The Golden Compass - Deciphered...

St Louis Review film critic, Tom Kavanaugh, has provided his critique of the trilogy "His Dark Materials," by British atheist Philip Pullman...I'm not certain if this longer version is in the St Louis Review's printed version or not...It's well worth distributing to friends and family or anyone else who may have been duped into thinking "The Golden Compass" is a movie worth spending money on...
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There has been a lot of controversy about the New Line release of the film version of "The Golden Compass," based on the first book in an equally controversial trilogy of books called "His Dark Materials" by avowed atheist Philip Pullman.

But much of the controversy centers on the question of whether there should be any controversy at all.

This is mainly because Pullman, along with the film’s director and New Line Cinema the studio that made the film, have cleverly — some might say devilishly — positioned this first installment (in part, by disguising the few things from the first book that directly attack Christians) as a harmless holiday film. They did so in such a way as to make any opposition to it appear repressive and foolish.

Some, however, like the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue, say the film is anything but harmless, calling this positioning of the film a "stealth campaign" and "bait for the books: unsuspecting parents who take their children to see the movie may feel impelled to buy the three books as a Christmas present."

What’s wrong with that? Only that the other two books in the trilogy, with growing virulence as they near the last book’s conclusion, are not only an attack on the Catholic Church but Christianity and God, as well.

Pullman insidiously leads his readers to root for themes, beliefs and ideas, such as witches and paganism, in their overthrow of God, religion and heaven.

Pullman’s god, in fact, is a pathetic old fraud who has ruled by oppression and intimidation until he’s mercilessly killed by the two children protagonists of the story. In his trilogy, it was actually Satan and the fallen angels who brought consciousness and free will (and everything good about being human) to this earth, something that God and his Church, the Magisterium (what the Catholic Church calls its teaching authority) will do anything to end — because we call such free-thinking "sin" — including murder and torture.

You might think I’m exaggerating, so I’ve included some passages straight out of the three books of "His Dark Materials" — "The Golden Compass," "The Subtle Knife" and "The Amber Spyglass" — to give you an idea of just what your children might be reading this Christmas. Or, if the movie version of "The Golden Compass" is a hit, what they might be seeing in the Cineplex next Christmas.

First, we really are talking about God here, despite claims that the series is a fantasy that involves other worlds in parallel universes to ours. Consider this passage:

"(The angel) Balthamos said quietly, ‘The Authority, God, the Creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adonai, the King, the Father, the Almighty’ — those were all names he gave himself. He was never the creator. He was an angel like ourselves — the first angel, true, the most powerful, but he was formed of Dust as we are."

Pullman’s god, called the Authority, is described in the third book as a doddering old angel who is relieved to be snuffed out of existence by Lyra and Will, who don’t even know who they are helping to kill when they help him out of his toppled crystal chariot:

"Oh, Will, he’s still alive! But — the poor thing ... " … Demented and powerless, the aged being could only weep and mumble in fear and pain and misery, and he shrank away from what seemed like yet another threat."

The Authority is actually a fraud, one of a group of angels who battled for dominion over heaven and earth and won, kicking out better angels and literally demonizing them through falsehoods told in the Bible and by the Authority’s Church on Earth, the Magisterium. Both seem to be in the business of making humans unhappy:

"I don’t know who will join us, but I know whom we must fight. It is the Magisterium, the Church. For all its history … it’s tried to suppress and control every natural impulse. And when it can’t control them, it cuts them out.

" … They cut their sexual organs, yes, both boys and girls; they cut them with knives so they shan’t feel. This is what the Church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling."

The Authority never created anything, much less the human race. The fallen angels did that by finding a world where they could start a kingdom to rival the Authority’s. They used Dust to give some of the creatures intelligence and, voila, humanity was created. Not by the evil Authority but by a friendly serpent.

Another lie told by the Authority and its Church is that good people go to heaven when we die. In fact, some parts of us just disintegrate while a part of our consciousness is forced by God to stay throughout eternity in a frightening, eerie, lonely, colorless place, controlled by fearsome Harpies (who are only mean because God is forcing them to be so) located far underground on a planet in one of our parallel universes.

"Ghost people — so many that Lyra couldn’t guess their number. No one was moving about, or running or playing, though many of them turned to look at these new arrivals, with a fearful curiosity in their wide eyes. "Ghosts," she whispered. "This is where they all are, everyone that’s ever died."

Later, when Lyra and Will found a way out of the land of the dead, so that the souls/ghosts could be "freed" into eternal extinction, some hesitated to go believing they would still one day go to heaven.

"No one spoke until a young woman came forward. She had died as a martyr centuries before. She looked around and said to the other ghosts:

"‘When we were alive, they told us that when we die we’d go to Heaven. And they said that Heaven was a place of joy and glory and we would spend eternity in the company of saints and angels praising the Almighty, in a state of bliss. That’s what they said. And that’s what led some of us to give our lives, and others to spend years in solitary prayer, while all the joy of life was going to waste around us and we never knew.

