Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials": spirits and alienation

A recent podcast appearance: how to listen

Last week, I had the lovely opportunity to discuss my thoughts about angels, spirits, gods, and modern alienation with the two gents from the Soapbox podcast. They’ve got a great thing going: inviting people on to talk about some piece of literature or film as a jumping board into deeper conversations about the occult:

Esteemed pagan recontextualizer, author, and all around cunning & charming guy Rhyd Wildermuth was kind enough to come share his delightfully Gnostic thoughts and reflections on Philip Pullman's now classic fantasy series His Dark Materials, along with the psyops and spirits of alienation that inevitably follow closely behind. We get into it about angels and their possible roles in empire, the necessity of the antihero, the insufferability of adults, daisy chains of products, ideas, and realities. As usual, it was a pleasure listening to his well-armed mind do the dance of noticing and we hope he enjoyed it half as much as we did.

Philip Pullman’s series, His Dark Materials, is probably my favorite work of modern fiction. As I mention in the conversation, it’s quite clear Pullman was well-versed in many of the same texts (especially Bodin and Agrippa) that I reference in my recent installment of the The Mysteria, “The Mystery of Lawlessness.” So if you’d like even more context for my essays, or if you’re a fan of the series (in print or the adaptation), you’ll really enjoy this discussion.

The show is about 2 and a half hours, but I’m only on for the first 90 minutes because of my time constraints. The specific topics we discuss, in order, are:

• Technological liberation as alienation

• His Dark Materials as the “anti-Narnia”

• Guillermo del Toro’s proposed ending of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe

• Reverse gnosticism

• Soul-dualism, zombies, and separation from the wandering soul

• Enochian magic in the Apocrypha

• Alienation as separation not just from labor, but from the body and the spirits

• Angels, demons, magicians, and the Nation-State

• Coru Cathobodua and a god who wasn’t a god.

• Problems of neopagan systems

• Taking spirits dead-serious

• Enchantment and alienation

Here’s how to listen:

The podcast episode is available on Spotify, iTunes, Google podcasts, and quite a few other places. Here are the links:

Spotify:

Apple Podcasts:

Google podcasts

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