Deplorable Word word itself, and had vowed that none of them, nor their descendants, would seek to discover it. Jadis said she had "learned it in a secret place and paid a terrible price to learn it". The book does not say what that price was, or give further details on the Deplorable Word. Lewis does not explicitly link the Deplorable Word to any specific weapon of mass destruction, but he alludes to the power of humanity to destroy life. Writing in 1955 in the midst of the Cold War, Lewis has the lion Aslan say to the central characters from the
Lion dance exorcism rituals were described as wearing bearskin mask, and it was also mentioned in Han Dynasty texts that "mime people" (象人) performed as fish, dragons, and phoenixes. However, lion is not native to China (a species found in Northeast China "Panthera youngi" had long become extinct), and the Lion Dance therefore has been suggested to have originated outside of China from countries such as India or Persia, and introduced via Cental Asia. According to ethnomusicologist Laurence Picken, the Chinese word for lion itself, "shi" (獅, written as 師 in the early periods), may have been derived from the Persian word