However, the reverence for Psyche among the people is so great that even though her sisters are soon courted and married, Psyche does not receive any suitors (4:32).

Her beauty is so great that she is venerated as a goddess (4:28). The youngest one, Psyche, is the most beautiful of them all. 16 Apuleius tells the story of three daughters born to a king. 15 To gain an understanding of revelation and sacrifice as key elements of his narrative, it is first necessary to have some knowledge of the myth in its Apuleian form. Lewis’s reworking of the Apuleian myth took more than three decades. Reading may, in short, be revelatory: In re-articulating elements of the Christian story through an ancient myth, Lewis allows his readers to re-articulate their version of the Christian story. 13 By looking at the alterations that Lewis makes to the Apuleian myth in TWHF, we shall see how this book becomes a vehicle for expressing and understanding Christian theology. Till We Have Faces opens up for a continuous interaction between the reader’s “Christian” concepts of revelation and sacrifice and these elements as they appear in Lewis’s story. When we speak of revelation and sacrifice in TWHF, these are not considered “Christian” concepts from the outset, but elements of a narrative that speak meaningfully to what revelation and sacrifice might mean in Christian theology.

At the same time, it should be noted that when we speak about “sacrifice” and “revelation” in this article, these may well be elements that are part of the Christian story, but in TWHF they are contextualised as part of Orual’s story. The biblical allusions and Lewis’s view of Christianity as a myth become fact make it possible to speak of THWF as the Christian story retold both from the perspective of probable authorial intention and reader response.

Till we have faces meaning