Deep Heaven

*"Now that the very name "space" seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it 'dead'; he felt life pouring in at every moment.*" - (*Out of the Silent Planet*)
**Deep Heaven**, also known as the **Heavens**, **Heaven**, and **Space**, is the area between planets in the Field of Arbol. It is not an empty area, but full of Eldila, and the movements, or the Great Dance, of the Field of Arbol.

As Elwin Ransom says when aboard the spaceship: "*Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens – the heavens which declared the glory – the 'happy climes that ly/Where day never shuts his eye/Up in the broad fields of the sky.'*"

When Ransom returns from Malacandra to Earth (Thulcandra), the Oyarsa of Mars had promised Ransom that the *eldila* of "deep heaven" would watch over and protect him against any attacks from the other two Thulcandrians, who might seek to kill him as a way of economizing their air and food supplies; at times, Ransom is conscious of benevolent presences within the spaceship—the *eldila*. After a difficult return journey, the space-ship makes it back to Earth, and is shortly "unbodied" according to Oyarsa's will.

The Language of Deep Heaven is Old Solar:

"*For this was the language spoken before the Fall and beyond the Moon and the meanings were not given to the syllables by chance, or skill, or long tradition, but truly inherent in them as the shape of the great Sun is inherent in the little waterdrop. This was Language herself, as she first sprang at Maleldil's bidding out of the molten quicksilver of the first star called Mercury on Earth, but Viritrilbia in Deep Heaven.*"

Earth will remain a silent planet until the end of the great siege of Deep Heaven against The Bent One of Earth. The siege starts to end (with the Oyéresu of other worlds descending to Earth) at the finale of the Trilogy, *That Hideous Strength*. But there is still much to happen until the fulfillment of what is predicted in the *Book of Revelation*, when the Oyéresu put an end to the rule of The Bent One and, on the way, smash the Moon to fragments. This, in turn, will not be "The End of the World", but merely "The Very Beginning" of what is still to come.

## Cultural references

* Metal band Becoming the Archetype's album *Dichotomy* features the song "Deep Heaven (The Awakening)"

## Quotations

* *He had read of ‘Space’: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now — now that the very name 'Space’ seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it ‘dead’; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. He had thought it barren: he saw now that it was the womb of the worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the earth with many eyes-and here, with how many more! No: Space was the wrong name… Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens — the heavens which declared the glory…” (*Out of the Silent Planet*)*
* \* “He could not feel that they were an island of life journeying through an abyss of death. He felt almost the opposite--that life was waiting outside the little iron egg-shell in which they rode, ready at any moment to break in, and that, if it killed them, it would kill them by excess of its vitality. He hoped passionately that if they were to perish they would perish by the "unbodying" of the space-ship and not by suffocation within it. To be let out, to be free, to dissolve into the ocean of eternal noon, seemed to him at certain moments a consummation even more desirable than their return to Earth. And if he had felt some such lift of the heart when first he passed through heaven on their outward journey, he felt it now tenfold, for now he was convinced that the abyss was full of life in the most literal sense, full of living creatures.”(*Out of the Silent Planet*)
* “He wondered how he ever could have thought of planets, even of the Earth, as islands of life and reality floating in a deadly void. Now, with a certainty which never after deserted him, he saw the planets - the 'earths' he called them in his thought - as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven - excluded and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but subtraction from, the surrounding brightness.” (*Out of the Silent Planet*)
* *"Their own strength has betrayed them. They have […] pulled down Deep Heaven on their heads."* - "(*That Hideous Strength* 271)
* "*Sulva is she whom mortals call the Moon. She walks in the lowest sphere. The rim of the world that was wasted goes through her. Half of her orb is turned towards us and shares our curse. Her other half looks to Deep Heaven; happy would he be who could cross that frontier and see the fields on her further side.*"(That Hideous Strength 271)

## References

1. ↑ *That Hideous Strength* p281 1945 edition.