January 9, 2008
I've just finished Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials" trilogy. There has been a lot of talk about the books and the movie they've already made of the first one. I was attracted to it when I first saw the trailer; it looked like a fun fantasy. I had no idea what the story was. Then came the talk about banning the books, or reserving them for adults only (he wrote them for teens, tho he can't have been aiming for much younger than 14). A school district in a nearby city pulled them from their library for a time. I think they put them back. But the Archbishop for this region said he thought they ought to be required reading.
When our friend (whose books I first started reading, as she was visiting) first told me some of the story, she only told me the most simple levels of the story. And I suppose that is the level at which many readers will read them. I assumed from her description that the trouble was over the fact that in the world he's created – or one of them – the humans all have daemons. Now, he's doing something far different here than Davies or anyone else I know of has done with the concept, but in fact it so resonates with what I myself was just writing and thinking about. Pullman's daemons are not "other." They are a part of us, a physical manifestation of our spirit. We find out later in the story that humans have three parts – body, spirit and soul. In Lyra's, the heroine's world, spirits take animal form, usually opposite sex, so they are also kind of our anima/animus.
So, since the folks in the film all speak with British accents, they pronounce the word more like "demon" (according to my friend), and the idea that every human has a sort of guardian demon, rathen than a guardian angel, and that demon's aren't all bad – too much for the "Christian" public to handle. Plus the church is portrayed in a negative light, tho not too terribly so in the first book. Or is it?
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I thought the hullabaloo was about daemons, and it may have been, so far. If and when they make the rest of the movies, there'll be some serious banning and book burning going on. Why? First, let me say I think the books are extraordinarily well done. A truly fascinating, plausible, intriguing, thought-provoking story with characters so finely drawn I feel I really love them. And it has complicated physics, philosophy and theology, and it is written such that teens can understand it. And it is ballsy as hell. Literally.
The central argument of the books is that God, if he exists, has done terrible things to us, and must be destroyed. All of history has been a battle between wisdom and stupidity, with God using his power and the power of his church (es) to keep people stupid. God is petty, mean, envious, and cruel. He must be overthrown. Lyra's father assembles an army from many worlds for the second battle for heaven. As it turns out, God turned things over to Metatron long ago, and God himself is a frail, befuddled ancient of days, who falls apart into atoms as soon as he's exposed to air.
So what was god? Was he the creator of the heaven and eath, etc.? Not at all.
The world(s) were created, came into being, in an unexplained way. Probably thru the big bang or a similar process, and life began in the way modern evolution describes. But Pullman posits an element that in some worlds is called Dust, some Shadows, and in ours, Dark Matter. It is conscious. And where consciousness arises, or minds capable of it, Dust is attracted – created even. I'm still not completely sure which comes first. Anyway, long before there were humans in our universe, there were beings made of pure Spirit, or consciousness, or something. Angels. Made of something quite different from us, in that they have no real bodies, tho they do have forms, and as the Bible faithfully records, they were able to take the form of humans later and come and mate/have sex with human women.
One of the earliest angels, and smartest, was able to convince the later angels that he had created them – a bald faced lie – and therefore had authority over them. He claimed credit for having created everything – not just the angels but the universe and all that was in it. One of the other early-born/come-into being angels knew that for the lie it was, and she gathered a force around her who rebelled against the self-proclaimed Authority. Of course they lost, but they were not destroyed, and they've been fighting an underground, guerilla war for Wisdom and freedom ever since, against Stupidity and Authority/control. Since the Authority, God, won, he can place his people in all the positions of power, and thus all rulers (secular and religious) ultimately are on the side of Stupidity. Even if they are engaged in research, it is with one eye closed and one hand tied behind them, because they can't really search for the truth, seeing as how all their power rests on a lie.
The books, therefore, are deeply heretical. To any and all religions. They teach children to doubt whether there is a god, to wonder, if there is, if he might be a bad guy, and they encourage children to mistrust all agents of all churches and governments. And there are homosexual angels, good witches, and the idea that Eve's Fall is the greatest boon to all humankind. A wonderful trilogy! I think all teens should read it.
Not because I want them all to be little atheists, but because they should all have at least one time in their lives where they are given an opportunity to seriously question their faith. They ought to have some tools, some complexity, with which to do that.
In the meantime, I read Connie Willis' Passages, about near-death experiences, and it also spurred some new thinking. Right now I'm reading Annie Proulx's Postcard's. But I have got to get to work.
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