Till We Have Faces

“[T]here is no judge between gods and men, and the god of the mountain won’t answer me.” 

This quote expresses Orual’s motivation for writing; she asks her reader to fill the role of judge so that she might have an answer, so that she might be vindicated.

“I had a fear of the Priest that was quite different from my fear of my father. I think that what frightened me (in those early days) was the holiness of the smell that hung about him—it was a temple-smell of blood (mostly pigeons’ blood, but he had sacrificed men too) and burnt fat and singed hair and wine and stale incense. It is the Ungit smell.” 

Orual’s description of the Priest gives us an insight into the religion of Glome. The worship of Ungit includes human sacrifice and teaches Orual to associate “holiness” and the gods with death and fear.

“She made beauty all round her. When she trod on mud, the mud was beautiful; when she ran in the rain, the rain was silver. When she picked up a toad—she had the strangest and, I thought, unchanciest love for all manner of brutes—the toad became beautiful.” 

This is Orual’s description of Psyche. Unlike their sister Redival, whose beauty is superficial, Psyche’s is spiritual as well as physical; she makes the world around her lovelier by her presence in it. Orual’s comment about Psyche’s love of beasts also suggests that Psyche sees the beauty and value of things that others dismiss, foreshadowing the conflict between the two sisters about the existence and nature of the gods.