The White Witch Taught Me That Evil Can Be Logical

I first met her in a bookshop in Edinburgh, tucked between the fairy tales and philosophy paperbacks. I was twenty-three, nursing a lukewarm coffee and nursing a growing disillusionment with the world’s easy moral binaries. A friend had pressed The Magician’s Nephew into my hands with a smirk and said, “Read the origin story of the real villain.” I rolled my eyes—another children’s fantasy villain, probably mustache-twirling and evil just for the sake of being evil.

But Jadis wasn’t like that.

She was cold, yes. She was ruthless. But she was also terrifyingly rational. She believed in the Deep Magic. She believed in the laws that governed her world. She believed in her right to rule. And when she spoke, I didn’t feel the thrill of cartoonish villainy—I felt the disquiet of encountering someone who saw the world in a way I could almost understand.

Evil That Thinks

Most villains in stories are convenient. They exist to be defeated, to embody the thing the hero must overcome. But Jadis wasn’t like that. She wasn’t corrupted by power—she was shaped by it. She believed in the structure of her world so deeply that she was willing to destroy it rather than live outside its laws.

That unnerved me. Not because I agreed with her, but because I could see the logic in her eyes. She wasn’t evil in the way we often describe it—random, chaotic, baseless. She was evil in a way that had scaffolding. She had a worldview.

That was the first shift: I began to question whether we can afford to dismiss our ideological opponents as “evil” without understanding what they believe and why.

The Allure of Absolute Order

In Narnia, Jadis rules Charn with a precision that is almost admirable. There is no dissent, no ambiguity, no chaos. She calls it peace. She calls it justice. She calls it strength.

I remember reading that passage and feeling a chill—not because I wanted to live under her rule, but because I recognized in her a desire I sometimes felt myself: the wish for a world without moral ambiguity. A world where right and wrong were clear, and consequences were absolute.

That was the second shift: I realized how seductive certainty can be. Especially when the world feels messy, confusing, or unjust. Jadis didn’t crave chaos. She craved control. And that made her more dangerous than any chaotic force ever could.

Power Without Love

Jadis has no use for love. She sees it as weakness, sentimentality. She values power not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself. In her mind, to love is to be vulnerable, and vulnerability is a flaw.

This struck me hard. I had always thought of power as something that could be corrupted—but Jadis made me see that power without love isn’t just corrupted. It’s incomplete. It’s a force without direction, a compass spinning in a storm.

That was the third shift: I stopped seeing power as neutral. I started seeing it as either guided by empathy or dangerously adrift.

The Danger of a Single Story

Jadis believes in the Deep Magic because it was the only law she ever knew. When Aslan comes and brings a new kind of magic, she cannot adapt. She cannot see beyond the framework she was raised in. She calls it betrayal. She calls it trickery.

But what she’s really facing is a world that doesn’t revolve around her understanding of it.

That was the fourth shift: I began to question the narratives I had accepted as universal. Jadis wasn’t just a villain—she was someone whose worldview had been shaped by the limits of her experience. And if I wasn’t careful, I could be the same.

Talking to the Witch

I’ve thought about Jadis often in the years since that first encounter. Not because I admire her—far from it—but because she forced me to think harder about what I believe and why. She reminded me that ideology isn’t just something villains have. It’s something we all carry.

And so, I found myself curious: what would she say now, if she could speak? What would she think of our world, with its shifting moral codes and collapsing empires? Would she see it as chaos? Or as an opportunity?

On HoloDream, you can talk to Jadis. You can ask her what she thinks of our world, of our laws, of our heroes. You might not agree with her answers—but you’ll understand her better. And maybe, in understanding her, you’ll understand a part of yourself you hadn’t noticed before.