The Republic of Heaven

After reading this beautiful series, over, and over, and over again, I found myself at a loss for how people could consider the books anti-God. Anti-church, maybe, but...at the time, it just mystified me.

So, now that I’m a tad older, and I’m able to articulate my thoughts better, I thought I’d throw my theory out to you guys.

There could have been two parts...but it would have been too long. Maybe when I'm feeling more writery, I'll give you the rest of it. But for now, be satisfied with this.

Anti-God

When I pulled the last page shut, my immediate reaction was that of amazement. My God, this ~*pineapples*~ was almost Orwellian, in its ability to mask the ‘true’ message, with a beautiful story!

I have thought, always will think, that His Dark Materials strengthens, rather than breaks down, the idea of God.

Alright, bear with me, people...you’re about to see how deep the rabbit-hole goes. Please keep your hands and arms away from mirrors, at all times.

In the Bible, y’all remember the story of Moses, and the golden sheep? He goes up to Mt. Sinai (sp?), and brings down the Ten Commandments. The people are all happily worshipping a golden calf, which really, really pisses off Moses. He goes on to say “Hey, dipwads, y’know the big guy? He doesn’t like you to worship false gods!”

So, the people were mistaken. Even in the face of insurmountable evidence (the parting of the seas, anyone?), they were taken in...by a shiny piece of meat.

How does this relate to His Dark Materials?

The Authority/Metatron/”God” is the shiny piece of meat. They are not the true creators of the universe...indeed, they are but creations of our lovely omniscient friend: Dust. And yet, the Church worships them...and the people, under the iron-hand of the Church, worship them as well.

So, to summarize what I’ve got, so far:
*God created the shiny piece of meat (Golden Lamb), and the people worshipped it.
*Dust created all the Angels (Including “God”), and the people worshipped them.

To strengthen the idea of a “false god” (SG-1, ftw!), let’s turn to Mary, and the idea of converting to a different religion.
If we stay on the path that the Church is wrong, in its obsession with worshipping “God”, than Catholicism is wrong. So, when Mary leaves the cloister, and becomes a scientist, she is leaving the incorrect religion, a religion that worshipped a false God.

Pretty weak, on its own...but what did she become, ladies and gentleman? A scientist. Specifically, a scientist that studies Dark Matter, aka Dust.

She “converted” from a religion that worshipped a false God, to a job that can be called a religion- she spends all day pouring over, studying, Dark Matter. This is important...so read on!

At its basest form, worship is just paying attention. If I pray to God, I am speaking with him...”telling [Him] stories”, if you will.
Worship is an elaborate form of paying attention.
Paying attention...is conscious thought.
Dust thrives on conscious thought.
Dust thrives on the attention of conscious being.
Like the Catholic God, Dust thrives on worship.

Oooh...this is fun! So, see what I’m getting at? Mary, by becoming a scientist, was essentially a nun, for a different religion. She spent all her time in the cloister, worshipping God. Now, she spends all her time in a lab, worshipping (paying attention/studying) Dust/Dark matter. Cool, eh?
And her first discovery of the “religion” is with the man- I recall it was, like, Lemon Meringue? My memory fails me, unfortunately. Remember? She kisses the guy, has a crush on him?

In The Amber Spyglass, when Will and Lyra are in love, there’s a comment made: “Mary didn’t have to use the spyglass, to tell that the two were bathed in that beautiful golden light.” Alright...not the exact wording, but pretty damn close.

So, Mary’s first discovery, Mary’s “Conversion” is when she makes out with a guy on a beach. Not quite Love, per se...but for our purposes, good enough.
We know this is significant, because in Amber Spyglass, we learn that Dust was especially attracted to these two young lovers.

Pretty damn cool, if I do say so myself. Can you tell I’m having fun with this? Well, I’m done for the da- NOT! Ahahaha! Even more cool things to keep in mind!

Hopefully, by the time I’m through with you all, you’ll see what I see: Pulman was not anti-God...so much as unhappy with the idea of organized religion. Or, at least, warning us to the dangers of organized religion.

Alright, back to the show, people.

