant Planet Narnia.

In that book, Ward mentions a theologian named Austin Farrer, a friend of C.S. Lewis’s, and Farrer’s book, A Rebirth of Images: The Making of St. John’s Apocalypse.

I bring it up, because curiosity killed the cat and I decided to look into what a friend of the Inklings had to say.  What I discovered was basically that both Lewis and Dante weren’t the first authors to write about the “Seven Heavens”.  It appears St. John, or rather Someone, beat both Lewis and Dante to the punch, and in a way even more “Inspired”, let’s say.

Perhaps the greatest lower case “revelation” (pardon the pun) of Farrer’s book is that it lays bare the “architechtural” foundations of St. John’s scripture and theology, especially in it’s relation to Jewish ideas of “The Temple”.

To give a very brief and inadequate summary: Farrer’s argument is that Revelation is structured around the Jewish calender of feasts and ceremonies, starting (I think) from the Jewish New Year, followed by Passover, then Tabernacles, Dedication, and once more back to New Year, structured as a kind of Ultimate Holy Week, in which the feasts and sacred days are revealed as a kind of pattern of Divine Providence written into the very fabric of the cosmos itself.

Also, like Dante and Lewis, St. John weaves the Seven Planets into the structure of his book, I think in a kind of guidepost or clock-like way, I’m not certain. Read More “A Sourcebook for the Astrological Narniad: Revelations?”

22 November 1963 was the day an extraordinary trio of men died: US President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, philosopher and apologist C. S. Lewis died of kidney disease at the Kilns, and novelist Aldous Huxley expired high on LSD at the end of his battle with laryngeal cancer. Peter Kreeft‘s novel Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, & Aldous Huxley is the story of their meeting in Purgatory to discuss issues of faith.

So what? Well, if you’re a C. S. Lewis fan, it was announced today that he will be honored on this date next year, the 50th anniversary of his death, with a stone in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey. With Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare, Browning, Eliot, Tennyson, and a few other pikers.

Today is also the day that Harry is out of bounds late at night under the Invisibility Cloak seeing the dragons the Champions will face in the first TriWizard Task and meeting with Sirius Black between midnight and 1 am via the Flew Network in the Gryffindor Common Room. The chapter is ‘The Hungarian Horntail’ which is the center chapter of the fourth and central novel of the seven book series. I discuss this at greater length in my Goblet of Fire lecture (which you can see anytime you like!), but the fun part of it is just noting that, at the half way point in the series, Ms. Rowling sets the date and time as 11/22 (or 22/11, UK fashion) between 12 and 1 (12-1).

If you don’t see the pivot picture there in the numbers, ask a friend or, better, watch the ‘Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Goblet of Fire’ talk.

Happy Thanksgiving, All Pros!