Daemon Voices

by Philip Pullman

  So each one of us has a whole complex of attitudes and experiences which, if they’re not as coherent as a worked-out system, function in a similar way. They provide the solid and unquestioned support for all the work we build on top of them. And not only the work. They function like an invisible armature shaping every action we take, every assumption we make, every view we form of society or politics or religion. They are there whether we know it or not. And sometimes we deny they’re there at all. People who are successful in a worldly way, in administration or business or politics or journalism, for example, often claim that they see things clearly and they’re not taken in by any fancy theories and they know what’s what and they’ve got their feet on the ground. The system they have acquired by a thousand tiny chances doesn’t seem to them like a system at all; it seems to be a perfectly designed edifice of truth—mighty, beautiful and flawless—which corresponds in every particular to the way things really are.

  But it works. As long as they don’t think about it, it stands. It might seem from the outside like a haphazardly acquired combination of prejudice, ignorance, random experience, scraps of cracker-barrel sententiousness, things they were taught before they were seven, superstition, sentimentality, wishful thinking and saloon-bar knowingness; a gimcrack, jerry-built, patchwork thing, crawling with dry rot, with rats in the basement and death-watch beetle in the attic, with staircases that lead nowhere and corridors blocked off by fallen masonry, with broken windows banging in the wind and great holes in the roof letting in the rain. Never mind. As long as the inhabitants don’t question its absolute rightness and truthfulness, it’ll stand. Plenty of people live their entire lives in a state of boundless confidence, and die never once having doubted the happy certainty of the things they know. Lucky them; this unquestioning confidence is a source of great strength.

  In literary work, which is my main concern, a system like that—the one you don’t know you’ve got—often only becomes clearly visible a generation or two after the work was first published. As the sun moves round, the shadows change; and popular fiction of the first half of the twentieth century seems to a reader of today to be darkened by shadows that readers then didn’t notice. Anti-Semitism, for example. The attitude many such stories embody is that Jews are not like us, somehow—the us that is understood to include the reader that books of that sort seem to expect. Jews may be very clever, they may be imaginative and artistic; but somehow they are not like us; we unconsciously signal the difference by referring to their Jewishness all the time. Better books reflect the same social assumptions, but more subtly: in Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train of 1932, the author signals this all-pervasive awareness of difference by locating it either in the words or the consciousness of the characters. The purser on board a cross-Channel ferry is talking to a waiter. “That Jew,” he said, “did he give you a good tip?” A young actress is coming round after having fainted: “She was aware of the heavy slow movement of the train. Lights streamed through the window across the doctor’s face and on to the young Jew behind.”

  I dare say that much work of the present day, including my own, will in time reveal some equally unfortunate attitudes, some ugly shadows, of which we’re quite unconscious at the moment. The point is that we cannot be free of these things; to claim that we have no system, that we see things exactly as they are, that we write without any preconceptions or hidden ideology, is to deceive ourselves. We are already enslav’d.

  When we first realise that, it comes as a terrible shock. And all that sunny confidence we had when we didn’t think about it vanishes at once.

  Blake in “Auguries of Innocence”:

  If the Sun & Moon should doubt

  They’d immediately go out.

  I’m going to follow this line for a minute, because it leads back at last to the other word I mentioned in the title of Nuttall’s book, the word Gnostic, and I want to think about whether the Blake I love—that small corner of the great continent of all his work that I’ve wandered about in, and grown to know and revere—can truthfully be called Gnostic, and whether the Gnostic system is one in which I might feel free.

  So: this business of doubt.

  William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, has a name for people who have never doubted the assumptions they live by: he calls them once-born. And once you’ve doubted, once you’ve seen the arbitrary and contingent and contradictory nature of the system you didn’t think was a system at all, you become as it were twice-born.

  Not born again, in the modern phrase that comes originally, I suppose, from the Southern Baptists; being born again is a very different thing. It means conversion to a particularly shrill and enthusiastic form of Christianity. Born-again people have all the certainty of the once-born, with an added and obnoxious self-righteousness. But twice-born people are in a different condition.

  William James describes the difference like this:

  In the religion of the once-born the world is a sort of rectilinear or one-storied affair, whose accounts are kept in one denomination, whose parts have just those values which naturally they appear to have, and of which a simple algebraic sum of pluses and minuses will give the total worth. Happiness and religious peace consist in living on the plus side of the account. In the religion of the twice-born, on the other hand, the world is a double-storied mystery. Peace cannot be reached by the simple addition of pluses and elimination of minuses from life.

  Natural good is not simply insufficient in amount and transient, there lurks a falsity in its very being…it gives no final balance, and can never be the thing intended for our lasting worship.

  James doesn’t mention Gnosticism directly in The Varieties of Religious Experience, but in that last couple of sentences, he perfectly summed up the attitude that fuels it. Gnosticism is a perennial system of radical existential scepticism that flares up in times of millennial crisis such as the present. It’s an extraordinarily intoxicating system, because it tells a thrilling story that’s exactly like a conspiracy theory, involving our very deepest selves.

