C.S. Lewis on the longaevi

Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality: In his book The Discarded Image, C. S. Lewis tries to depict the universe as it was seen through the eyes of a medieval person. He describes their view of the heavens, with its precise system of crystalline spheres towering like a great cathedral, vast but finite, into space. And he is just about to describe their view of Earth and its inhabitants who occupy the lower end of the Great Chain of Being, which stretches down from God and the angels, to man, animals, vegetables, and even stones, when he finds himself obliged to pause and consider an anomalous class of beings. They are not only strange to him, as a literary historian and Christian apologist, but they are also at odds with the cosmology he is outlining - a world even more precise and orderly than our own worldview. Following the Roman writer Martianus Capella, he calls these beings longaevi (presumably “long-lived ones”) - “dancing companies” of which “haunt woods, glades, and groves, and…