"Because the land of the dead isn’t a place of reward or a place of punishment. It’s a place of nothing. The good come here as well as the wicked, and all of us languish in this gloom forever, with no hope of freedom, or joy, or sleep, or rest, or peace."

Lyra and her friend Will (from Earth) eventually go to this land of the dead to find the ghost of one of her playmates and end up releasing these poor tortured souls into sweet oblivion. They themselves come back from the dead, the only ones to do so in the history of any world.

"We shall come back," whispered Lyra fiercely. "…I swear I’ll come back…even if no one’s ever done it before, I swear I will."

Lyra will actually accomplish three pretty impressive things in the three books: she will be responsible for the overthrow of Heaven, she will overcome and defeat Death, and she will be the new Eve/Mother for a new Republic of Heaven on Earth.

Lena Feldt gasped, "She will be the mother—she will be life—mother—she will disobey—she will—" "Name her! You are saying everything but the most important thing! Name her!" cried Mrs. Coulter.

"Eve! Mother of all! Eve, again! Mother Eve!" stammered Lena Feldt, sobbing.

Lyra fulfills the prophesy of becoming the new Eve when, after Heaven has been destroyed she and her young friend Will are sent away to an island paradise on another world to recover. There, as also predicted, a scientist from Will’s (our) world named Mary Malone has been directed in dreams to play the part of the young couple’s "temptress," telling the pre-teens the blissful joys of carnal love. They immediately, discover their own and each other’s bodies and fall passionately in love.

" … I love you, Will, I love you." The word love set his nerves ablaze. All his body thrilled with it, and he answered her in the same words, kissing her hot face over and over again, drinking in with adoration the scent of her body and her warm, honey-fragrant hair and her sweet, moist mouth that tasted of the little red fruit.

One of the things Malone tells the kids as part of her temptation is how she herself had been a Roman Catholic nun until a sexual experience caused her to see the errors of her ways, causing her give up her vows, the Church and God all in one glorious moment.

"There’s no one to fret, no one to condemn, no one to bless me for being a good girl, no one to punish me for being wicked. Heaven was empty. I didn’t know whether God had died, or whether there had never been a God at all. And I took the crucifix from around my neck and I threw it in the sea. That was it. All over. Gone.

"So that was how I stopped being a nun," she said. The Magisterium of Lyra’s world (and by implication the Christian religions of our world) are obsessed by sin to the point of perversion and will do anything to stop people from enjoying life and thinking for themselves, even if that includes murder, assassination, torture, or wholesale slaughter of innocent men, women and children.

"There was a precedent. Something like it had happened before. Do you know what the word castration means? It means removing the sexual organs from 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."

As opposed ro the Magisterium, Pullman’s witches, on the other hand are not wicked, ugly old crones but rather a wonderful sisterhood of free-loving, wise, compassionate heroes of the sky — beautiful, ageless and powerful.

"She was young — younger than Mrs. Coulter; and fair, with bright green eyes; and clad like all the witches in strips of black silk, but wearing no furs, no hood or mittens. She seemed to feel no cold at all. Around her brow was a simple chain of little red flowers. She sat on her cloud-pine branch as if it were a steed and seemed to rein it in a yard from Lyra’s wondering gaze."

Led by their beautiful queen Serafina Pekkala, the witches save the day several times during the trilogy, not only for Lyra but for others as well, including the rescue of the children from the torture chambers of the Church’s General Oblation Board (the dreaded Gobblers).

"… Lyra saw in the air beside her a witch, one of those elegant black shadows from the high air, but close enough to touch; and there was a bow in the witch’s bare hands, and she exerted her bare pale arms (in the freezing air!) to pull the string and then loose an arrow into the eye slit of a mailed and lowering Tartar hood only three feet away. Up! Into midair Lyra and Roger were caught and swept, and found themselves clinging with weakening fingers to a cloud-pine branch, where a young witch was sitting tense with balanced grace."

But there are other sweet, kind, gentle and heroic people who help Lyra and Will along the way, offering sage atheistic advice, and gladly join them in the kids’ mission to kill God. They include:

A dear old man who teaches Will how to use the Subtle Knife to cut windows into other worlds, and teaches both kids that suicide is really a pretty good option for ending your life when the time comes.

"Now go. I shall die very soon, because I know where there are poisonous drugs, and I don’t intend to wait for the Specters to come in, as they will once the knife has left. Go."

"You en’t really going to poison yourself?" said Lyra distressed.

"Hush," said Will. "It won’t hurt him. He’ll just go to sleep."

A talking polar bear, Iorek, a great blacksmith (as well as kind, protective friend to Lyra) is also a great fighter, ripping off the bottom of the face of the King of the Bears in a fight for supremacy over the bear clan; later Iorek eats the flesh and organs of his good human friend, Lee Scoresby, after the aeronaut’s death, as a way of honoring his lost comrade.

