But if Lyra, as a modern Eve, discovers that her first consciousness of sexuality is a joyful and loving process, then the former power of the Church to impose guilt and fear in this area could be lost forever. Exactly how Lyra’s example would filter through to everyone else is never made clear. But everyone in the trilogy knows how important Lyra is and how long her presence has been prophesied. The ultimate positive effect she will have on her own society if she wins through must simply be taken for granted.
Pullman’s attack on Christianity takes off in other directions. He is not against the idea of one great force in the universe, of the type that makes the northern lights glow and may be pushing the hands of the alethiometer at the same time. But he hates all the attempts by human agencies to first claim this force for themselves and then use it for evil purposes. In this trilogy, God, or the Authority, is simply the first angel to be ‘condensed out of Dust’. He told all the angels that came after him that he was their creator, but this was not true.
At the end of the trilogy, this figure is revealed to Mrs Coulter as nothing more than an anguished, aged being, ‘of terrifying decrepitude, of a face sunken in wrinkles, of trembling hands and a mumbling mouth and rheumy eyes’. Demented and powerless, he finally dissolves in the wind after Lyra and Will help him out of his crystal litter. He does so with ‘a sigh of the most profound and exhausted relief’. His Regent, Metatron, who had long been running things, is the Biblical figure Enoch, a direct descendant of Adam. He too is anxious for power and ruthless about how he gets it. In this he is well served on earth by the Church, which uses the original lies of the Authority to back up its own claims for power over other fellow humans.
This ultra-negative view of Christianity and the Church could seem strange now, at a time when, at least in most parts of the Western world, religious belief is generally on the wane. But Pullman is having nothing of this. In his lecture on the Republic of Heaven, given in 2000, he writes: ‘of all the dangers that threaten us at the beginning of the third millennium – the degradation of the environment, the increasingly undemocratic power of the great corporations, the continuing threats to peace in regions full of decaying nuclear weapons, and so on – one of the biggest dangers of all comes from fundamentalist religion.’ He goes on to pick out in particular the threat posed at the time by Christian conservatives in the USA and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
One of the arguments for any organised religion has always been that humans need a fixed code of conduct without which they may be too weak to conduct their lives for the best. Pullman rejects this case on both counts. He does not think that the code of conduct suggested by Christianity is always either good or humane, and he believes that humans have it within themselves to live happy, fulfilled lives without encouragement or threats from religion. But as he has admitted himself: ‘There is a depressing human tendency to say “We know the truth and we’re going to kill you because you don’t believe in it.”’ Why so many human beings should have lent themselves to attitudes like this both in the past and present, and what this means for Pullman’s more hopeful view about humanity, is a matter his novels have yet to come to terms with.
14. A watercolour painting from William Blake’s Book of Urizen: ‘The Immortal endur’d his chains, / Tho’ bound in a deadly sleep.’ Blake has been a particular hero of and influence on Pullman. (The Book of Urizen (1794), plate 22, copy G, c.1815. Reproduced by permission of the Library of Congress.)
As far as Western Europe is concerned, Pullman’s reasons for his passionate dislike of Christianity in the trilogy sometimes belong to things that happened in the remote past. He twice mentions the fact that John Calvin, the seventeenth-century Protestant reformer based in Geneva, occasionally ordered the deaths of those children he believed to be heretics. Elsewhere, the witch Serafina Pekkala warns her sisters that there are modern churches that cut children’s sexual organs ‘with knives so that they shan’t feel’. But if this is a reference to female genital mutilation, this is something that Christian forces in Africa have long been condemning.
Pullman gives a clue to what he is getting at here when Lord Asriel lectures Lyra about the Church’s tradition of cutting children:
Do you know what the word castration means? It means removing the sexual organs of a boy so that he never develops the characteristics of a man. A castrato keeps his high treble voice all his life, which is why the Church allowed it: so useful in Church music. Some castrati became great singers, wonderful artists. Many just became fat spoiled half-men. Some died from the effects of the operation. But the Church wouldn’t flinch at the idea of a little cut, you see.
This loathsome practice is not found in any Christian religion today, and was once widespread in many different cultures. So once again, it seems hard to blame it on Christianity alone. The various priest characters in the trilogy, whether they enjoy vodka too much, watch over acts of torture or set out to commit murder, also come over as uniformly nasty. Like the caricatures found in the atheistic propaganda put over in pre-war Soviet Russia, these characters suggest that a good clergyman or nun has never existed. This is clearly unfair, as is the suggestion in the trilogy that the Church is only concerned with its own cruel and cynical survival, and is happy to kidnap, torture and murder to that end.
