There is a very particular kind of disorientation that comes with rereading His Dark Materials as an adult. As children, we moved through Lyra’s world for the adventure — the dæmons, the armoured bears, the shimmer of the alethiometer, the snow and danger and endless possibility.
We knew it was darker than other fantasy, but we didn’t yet understand why. As adults, the story rearranges itself.
It stops being a quest and becomes a philosophical argument about consciousness, authority and what it means to grow into yourself in a world that would rather you stayed small.
And the most extraordinary thing is that Philip Pullman never hid that this was what he was doing. He said it outright:
“My books are about killing God.”
It sounds shocking until you realise the target isn’t faith — it’s control.
The Fall Was Never the Tragedy
Pullman’s relationship with Paradise Lost sits at the heart of the trilogy. Where Milton saw the Fall as humanity’s great catastrophe, Pullman sees it as the moment we became fully alive.
He has said, simply and beautifully:
“The Fall is not the end of something, it’s the beginning.”
Dust — that mysterious presence that settles on adults and avoids children — is described within the world of the story as “the physical evidence of original sin”. But the longer we sit with the books, the more we understand that this is not a warning.
It is a celebration.
Dust is thought.
Dust is self-awareness.
Dust is the slow accumulation of experience.
In Milton, Eve’s choice brings suffering. In Pullman, her choice brings consciousness. The movement from innocence into knowledge is not a fall from grace — it is the beginning of it.
And when you place this beside Milton’s Satan declaring, “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven,” you can feel the conversation between the two texts. Pullman isn’t retelling the story. He’s answering it.
The Magisterium and the Fear of the Inner Life
To call His Dark Materials “anti-religious” has always felt too small. The Magisterium is not terrifying because it believes in God. It is terrifying because it believes it has the right to regulate the human soul.
Pullman himself has been clear that his interest lies in challenging systems of power rather than private belief. He once said, “I’m not interested in organised religion,” and that distinction matters.
What the Magisterium fears is not sin.
It fears independent thought.
You cannot control Dust because you cannot control the moment a child begins to question the world. You cannot legislate curiosity. You cannot make consciousness obedient.
Which is why Bolvangar is one of the most disturbing places in children’s literature. Intercision is not just physical violence. It is ideological violence. It is the belief that a person can be made safe by being separated from their own interior life.
A quiet child is a good child.
An obedient adult is a holy one.
And Pullman’s entire trilogy stands in opposition to that idea.
Dæmons and the Brutal Reality of Becoming Yourself
Nothing in the series is more quietly devastating than the settling of a dæmon.
As children, our dæmons would change shape endlessly. We could be anything. Every future was still open.
And then, slowly, without ceremony, it stops.
You are one thing.
The world can read you.
The doors close.
It is the most precise metaphor for growing up that fantasy has ever given us, because it recognises something we rarely allow ourselves to say: becoming an adult is not only a gaining of self. It is a loss of infinite possibility.
And yet Pullman does not frame this as a tragedy.
To have a settled dæmon is to have a self.
To be cut off from it is to become empty — compliant, disconnected, safe in the most frightening sense of the word.
This is why intercision feels worse than death. It is not the end of life. It is the removal of the part of you that thinks and feels and questions.
Lyra as the Second Eve
Lyra is not a chosen one in the traditional fantasy sense. She is not destined to win a war or defeat a villain. Her role is far more dangerous than that.
She must repeat the Fall — but this time it has to be a conscious choice.
Eve’s “sin” in Pullman’s world is not disobedience. It is the moment she becomes aware. Lyra’s journey follows the same movement: from instinctive childhood into deliberate experience, from innocence into knowledge, from not knowing what love costs to understanding it completely.
The fate of the universe rests not on a battle, but on a girl growing up.
On her ability to feel deeply and choose anyway.
Dust and the Weight of Being Alive
As children we are told that innocence is purity.
Pullman disagrees.
Dust gathers on those who have lived, who have loved, who have suffered and asked questions and refused simple answers. It is the visible sign of a mind that has woken up.
He describes the universe itself as “a place of consciousness,” and that is the quiet miracle at the centre of these books. Awareness is not a burden to escape. It is the point of being here at all.
Which is why the trilogy ends not with a return to childhood, but with a responsibility.
“We have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are.”
No retreat into innocence.
No promise of salvation elsewhere.
Meaning is made through lived experience, through thought, through love, through the difficult work of being fully awake in the world.
Why It Hits Harder When You’re Older
Reading His Dark Materials as an adult means recognising that the real loss in the story is not childhood.
It is the idea that adulthood should be smaller.
Quieter.
More obedient.
Less curious.
Pullman refuses that.
He gives us a vision of growing up in which knowledge is not a fall from grace but a movement toward it — where experience is holy, where consciousness is the soul, where becoming yourself is the most radical act you can commit.
And perhaps that is why these books never leave us.
Because long after the plot fades, what remains is the feeling that somewhere, in some other version of reality, your dæmon is still beside you.
Still the truest shape of who you are.
Sources & FYI
Pullman, Philip. Interview with The Guardian. “The Dark Materials Debate: Life, God, the Universe…” 2001.
Pullman, Philip. Interview with The Telegraph. “Philip Pullman: The Republic of Heaven” 2002.
Pullman, Philip. His Dark Materials trilogy. Scholastic, 1995–2000.
Pullman, Philip. Carnegie Medal acceptance speech, 1996.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. 1667.