And because the Texan aeronaut was one of the few humans Iorek had ever esteemed, he accepted the man’s last gifts to him. With Deft movements of his claws, he ripped aside the dead man’s clothes, opened the body with one slash, and began to feast on the flesh and blood of his old friend.

A pair of "good" i.e. (anti-God) male angels named Baruch and Balthamos, who happen to be lovers.

"The next moment, the two angels were embracing, and Will, gazing into the flames, saw their mutual affection. More than affection: they loved each other with a passion."

And, after the death of Baruch:

"Then Balthamos stood up, sick and weary and full of pain.

"‘Baruch," he said, "oh, Baruch, my dear, I can do no more. Will and the girl are safe, and everything will be well, but this is the end for me, through truly I died when you did, Baruch, my beloved.’"

All of these people friendly to the idea of killing God are so nice, even loveable, and described by Pullman in rhapsodic, even heroic, terms. On the other hand, the defenders of God and of His Church are described in ways that are reminiscent of Nazi propaganda against Jews, either being cruel, manipulative, lecherous, filthy, smelly, murderous, fanatically religious, or all of the above. For example:

A Russian priest who offers to "help" Will.

"The priest kept leaning forward to look closely at him, and felt his hands to see whether he was cold. And stroked his knee. ‘My boy,’ he said and then closed his eyes and began to intone a prayer or a psalm. Vapors of tobacco and alcohol and sweat came powerfully from him, and he was close enough for his thick beard, wagging up and down, to brush Will’s face. Will held his breath."

Another priest, Father Gomez, who is sent by the Church to murder Lyra.

"… Father Gomez found himself praising God for his mission, because it was clearer than ever that the boy and the girl were walking into mortal sin. They hadn’t looked back once since coming over the top of the ridge, but he still kept low, moving down the stream at a crouch, holding the rifle in one hand, balancing with the other."

God’s regent, Metatron, who is willing risk Heaven and Earth to get a chance with Mrs. Coulter.

"‘When I was a man," he said, "I had wives in plenty, but none was as lovely as you.’

"That was the moment she felt most exposed and in most danger. But she trusted to her lies, and to the strange truth she’d learned about angels, perhaps especially those angels who had once been human; lacking flesh, they coveted it and longed for contact with it. And Metatron was close now, close enough to smell the perfume of her hair and to gaze at the texture of her skin, close enough to touch her with scalding hands.

… And the shadow hungrily sniffed and seemed to gulp at the scent of her flesh"

And even Mrs. Coulter herself, at least before she comes to her senses and switches sides against God, embodies the malicious punishment of the Magesterium.

"‘We have a thousand years of experience in this Church of ours. We can draw out your suffering endlessly. Tell us about the child,’" Mrs. Coulter said, and reached down to break one of the witch’s fingers. It snapped easily."

This series of books and the movies made from them are for children — pre-teens and adolescents. Pullman has denied this saying he intended the books for any thinking person of any age, but that is pure rubbish.

Everything from the ages of the young protagonists to the inclusion of every favorite childhood imagery — from cute cuddly animals to fluffy white bears, to flight in balloons, to secret and magical gadgets, to cowboys … even, nowadays, witches … and especially in granting license and empowerment of adolescents and pre-adolescents, especially girls, to do and be whatever they want to do and be.

Is there anything we can do? Protesting and boycotting the movie of "The Golden Compass" would only be turned against us, making us look anti-art, anti-literature, anti-free expression, repressed as well as repressive of thought and imagination, paranoid and self-pitying as the priests and monks of the Magisterium.

Instead, I suggest the open sharing of information with other parents and talking with your children about this very serious matter of using cute animals and an eye-candy movie production to lure children into believing things their parents believe are wrong. If your kids want to see the movie and you decide to let them, talk about it beforehand and afterward, explaining some of the things that you think are bad that will be in the next movies. If you decide not to allow them to see the movie, explain to them why; that the movie seems harmless but leads to very bad things that the man who wrote the books wants to make children believe about God and heaven.

To share the information about the movie, send these few passages I’ve quoted from the books (out of the hundreds of disturbing passages I’ve found) to every parent you know so they can be informed about Philip Pullman’s agenda to change the hearts and minds of our children.

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Personally, I think the film should be boycotted, primarily by Catholics, as well as by other Christians and anyone else who can envision the poisonous effect these books could have on oinnocent children. Does it matter if the atheists and secularists turn against us? Aren't they already against us - daily? Why would anyone want to feed this beast so that it could grow even bigger? Starve it of your hard earned money and support! Let it die from hunger of money and lack of attention! Instead, would it not be better to use that money to help feed, clothe and shelter those truly in need?

The full article from the St Louis Review is here.

Please let us know if I have made errors in any formatting of the article - I attempted to make it a bit more readable.