Pullman believes that ‘Every single religion that has a monotheistic god ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don’t accept him. Wherever you look in history you find that. It’s still going on.’ But since he knows the Christian religion best, this is where he pitches his main attack. For him, Christianity is a powerful and convincing force that has adversely shaped Western culture ever since it was first adopted. In this view, the Christian concept of the Kingdom of Heaven has always been an authoritarian attempt to impose negative values on populations, backed up by the weight of a self-serving Church hierarchy.
The end result, for him, has been the inevitable persecution of all those who oppose this system of belief. Such persecution is certainly less obvious now than it has been in the past, but in terms of the trilogy, Lyra’s world of Brytain is different in many ways from Will’s up-to-date version of Britain today. If the powers of the Church in Lyra’s life have developed in new and horrible directions this, in Pullman’s view, is because the seeds of this type of religious tyranny have always been implicit in Christianity anyway. While such tyranny is relatively restrained in Will’s world, it is running out of control in Lyra’s Brytain, just as it sometimes has in our own past.
What Pullman argues for instead is the reverse ideal of a Republic of Heaven, inhabited by people who have been brought up to value both themselves and others. In this scenario, the guilt and shame about sex encouraged by the Bible would be replaced by an honest admission of the joys and pleasures of the body. Instead of turning to priests and the Bible for advice, people instead should learn to trust their own instincts to do the right thing. The aim should always be to live harmoniously with themselves and with each other in an environment that is also loved and protected. Far from condemning Eve for eating from the tree of knowledge, Pullman believes that she should be seen as heroic in her determination to find out things for herself – the basis for all true education.
As for the powers of the Church as they appear in his trilogy, it is clear that Pullman is not only aiming at oppressive religion in his description of the various forces of darkness threatening to take over every world wherever they exist. He is also attacking all authoritarian systems of thought, religious or otherwise, that set out to enslave their followers under the guise of caring for them. As John Parry puts it to his son: ‘Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.’
Some would argue that there are times in history as well as in the contemporary world when this apparently clear division between good and bad is not as easy to make out. But in broad t
erms at least, this overall view enables Pullman to attack many other villains in addition to oppressive religion in his trilogy. The cruelty inflicted on the kidnapped children when their dæmons are cut away is more reminiscent of some of the abominable experiments carried out in Nazi concentration camps than anything to do with the modern Church.
The spiritual starvation and environmental degradation that so often go together in dictatorships also occur in the various descriptions of lost, cowed societies found in the trilogy. Lyra does not therefore just stand for spiritual freedom; she also represents the physical and social freedom that should be the aim of any truly civilised country for its citizens, young or old. This is not an argument for anarchy, given that Pullman also provides plenty of examples where individuals act with a just authority that deserves to be obeyed, from Iorek the bear to Dame Hannah, the wise head teacher who takes on Lyra as her pupil at the end of the trilogy. But such authority must be earned rather than assumed, and it should always act with a strong sense of responsibility.
Parallel worlds
Lyra and Will live in parallel worlds, resembling each other in some ways but different in others. In the course of their travels, they enter other worlds as well. This may seem a strange direction to take for a writer so intent on the idea of making the best of the here and now in his fiction, yet there are good reasons for this plot device. Pullman takes his cue here from modern quantum theory, which challenges former truths once held to be standard with the idea of uncertainty as a built-in factor to all science.
This has led distinguished physicists such as David Deutsch to claim that the results of certain ‘double slit’ experiments with light constitute evidence for the existence of parallel worlds. This claim has been disputed, but the main argument, once unthinkable where orthodox scientific reasoning is concerned, still has its followers. The Palmerian Professor at Jordan College refers it to when he mentions ‘the Barnard-Stokes business’ to Lord Asriel at the start of Northern Lights. Later on, the Master of Jordan explains to the librarian how these two daring theologians had postulated ‘the existence of numerous other worlds like this one, neither heaven nor hell, but material and sinful’.
The basic premise about the possible existence of parallel universes arises from what might happen should one particular action have two possible results at the same moment. Let Pullman explain the main idea behind this for himself, talking through the pursed lips of Lord Asriel:
Take the example of tossing a coin: it can come down heads or tails, and we don’t know before it lands which way it’s going to fall. If it comes down heads, that means that the possibility of its coming down tails has collapsed. Until that moment the two possibilities were equal.
But on another world, it does come down tails. And when that happens, the two worlds split apart. I’m using the example of tossing a coin to make it clearer. In fact, these possibility-collapses happen at the level of elementary particles, but they happen in just the same way: one moment several things are possible, the next moment only one happens, and the rest don’t exist. Except that other worlds have sprung into being, on which they did happen.
Pullman puts this idea of other worlds to maximum use in his trilogy, showing readers how each of the societies that he describes has gone on to grow in its own particular style. The same is true of individual development. While sitting together on a moss-covered rock, Will and Lyra reflect on ‘how many tiny chances had conspired to bring them to this place. Each of those chances might have gone a different way’. The overall message is that because nothing that happens is ever inevitable, it is up to the people that live in whichever world – including our own – always to make the best of the various opportunities that come their way.
