I was aware that Philip Pullman’s series His Dark Materials was anti-Christian, if not broadly anti-religious, fantasy, but I having just seen some of the subject matter on the movie site for the first book, The Golden Compass, I’m scratching my head a bit.
People in this new world have their souls outside their bodies–an interesting idea–in the form of animals called “daemons.” That’s another word for demon. I can handle noble witches far better than I can handle the idea that everyone has a personal demon. And the Alethiometer, a truth-telling device, looks like a Ouija board, especially after I read the instructions for how to use it. Perhaps I’m silly, but I hate Ouija boards, and after being told that the soul is a demon in this fantasy, I won’t stand for it.
What do you think? Am I projecting onto someone else’s imagination? Have you read The Golden Compass or the other books in His Dark Materials?
“daemon/demon” comes originally from a neutral Latin word meaning “spirit” or petty deity, IIRC. I’m not defending Pullman’s decision there, and I would suspect he dubbed these “external souls” (they sound more like familiars or permanent sidekicks to me, but I’ve not read the books) daemons precisely as a slap at or attempt to rile Christians, but what I just gave is the defense you’d likely get from a fan of the books with a modicum of classical education.
Thanks. I looked up “daemon” to see if it had that kind of meaning, but didn’t see one. Oh, well. I guess I’m a reactionary.
What I don’t understand is how a Materialist can write about daemons/demons. This makes no sense to me; but if you’re a consistent materialist I guess you’d have little to write about.
– Socrates of course spoke famously of his ‘daemon.’ (Who instucted in things; not what to do, but what not to do.)
SR: Pullman wants to bring young people to a greater appreciation of the physical world and to the belief that it’s the only world that matters, and he tries to forward that goal by writing an overly complicated fairy tale that has little to do with what is genuinely poetic or intriguing in the world of scientific discovery. He also has little respect for Ursula K. LeGuin, the very model of a serious and talented spec fic writer who thinks worrying about an afterlife or a Supreme Being is a waste of energy. If that’s not a case of being too stupid to tell your friends from your enemies, I don’t know what is.
derringdo, are you saying Pullman doesn’t respect LeGuin because she writes about those ideas?
My friend who loves fantasy and sci-fiction said he couldn’t finish The Golden Compass. It’s hateful. I don’t remember if he said anything positive about it when we talked.
Phil: He had apparently not read her when he first started getting famous and giving interviews and canting about Lewis and Tolkien being poisonous escapists (which, btw, was where he lost any sales he might have made to me). In more recent interviews he admits to reading spec fic-including her-and dismissing them as not the kind of thing he was trying to do, and not especially his thing.
Sorry for getting caught up in my own thoughts above-I didn’t mean that he was dismissing her *because* she wrote about those ideas, just that he was dismissing a widely admired writer whose themes were not dissimilar to his own (though LeGuin is often interpreted as having a Buddhist kind of spirituality), on the grounds that the actual spec-fic-ness of her work was rather beneath his interest.
I’ve not read Pullman, though I’ve heard good things about the books – and read crazed rants by him about C.S. Lewis. But regarding a daemon (or daimon), as I recall that is an attending spirit (which is also what a genius originally was, I think).