So...if anyone’s well-versed in the Bible, I’d be very happy if they’d help me, right now. I only remember vague semblances of the Good Book...and I’m in no mood to go looking up the exact passages. Maybe when I have to do this for a report...but not jut on my free time.
Anywho, somewhere in the Bible, there's a line that says something to the effect of 'Make your Heaven on Earth'...or something. It’s the idea that one should not be so obsessed with praying, and such, that one forgets Gods greatest gift: life.

Now than, my (hopefully) excited book-pioneers: where do we go, if we die in Pulman’s Paradise?

A holding cell. A prison. A barren world, devoid of life, where we are constantly reminded of our sins and transgressions, where everything we were, everything we stood for, is forgotten.

Does this not fit in with the classic idea of Purgatory? A place where we must atone for our sins? A place that, eventually, guarantees us passage to paradise? Oh, wait...how could I?! Did I forget paradise? I believe I did- Ladies and Gentleman, paradise is the Earth itself.

After passing through Purgatory/”Heaven” (with the harpies, and all that?), the dead are released into the Earth, much like their conscious souls (Daemon’s) already have. They are described as having the happiest expression, when they are finally released.
Fits in with the idea of paradise, right? When they hit the surface, when they get to the true Heaven, they release themselves to the Duts’s will; they get to transcend their bodies, and embrace Dusts’s (God’s) creations.


Now...that’s all fine and dandy, but I have a long way to go. Because I’m less sure of these last couple theories (and thus, cannot articulate them as well), I’ll just put them in bullet points:

*The Subtle Knife, a creation of human beings, tears unnatural holes in the worlds, and harms Dust. It is known as “Aeshattr”, or, the God Killer. And it kills Dust. And it’s known as the God Killer. ... ... ...And it kills Dust.
*The Knife creates things that wrest our attention/worship away from Dust- Specters. These specters also thrive on attention (much like Dust), but they do it in a more malicious way, a way that kills the host.
*The only things that can combat the Specters are the Knife, and ghosts (Lee Scoresby, and the like.)

And...that’s all I’ve got, for now.


I would love it if you people pitched in your own ideas...or told me what you thought of mine. Am I crazy? Am I brilliant? Maybe abit of both?

I've always thought of Dust as being the real method of creation, the expression of thought and the ultimate reason for everything that could be considered beautiful.

I think we do see the effect of false gods (nice, another SG-1 fan) and people who would claim to have authority and power and how that power can be abused. The key, to me, is that this power is used to suppress individual thought and thus the formation of Dust. That is, the lie suppresses the chance to realize the truth.

I also think you have a point about science being no different than a religion, in that sense. Science is really only a belief in something, just as much as any religion is.

If you imagine Dust as the expression of thought, like I do, then you can see that Dust is unifying, across worlds, across peoples, encouraging sentient beings to pursue it, even harm themselves (think Tartars) to be one with it. And, in the context of HDM, it's certainly, in general, a positive force, one that fosters growth and thought and results from acts of expression and independence, as opposed to submission and constraint. That's as good an expression of what we want God to be as any, I suppose.

I am probably what you'd call a 'day time atheist', but, nevertheless I agree with you. But surely there is one difference between a god and dust. Gods are generally single entities, whereas dust is not, it is a collection of consciences, after all, it describes itself as angels.
In this way dust must be more like divine termites or something (excuse the cr@p metaphor) instead of actually a god.

I am probably what you'd call a 'day time atheist', but, nevertheless I agree with you. But surely there is one difference between a god and dust. Gods are generally single entities, whereas dust is not, it is a collection of consciences, after all, it describes itself as angels.
In this way dust must be more like divine termites or something (excuse the crap metaphor) instead of actually a god.

First off, I'd like to point out that dust is not a collection of conscience(s), it seems to be an omniscient force attracted to conscious thought. Or, at least, that's how I interpreted it.

Secondly, who's to say that God looks/acts anything like humans do (as singular entities)?

Third, it's only in this day and age that monotheism is popular...remember the romans, the greeks, the celts; all the great societies had numerous gods. Is it remotely possible that we, as fallible humans, effed things up, and sorta...'miscounted'?

Lastly, it doesn't describe itself as angels, it said that angels were formed from it. Now, you could interpret that to mean that angels are the physical (sorta) manifestations of Dust...but that doesn't make sense, when you see that many of the angels are on either side of the war. What makes more sense, is the Adam and Eve imagery: that Angels were created from a piece of God/Dust.