  The idea is that the real God is nowhere to be found in this universe, but is infinitely distant. Our souls (it’s a little more complicated than that, but souls will do) belong with Him, the distant unknowable God, and not here in this world, because each soul is a spark of divinity that was stolen and imprisoned here by the evil creator of the material universe, the Demiurge or false God who is worshipped by all those who aren’t in on the secret. Only those who know can pass on the secret knowledge of how to find our way back to our true home.

  What could be more thrilling than to feel ourselves in possession of knowledge like that, and of a fate so grand and all-encompassing? To feel our own lives bound up so intimately with the origins and the destiny of the universe itself? It’s no wonder that the Gnostic impulse keeps flaring up again like an underground fire that can’t be put out. It lies behind a lot of popular narrative art of the sort that deals with the questions of who we are and why we’re here and why those in authority are deceiving us: the truth about Jesus, or God, or our own deepest identity, is not what we have been told up till now. The truth is something radically different, which is in the possession of a few initiates, and if only people knew what it was, it would change their view of everything.

  Anyway, Gnosticism forms a natural refuge for the twice-born. It accounts for all kinds of things, not least for the existence of evil in a world that was supposedly created by a good God—because the world was created by a bad God, and the real God is somewhere else. It accounts for the mysterious feeling of alienation that the twice-born suffer—because it’s natural to feel alienated from a world where you don’t belong, a world where you are yourself an alien. It accounts for the power of the Christ story—because Christ was not a man at all, but an emissary from the distant Godhead sent to show us the way back home. There are secret gospels, and secret ways of reading the
familiar gospels, that make this clear to those in the know. Everything we have taken for granted is wrong, and must be re-interpreted in order to be understood in a new way.

  Now there are passages in Blake that sound very like this. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the Devil, in conversation with an Angel, speaks about Jesus Christ:

  Now hear how he has given his sanction to the law of ten commandments: did he not mock at the sabbath and so mock the sabbath’s God? murder those who were murder’d because of him? turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery? steal the labour of others to support him? bear false witness when he omitted making a defence against Pilate? covet when he pray’d for his disciples, and when he bid them shake off the dust of their feet against those who refus’d to lodge them? I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments. Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.

  The Angel who’s being addressed, says the narrator of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “is my particular friend; we often read the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense, which the world shall have if they behave well.”

  So far, so Gnostic. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is one of the most radically troubling and exhilarating works that has ever been written, and a great deal of it seems to support a sort of antinomian reversal of conventional morality (“Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires”) which has formed a strong part of the Gnostic tradition. A. D. Nuttall’s reading of Blake demonstrates that although that is certainly there, it’s far from the whole of it, and that Blake’s Gnosticism is seen even more vividly in the opposition he depicts between the aged father-tyrant and the revolutionary, life-bringing son.

  Well, possibly. Blake’s genius was so protean that it’s possible to find support for all kinds of theories about it in the teeming riches of his verse.

  But for me, although Nuttall doesn’t agree with this, the tendency of the poetry points the other way. The Blake I love was not a Gnostic. The defining mark of Gnosticism is its mistrust and hatred of the natural world, its contempt for bodily experience, and that is why, for all the intoxicating excitement of the conspiracy theory of creation, I could never be a Gnostic, and I could never love Blake if I thought that he hated the physical world.

  But remember, I’m seeing this with the eyes not of a scholar but of a moth, as I mentioned at the start. All I can do is tell you what I see with those eyes. I say moth; I might as well say butterfly. I admitted in the afterword at the end of The Amber Spyglass that my principle was to “read like a butterfly, write like a bee,” and what I meant was that I read unsystematically, carried from place to place by the impulse of the moment. I sample dozens of flowers every morning; if a strong wind comes along, I’m lifted helplessly and deposited a hundred miles away; whatever attracts me can have my attention for as long as it can keep it, and then I’m off. That’s how I read.

  But there are some flowers I return to again and again for the quality of their nectar, as a butterfly, or there are some lights I can’t help fluttering back to, as a moth. And this tiny insect-brain or insect-instinct knows what’s good for it and what’s bad; and little by little it’s been gathering drops of nectar from here, and beams of light from there, and making them into something which, if it isn’t as grand and all-embracing as a system, is at least a series of Axioms, if you like, which make it possible for the moth-butterfly, when he returns to his little hexagonal cell and becomes a bee, to write with a sort of coherence.

  So here, to end with, are seven of the drops of nectar and beams of light that this unstable insect has gathered from Blake. They are engraved on the walls of the cell under the title The Republic of Heaven.

  Axiom number one: the moth-butterfly-bee believes that this physical world, this matter of which we are made, is amorous by nature. Matter rejoices in matter, and each atom of it falls in love with other atoms and delights to join up with them to form complex and even more delightful structures: “…and shew you all alive / This world, where every particle of dust breathes forth its joy.”

