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NOT a Review of the HBO Series

A local dungeon daddy once invited me over for a tour of the chamber.

"Well, why not?" I thought.

I'll spare you the details. I left having learned two things.

First—as expected—bondage doesn't really interest me.

Second, that my friend Paul was absolutely right in his characterization of BD/SM as essentially an elaborate and extended form of foreplay.

Now, I like foreplay as much as the next guy, but I have to admit that, at several points during the encounter, I couldn't help thinking, “Um...can we just screw already?”

Let's just admit it: House of the Dragon is Silmarillion to Game of Thrones' Lord of the Rings.

It's an old question: why did the gods make the world? The answer, as any artist can tell you, is that making is the best drug of all.

If making is a drug, then world-making must be the most addictive drug of all. Alas, both Tolkien and Martin fell  prey to traps of their own making, forgetting what—say what you will about Narnia—C. S. Lewis never did: that, no matter how intrinsically interesting the world, the story always has to come first.

That's why GoT and LotR are both such romps, and HotD and the Silmarillion such bores.

Could it also maybe have something to do with the fact that, while the former are suffused with gentle humor, the latter are, by contrast, utterly humorless?

Or is that just the nature of story vs. history?

Hearing fans effuse about the first season of House of the Dragon always leaves me wondering just exactly what I was missing. The show always seemed to be building to a climax that somehow never came.

I kept being reminded of those bad pagan rituals of the 80s and 90s in which you were supposed to stand in an interminable line, waiting for your one-on-one with a (supposed) deity.

Spoiler alert: it's never worth the wait.

I've sometimes wondered if the eponymous White Witch of C. S. Lewis' 1950 The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—whom Lewis describes as “white as paper”—was inspired by Robert Graves' The White Goddess.

TWG having been published in 1948, this remains chronologically possible, though (admittedly) tight. Whether or not Lewis was familiar with Graves' magnum opus I do not know, though as a study in mythology, it does seem right up Lewis' alley. Although the White Witch is never (to my memory, anyway) spoken of in explicitly lunar terms, the implied contrast with the lion Aslan, the solar Narnian Christ, permeates the book.

The White Witch also appears—offstage—in the 1951 Prince Caspian. Waiting for assistance from an Aslan who never seems to show up, a hag and a werewolf propose that the Narnians invoke the power of the White Witch for aid.

When the king's adviser observes that, as all the stories agree, the Witch is dead, the hag counters, “Oh, bless his heart, his dear little Majesty needn't mind about the White Lady—that's what we call her—being dead....who ever heard of a witch that really died? You can always get them back.”

“Call her up,” says the werewolf. “We are all ready. Draw the circle. Prepare the blue fire.”

Invoking the White Lady in a drawn circle? Do we see here shades of anti-Wiccan polemic? Although Gerald Gardner's Witchcraft Today was not published until 1954, accounts of Wicca had begun appearing in the popular British press early in the 1950s, and—given his interests—it seems at least possible, if not likely, that Lewis will have been aware of them.

Was arch-Christian C. S. Lewis polemicizing against a resurgent White Goddess and her latter-day witch-cult in his Narnia series? Well, it shouldn't be difficult to find out, one way or the other.

What's Marvel's Iron Fist have to do with Buddhism? Thoughts on what it takes to make erotic fantasy work in a video game. And a look at what The Magicians has to say about magic. It's Airy Monday, our segment about magic and religion in popular culture! All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!