At a plot level, parallel universes also have advantages, allowing Pullman to use his gift for describing other worlds that are a fascinating mixture of the strange and the familiar. Some of these details of daily life in other worlds are drawn not just from the present but also from the nineteenth century, such as the naphtha lights and zeppelins that crop up throughout the trilogy. Others are entirely imaginary, like the alethiometer, a device for reading the future taking its name from aletheia, the Greek word for truth, or the various dæmons that accompany people in Lyra’s world. In all cases, the effect is to keep the reader in a state of imaginative wonder – for Pullman, one of the principal aims of all fiction.
What is Dust?
Pullman never actually states who or what he thinks does actually run the universe, and for good reason. To do so would be to run into exactly the same trap that has snared everyone else attempting to narrow down and specify a power that he believes remains impossible to understand, however clearly it is sometimes felt. At one moment Serafina Pekkala tells Lee Scoresby of Lyra that ‘it seems that the fates are using her as a messenger to take [the alethiometer] to her father’. Later on Jotham Santelia, Professor of Cosmology, assures Lyra that: ‘The stars are alive, child. Did you know that? Everything out there is alive, and there are grand purposes abroad! … Everything happens for a purpose.’
It is a short step from this position to move on to the idea that the elementary particles that make up life may themselves also possess consciousness, just as they do in the Dust that plays such an important part in all three stories. Pullman takes his own particular use of this word straight from a verse in the Bible. When God is cursing Adam for having eaten the forbidden fruit, he tells him: ‘For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.’
As Lord Asriel explains to Lyra, some scholars believe this should actually be translated as ‘Thou shalt be subject to dust’. But for Pullman, Dust has many different meanings. He defines it variously throughout the trilogy as original sin, the form of thoughts not yet born, dark matter, shadow-particles, particles of consciousness and even as rebel angels. This cosmic Dust is distributed throughout space and is at one with the universe itself. Death is described as a joyful process of re-integration with Dust rather than with any Christian idea of God. This belief is not far from the eighteenth-century idea of pantheism, whereby God is seen as everything and everything is seen as God.
Pantheism is in fact a very ancient belief, far older than Christianity, and forms the basis for many other world religions still in existence today. At its heart is a reverence for the whole universe as well as for the native earth, seen as something sacred. Supernatural gods play no part in this religion. Animal as well as human rights are respected, and there is a commitment never to harm the natural environment. Humans themselves are held to be made of the same matter as the universe, and only in this life do they have the chance to witness this earthly paradise face to face. When they die, they are reunited with nature by being re-absorbed into it. But should they destroy nature, they then risk creating a hell on earth for all species as well as for themselves.
Pullman’s notion of Dust may therefore also have links with a particular mystical-ecological approach to the earth. In this view the world – like Dust – has always been a living organism with its own needs and feelings. The Greeks recognised this by giving the earth its own individual name of Gaia, the Greek name for the Goddess who was the original earth-mother. Humankind that so freely pollutes the world continues to neglect this mighty living organism at its own extreme peril.
His Dark Materials is packed with examples of environmental devastation, running hand in hand with descriptions of accompanying human cruelty, neglect and intolerance. For Pullman, bad behaviour towards other humans is inseparable from behaving badly towards the living environment. In both cases, violence is shattering what should be a natural harmony and still could be, if only humans learned how to act in ways where ‘responsibility and delight can co-exist’. In this, they could well afford to follow the example of the gentle, inoffensive mulefa, who work with, rather than against, their environment. By using giant seed-pods as wheels to help them travel, they also bring these same pods to a state where they finally crack after so much pounding al
ong hard roads. After that, it is possible for the mulefa to extract the seeds which are then tended carefully as they grow into new plants.
Dust may also be linked to superstring theory found in the discussion of quantum physics today. Sometimes also known as the Theory of Everything, this states that at the most microscopic level everything in the universe is made up of loops of vibrating strings. An object such as an apple, and a force such as radiation, can in this theory both be broken down into atoms, which can then be further broken down into electrons and quarks. These in turn can finally be reduced to tiny, vibrating loops of string.
This essential indivisibility of matter and energy could help explain why Pullman has endowed Dust with consciousness as well as an only barely visible physical shape. As Mary Malone discovers, it made its presence felt in human evolution partly in order to extract vengeance. This was for the betrayal of humanity that occurred when the rebel angels lost the great battle that once raged in heaven. These angels were also composed of Dust. At other times this precious shadow-matter can only be approached obliquely. When Lyra turns to the alethiometer, or Will makes use of his knife, it is important that they stay in a relaxed, totally open and receptive state of mind, putting their own immediate thoughts to one side.
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