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Dammit, you're gonna make me go back to the book and cite myself, aren't you? Geez, and just when I started something new, too... T_T

i'd certainly agree that the book isn't nessecarily anti-god.
it is anti-church, or anti-organized religion though

i think that instead of strengthening the idea of "God", it instead strenghtens the idea of (personal) faith

Strangely enough Refugee you've painted out exactly what I believe about the nature of Dust. I am infact writing a fan-fic with "Dust" as the true God..

So yes, I agree with you. Good call!

I think Pullman's message can be interpreted as anti-church, but in reading, you can choose to leave the organized religion issue as optional. Yes today's church is our example of organized religion, but if you look at what Will and Lyra were called to do...they were given the responsibility to frontier a new way of life for the peoples in their own worlds. Their actions, though emphasizing individual enrichment, are merely the first efforts in organization of an intellectual movement. As was said science is just as much as a religion as art, philosophy, history, Christianity, whatever you want to devote yourself toward. If there is no form of coordination then there won't be maximum efficiency. Simply put, much more can be accomplished when in groups. As long as the forwarding administration doesn't become corrupt. But then again, people are people. Whether alone or together people find a way.

The impression i had reading HDM is that Pullman is critical against the idea of organised Religions because they are the most powerful expression of the absence of any criticism.
Pullman is atheist, but he is also perfectly aware that there's' something incredible and almost magic in humans; that have the consciousness, they have a daemon.
where it comes from is a mystery even refusing any supernatural or divine explanation, but it pervades all the worlds; and this is the Dust.
So, in my opinion, there's a slight difference between God and Dust

I voted no, because the books are most definatley anti-religious, that is a fact.

Religious groups call Pullman "the most dangerous writer in Britain" and that his work is "fit for the bonfires", the trilogy offers an alternate morality, "without the need to bring in an invisible deity" as Pullman said. He regards organised religion to be corrupt, repressive controlling, and i totally agree with him.

The books are anti organised religion, cynical toward the idea of God (Pullman kills The Authority, the angel we in this world think of as God in The Amber Spyglass). But they are pro science, pro freedom of expression and, and i think this gets up the nose of religious groups most of all, pro sexuality.

One of the most profound things for me when i finished the trilogy was the impact it had on me. I finished The Amber Spyglass and i felt excited, alive and excited about the possibilities of science, at the thought of an alternate morality without the repressive churchs, and most of all about the famthomless mysteries of life and the universe, they are the ideals i believe in, i have always been uncomfortable with the notion of religion, it never made any sense to me, and the trilogy really helped me articulate my feelings on the subject.

I voted no, because the books are most definatley anti-religious, that is a fact.

Religious groups call Pullman "the most dangerous writer in Britain" and that his work is "fit for the bonfires", the trilogy offers an alternate morality, "without the need to bring in an invisible deity" as Pullman said. He regards organised religion to be corrupt, repressive controlling, and i totally agree with him.

The books are anti organised religion, cynical toward the idea of God (Pullman kills The Authority, the angel we in this world think of as God in The Amber Spyglass). But they are pro science, pro freedom of expression and, and i think this gets up the nose of religious groups most of all, pro sexuality.

One of the most profound things for me when i finished the trilogy was the impact it had on me. I finished The Amber Spyglass and i felt excited, alive and excited about the possibilities of science, at the thought of an alternate morality without the repressive churchs, and most of all about the famthomless mysteries of life and the universe, they are the ideals i believe in, i have always been uncomfortable with the notion of religion, it never made any sense to me, and the trilogy really helped me articulate my feelings on the subject.

If I may be so blunt, just because most people believe it is anti-religious does not make it so.

I believe the key words are organized religion. The books are more clearly against organized religion than they are against religion in general. To assume that the books are entirely anti-religion is to say that all the organizations who use religion are, in fact, adequate representations of religion itself, which I do not feel is the case. In my opinion, there are people of faith who are not like those depicted in the trilogy, and the Magisterium and the Authority represent corruptors, people and beings that use religion as a tool of power, as has happened so often in our past. For this reason, I feel that HDM is not anti-religious. Rather, it opposes the enforcement of a belief or use of belief as a source of power, opposes people who stand as middle-men and claim that their interpretation is better than yours and that to be faithful you must do as they say.

