and the cunning cat Ginger. Shift gains the power to pursue these actions by tricking Puzzle into impersonating Aslan, the true leader of Narnia. Later, to secure the assistance of the neighboring country Calormen, he insists that their god Tash and Aslan are one and the same. But Shift's plans unravel when his actions unwittingly summon the real Tash into Narnia. Shift meets his end when he is thrown into the stable where Tash dwells by king Tirian to prove that Tash is in fact there, and is eaten by the monstrous god. Allegorical interpretations and literary references Lewis, himself an expert on allegory, did not consider The Chronicles of Narnia allegory. He saw them as "suppositional" answering the question, "What might Christ become like, if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?' This is not allegory at all." As such, Narnia presents significant parallels with elements from Christianity. Shift is most often compared to the Antichrist from the biblical book of Book of Revelation. Revelation 13:15 can be seen as a passable description of Shift's hold over the Narnians: "And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed." Shift's ability to present his false Aslan is what compels the Narnians to obey him, and the Calormenes kill those who resist. A. N. Wilson and John Goldthwaite both suggest that Shift is intended as a type of the Catholic Church, in keeping with the traditional Protestant identification of the Pope with Antichrist. This identification is based on Shift's claim that Aslan cannot be bothered with speaking to a lot of animals and that he, Shift, is hereafter Aslan's sole mouthpiece. Similarly John J. Miller, writing for National Review, says: "I find it hard to see the ape Shift in The Last Battle, for example, as anything other than a satire of Roman Catholicism in general and the papacy in particular." . However, in Lewis' other writings it is made clear that he had no special animus against Roman Catholicism but detested theocracy in whatever form it might take. In his Oxford History of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century