Perelandra
Part Two of the Space Trilogy
Perelandra
Part Two of the Space Trilogy
Perelandra =
Venus
Perelandra is what the natives of Venus call Venus
Perelandra
Part Two of the Space Trilogy
Perelandra only has two natives, One is the Green Lady.
Perelandra
Part Two of the Space Trilogy
And the other is The King.
Synopsis
• Ransom is sent to Perelandra by Maleldil
• There he meets the Green Lady and reencounters Weston
• Weston tempts the Green Lady
• Ransom kills Weston many times
preventing the fall of Perelandra.
• In the end they were blissfully, blissfully
happy.
Maleldil
• Analogous to God.
• “I did not even doubt the reality of the mysterious being
whom the Elidila call Maleldil and to whom they appear
to give total obedience such as no Tellurian (Earthly)
dictator can command. I knew what Ransom supposed
Maleldil to be. ”
• “My spirit praises Maleldil who
comes down from Deep Heaven into
this lowness? It is He who is strong
and makes me strong and fills empty
worlds with good creatures. ”
• So God created man in his own
image, in the image of God he
created him; male and female he
created them.
~Genesis 1:27
Eldila
• Very similar to angels, as we know them.
• “Are not all angels ministering spirits sent to serve those
who will
inherit salvation?” ~ Hebrews 1:14
• “He had met the creatures called Eldila. The Eldila are very
different from any planetary creatures. They do not eat,
breed, breathe, or suffer natural death. Though they
appear on planets and may even seem to our senses to be
sometimes resident in them, the precise spatial location of
an Eldila at any moment presents great problems. They
themselves regard space (or “Deep Heaven”) as their true
habitat, and the planets are to them not closed worlds but
merely moving points, perhaps even interruptions, in what
we know as the Solar System and they as the Field of
Arbol.”
Perelandra
• Earth is very old compared to Perelandra
• Perelandra is just going through the time
of testing like in Genesis
• The Green Lady is “The Mother”
• The King is “The Father”
Fixed Land
"Is there a law in your world
not to sleep in a Fixed Land?"
"Yes," said the Lady.
"Maleldil Himself has told me now. And it
could not be so, if your world has no
floating lands. But He is not telling me
why He has forbidden it to us."
Fixed Land
• Genesis 2:16-17
• Perelandrians not allowed to sleep on
dry land
Ransom
• No analogous character in the Creation
account
• Too bad there wasn’t, then there might
have been no fall on Earth.
Green Lady (The Queen)
•Green Lady is the Mother.
•The Green Lady and the King were naked.
•Maleldil gave them the command not to sleep on the
fixed land.
•The Green Lady is tempted by Weston.
•The Green Lady was separated from the King.
•Difference: the Green Lady resisted the temptation,
while Eve seems to give in rather
easily…though the Green Lady also had
Ransom’s help.
The King
• The King is separated from the Lady when she
is tempted.
• When Ransom finally sees the King, he sees the
image of God, unblemished by the fall.
• Question: Would our likeness to God be more
clearly perceptible if the fall had not taken
place?
• The King names things, as Adam was given
charge to do.
Weston (Un-man)
• Weston is possessed by a demon (or Satan
himself, for all we know), and the serpent
is Satan.
• Weston’s tempting of
the Lady is remarkably
similar to Satan’s
tempting of Eve in
Genesis.
Ransom’s Heel and Weston’s Head
• "In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Ghost, here goes--I mean Amen," said
Ransom, and hurled the stone as hard as he could
into the Un-man's face.
• Ransom looked down and saw that his heel was still
bleeding. "Yes," he said, "it is where the Evil One bit
me. The redness is of blood."
• In Genesis 3:15 it is written "And I will put enmity
between you [serpent] and the woman, and between
your seed and her seed; he shall bruise you on the
head, and you shall bruise him on the heel."
• In Perelandra Ransom is "bruised" on the heel by the
Un-man and the Un-man is "bruised" on the head by
Ransom.
Ransom’s Killing: Irony?
• Ransom and Weston were engaged in Spiritual
warfare over the temptation
of the Green Lady for many days.
• Ransom knew that this debate could not go on
forever.
• Maleldil told Ransom that in order to end the
temptation of the Lady; he would have to kill
Weston.
“And will you teach us
Death?” said the Lady to
Weston’s shape, where it
stood above her.
“Yes,” it said, “it is for
this that I came here,
that you may have
Death in abundance.”
Predestination?
• “If the issue lay in Maleldil’s
hands, Ransom and the
Lady were those hands.”
~Ransom
• “It is not for nothing that you
were named Ransom.”
~The Voice
• “My name is also Ransom.”
~The Voice
•“You might look upon the Perelandrian story as merely an
indirect consequence of the Incarnation on earth: or you might
look on the Earth story as mere preparation for the new worlds of
which Perelandrea was the first. The one was neither more nor
less true than the other. Nothing was more or less important
than anything else.”
“You might say, if you liked, that the
power of choice had been simply set
aside and an inflexible destiny
substituted for it. On the other hand, you
might say that he had delivered from the
rhetoric of his passions and had
emerged into unassailable freedom.
Ransom could not, for the life of him, see
any difference between these two
statements. Predestination and freedom
were apparently identical.” ~Ransom
What If...?
• The fall hadn’t happened?
• Eve had resisted that snake?
• Our fall affected our world only, and not
the entire universe?
• If this is the case, what if there are other
worlds in which the fall did not take
place, which live in perfect harmony
under God’s watchful eyes?
Bye!