I personally do not believe religion is a logical thing. It is too often inherited rather than chosen, and there is no objective way to choose one religion over another, to believe one thing over something else that also claims to be true. But I do not see HDM as being anti-religion. To me, its message is far more restricted and confined.

if you say its against organized religion then you are talking about every religion...even the ones not corrupt with power and those are on the topic of everybody's posts. The ones not corrupt...do they count as organized? and if they do....are they just as terrible?

One of the most profound things for me when i finished the trilogy was the impact it had on me. I finished The Amber Spyglass and i felt excited, alive and excited about the possibilities of science, at the thought of an alternate morality without the repressive churchs, and most of all about the famthomless mysteries of life and the universe, they are the ideals i believe in, i have always been uncomfortable with the notion of religion, it never made any sense to me, and the trilogy really helped me articulate my feelings on the subject.

that's EXACTLY what i feel too

But i agree with Huggin when he says that the key words are "organised religions".
Because in a sense even science and atheism are a sort of "religion", a "something" people believe in, but they are more on a personal sphere, and above all, they do not, or should not, represent an "absolute" "revealed" point of view

if you say its against organized religion then you are talking about every religion...even the ones not corrupt with power and those are on the topic of everybody's posts. The ones not corrupt...do they count as organized? and if they do....are they just as terrible?

It means, rather, that organized religion opens the door for people to abuse it. In other words, it makes organized religion not evil, just terribly flawed. The people who abuse it are evil.

I've always felt people get the message HDM tries to deliver all wrong. They say Pullman kills god, that because the church he envisages in Lyras' world is evil it automatically means he sees God as something evil. But Pullman doesn't kill god, he kills The Authority, who is clearly stated as an impostor.
I agree with you dude, I've been arguing about Dust as a god image in HDM with my buddies ever since I got them to read the damn thing.
I don't like the way you interpret the underworld though, Purgatory implies something beyond purgatory. In the books the uderworld is eternal, there isn't anything after it. Pullman describes the afterlife as the greatest lie of all times (something along those lines, I can't remember the exact phrasing). I've always thought he meant heaven, as a promise. Over the centuries the catholic church has used the idea of heaven to control its followers; they've sold it, promised it, taken it away, used it to create hope(in many cases false), manipulated to instill fear(the idea of hell is not originally catholic, but rather the result of a smudge campaign against the Greek underworld), it's basically the most sullied and fingered concept in catholic dogma.
So when all the ghosts where liberated and turned to Dust, I interpreted it as Pullman's take on afterlife. Unlike you I don't think he meant the earth was heaven, but rather to become one with god. To take part in his creation yes, but no longer as the individual living beings we are on earth, but rather as a part of his vast omniscient, omnipresent conciousness.

One last thing concerning Organized Religion. The HDM books are clearly a statement against Organized religion, however most people get so bound up around how Pullman insults and dirties up the church that very few realize that he actually proposes an alternative, The Republic of Heaven.

Faith as something that is built from within, that starts and ends in each individual, not something that is imposed on us. It should be something that we discover and share with others through the richness and fullness of life, not some abstract, foreign concept that we have to believe in or otherwise we go to hell.

But does that mean all faiths must be different? that we can't all share a faith because it would somehow imply organized religion? Ofcourse not, Pullman says it himself, tell them stories. In TAS Mary acts a sort of guide for Will and Lyra, but she doesn't impose herself on them, she just tries to help them understand what they feel through her own experience of love.
I've always felt that he's against the church as a controlling overarching organization that seeks to 'monopolize' the idea of god, not religion.

if you say its against organized religion then you are talking about every religion...even the ones not corrupt with power and those are on the topic of everybody's posts. The ones not corrupt...do they count as organized? and if they do....are they just as terrible?

It means, rather, that organized religion opens the door for people to abuse it. In other words, it makes organized religion not evil, just terribly flawed. The people who abuse it are evil.

I agree. But what I'm saying is that by spreading the concept of a Republic of Heaven, it becomes organized in and of itself almost immediately upon its initial prosperity. Because we are humans, we have to come together, its part of our consciousness. Yeah in a perfect world we could have our own little religious epiphany and individually seek wisdom and theology, whatever you want to call it, but out of our imperfection, it will fall to the same fate as any other organized religion. That's all I'm saying. The key to building the Republic in Heaven in our worlds would not be to *show* people the way but to let them find it while offering your best example as a pointing finger in the right direction.