  Axiom number two: things arise from matter-in-love-with-matter that are not themselves matter. Thoughts emerge from the unimaginable, the non-disentangle-able complexity of the brain, thoughts that are not material, though they have analogues in material processes, and you can’t say where one ends and the other begins, because each is an aspect of the other. “Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five senses.”

  Axiom number three: the consciousness inherent in matter demonstrates that consciousness is a normal property of the physical world and much more widely diffused than human beings think. “How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, / Is an immense World of delight, clos’d by your senses five?”

  Axiom number four: bodily experience underlies, sustains, feeds, inspires, and cherishes mental experience. “Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. / Energy is Eternal Delight.”

  Axiom number five: we should use what works. And if invoking ghosts, demons, spirits, gods, demigods, nymphs or hobgoblins helps us to write, then we should banish the superstition about not being superstitious and invoke them without embarrassment or hesitation. “All deities reside in the human breast.”

  Axiom number six: the true object of our study and our work is human nature and its relationship to the universe. “God Appears & God is Light / To those poor Souls who dwell in Night, / But does a Human Form Display / To those who Dwell in Realms of day.”

  Axiom number seven: the work we do is infinitely worth doing. “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”

  Well, those are some of the things that this moth-butterfly has learned from Blake. These are the axioms he lives by. Whether it amounts to a system he couldn’t say; but he’s still young; he’s not sixty yet. He will continue to visit the flowers in the garden of Blake—and elsewhere too, and not only the flowers of poetry, but the flowers of music and painting and philosophy and science and those that occur naturally in the landscapes of the sky and the earth and the sea—and gather nectar of all kinds until his wings grow too old to fly with.

  And from time to time, as I say, he goes back to his cell and becomes a bee and begins the long silent contemplative process of turning the nectar into words. But that’s another story.

  THIS TALK WAS DELIVERED TO THE BLAKE SOCIETY AT ST. JAMES’S CHURCH, PICCADILLY, ON 25 OCTOBER 2005.

  William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience is one of the most interesting and enlightening books I’ve ever read. What makes it particularly valuable is that he’s not pushing a particular view of the truth of religion: instead he’s examining, with a wealth of examples and a great depth of psychological insight, what it feels like to be religious. It’s never a waste of time to look honestly at human experience.

  Talents and Virtues

  ANOTHER VISIT TO MISS GODDARD’S GRAVE

  Considering the delight and wisdom to be had from stories, and contrasting two ways of reading them, which might be called “democratic” and “theocratic”

  Thank you for inviting me to speak here in this distinguished series of lectures. Quite what prompted you to ask me to talk about religious education I can’t immediately see; you must have been desperate. As I’m not an academic, nor a member of the clergy, nor a teacher, whatever I say about the subject will be the observations of an amateur with no standing in the field. Furthermore, given that I’ve voiced some criticisms of religion in the past, and that various Christian groups have expressed their criticisms of me, it might be that whatever I said on the subject would be hostile in any case.

  Well, I hope it won’t be that. But we shall see. I’ll begin by taking you to the churchyard of St. Peter Mancroft overlooking the marketplace in Norwich. Not far from the door of t
his church there’s a tomb—a finely carved family sort of tomb, one of those big boxshaped ones. At one end there is an oval cartouche, and inside it the inscription:

  This Stone is dedicated to the Talents and Virtues of Sophia Ann Goddard, who died 25 March 1801 aged 25. The Former shone with superior Lustre and Effect in the great School of Morals, the THEATRE, while the Latter inform’d the private Circle of Life with Sentiment, Taste, and Manners that still live in the Memory of Friendship and Affection.

  I’ve been fond of that tomb, and this inscription, and by extension of Miss Goddard herself, for most of my life. I know nothing about her; if I had the time I’d spend a few hours in the county archives to see if there was any record of an actress called Sophia Goddard in Norwich at the end of the eighteenth century. Clearly she was greatly loved and widely admired. There must have been a portrait made at some stage; people have always liked looking at pictures of young actresses; they still do. Perhaps it’s still hanging in a house somewhere in the city, or at the back of an antique shop, with the title Unknown young woman, late 18th century. There’s a story there; in fact, there are several.

  But what I’m concerned about tonight is the relevance of her epitaph to the theme of my lecture. I don’t profess any religion; I don’t think it’s possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words “spiritual,” or “spirituality”; but I think I can say something about moral education, and I think it has something to do with the way we understand stories, which is why I’ve begun with Miss Goddard’s grave.

  Sophia Goddard’s tomb

  “The great School of Morals, the THEATRE”—it was possible in 1801 to use a phrase like that and not be misunderstood, not be suspected of irony. The people who patronised Miss Goddard’s performances would really have believed that the theatre was indeed a place to which we might go and find instruction or enlightenment about matters of morality.