Jollity

C.S. Lewis believed that all old mythologies were shadows of the Christian truth, and liked to play with the influences on Earth of the five classical planets:  Mercury, Mars, Venus, Saturn, and Jupiter.  In "That Hideous Strength," the angel-overseers in charge of each planet visit our hero and his group of insurgents in a country house on Earth, bringing their different influences in turn. Last to arrive is Jupiter:

Suddenly a greater spirit came--one whose influence tempered and almost transformed to his own quality the skill of leaping Mercury, the clearness of Mars, the subtler vibration of Venus, and even the numbing weight of Saturn.

In the kitchen his coming was felt.  No one afterwards knew how it happened, but somehow the kettle was put on, the hot toddy was brewed.   Arthur--the only musician among them--was bidden to get out his fiddle.  The chairs were pushed back, the floor cleared.   They danced.  What they danced no one could remember.   It was some round dance, no modern shuffling: it involved beating the floor, clapping of hands, leaping high.   And no one, while it lasted, thought himself or his fellows ridiculous.  It may, in fact, have been some village measure, not ill-suited to the tiled kitchen: the spirit in which they danced it was not so.   It seemed to each that the room was filled with kings and queens, that the wildness of their dance expressed heroic energy, and its quieter movements had seized the very spirit behind all noble ceremonies.

Upstairs his mighty beam turned the Blue Room into a blaze of lights.  Before the other angels a man might sink; before this he might die, but if he lived at all he would laugh. If you had caught one breath of the air that came from him, you would have felt yourself taller than before.  Though you were a cripple, your walk would have become stately: though a beggar, you would have worn your rags magnanimously.   Kingship and power and festal pomp and courtesy shot from him as sparks fly from an anvil.   The ringing of bells, the blowing of trumpets, the spreading out of banners are means used on earth to make a faint symbol of his quality.  It was like a long sunlit wave, creamy-crested and arched with emerald, that comes on nine feet tall, with roaring and with terror and unquenchable laughter.  It was like the first beginning of music in the halls of some king so high and at some festival so solemn that a tremor akin to fear runs through young hearts when they hear it.  For this was great Glund-Oyarsa, King of Kings, through whom the joy of creation principally blows across these fields of Arbol, known to men in old times as Jove and under that name, by fatal but not inexplicable misprision, confused with his Maker--so little did they dream by how many degrees the stair even of created being rises above him.

At his coming there was holiday in the Blue Room. The two mortals, momentarily caught up into the Gloria which those five excellent Natures perpetually sing, forgot for a time the lower and more immediate purpose of their meeting.