It's like growing up. You don't make every decision for the child (unless your psycho over-bearing, over-protective parents like mine) you have to allow them to do it and make their mistakes so that they become their own person and not a clone of the originals. Today's religion tries to do exactly that, make clones out of everyone.

Oh and VMLM3 I think you made your point extremely well, better than I ever would. I like your take on things.

I think the original post is probably the most convincing case I've seen for the Dust-is-God theory. It's a valid interpretation, although I don't agree with it myself. It depends how you define God, I suppose. Dust certainly doesn't fit with the traditional Christian view of God. It's physical stuff, it's not a singular entity and it doesn't demand to be worshipped, as far as I can tell.

You could fit it into a looser definition of a god. But I think a more appropriate analogy is something like the Force. Humans interact with Dust by thinking. That's not much different to the way humans interact with any other kinds of particles. What makes Dust special is that it's consciousness. I do actually think that Dust is like a collective consciousness. Angels are made out of it and they are basically intelligence concentrated in a single form. And people have it too.

So the afterlife in Pullman's world is for us singular entities to dissolve into the great mass of collective consciousness that is Dust. Is that heaven? I don't know. You could describe it in terms of being one with God, but somehow that doesn't strike me as right. I think the term 'God' has too many other connotations. Instead, the ghosts dissolving always reminds me of what happens to the body when it dies. It becomes part of the earth. And so the mind and the soul do the same; they become part of the fabric of the universe.

And perhaps that means that particles of Dust which once formed one person can later become part of another. A kind of reincarnation?

To strengthen the idea of a “false god” (SG-1, ftw!), let’s turn to Mary, and the idea of converting to a different religion.
If we stay on the path that the Church is wrong, in its obsession with worshipping “God”, than Catholicism is wrong. So, when Mary leaves the cloister, and becomes a scientist, she is leaving the incorrect religion, a religion that worshipped a false God.

Pretty weak, on its own...but what did she become, ladies and gentleman? A scientist. Specifically, a scientist that studies Dark Matter, aka Dust.

She “converted” from a religion that worshipped a false God, to a job that can be called a religion- she spends all day pouring over, studying, Dark Matter. This is important...so read on!

That's a pretty big leap to make. There's a difference between worshipping and studying. She doesn't really think dark matter is a God, or revere it in the same way she did God.

I think that Dust may represent knowledge and reason rather than God- it formed because matter started to think about itself and it confers knowledge and wisdom (remember that you gain more of it as you learn more). The books have too much of an anti-religious nature to them for Dust to be God (the actual god is a fake, and heaven is ruled by a tyrant. I think that's sufficient to destroy any religiousness). The idea of the "Republic of Heaven" was that people should build a better life for them here and now rather than wait for heaven. So no, dust isn't God, in my opinion.

I think you may be right in the rest of it though- I think he may be saying that churches are perverting religious belief for their own benefit and in the process, steering us away from the true image of God (of course, we'd have to ask him). I must confess I totally agree with him (I don't actually have a religion). Whether or not he intended Dust to be the real image of God, I'm not sure.

I don't like the way you interpret the underworld though, Purgatory implies something beyond purgatory. In the books the uderworld is eternal, there isn't anything after it. Pullman describes the afterlife as the greatest lie of all times (something along those lines, I can't remember the exact phrasing).

But Lyra and Will create heaven when they open the window from the underworld back to the earth - which is why the OP said heaven IS Earth.

When you think about it, she's a christ figure in that way: They choose to leave the window from the underworld open instead of a window that Will and Lyra can visit each other through, sacraficing her own happiness for the good of the souls of the dead.

I agree with Refugee insofar as he says that the Authority is a false god. I just don't buy the theory that Dust is God.

I mean, suppose someone believes that life on earth began by natural processes from non-living matter- clay, say. Would it be correct to say that this person believes that clay is God?

I believe that any kind of substance is the wrong sort of thing to potentially be God. God is to the universe the way that an author is to a book. Dust is like the ink, perhaps, but not the author. I understand that the metaphysics of HDM is based on Milton's monism, but I don't think it is quite adequate.

Perhaps the Dust was actually midi-chlorians, and Lyra's World later gave birth to a galaxy far, far away...