Today was a very stimulating day, I thought. We mentioned Frazer's The Golden Bough as an important text in the history of studying literature(though it's technically an anthropology text), particularly in regards to rituals relating to the story of dying/resurrecting God.


This lead into a discussion that has recieved a great deal of (shallow)discussion in the press at large, the debate between Philip Pullman and CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. But is there really a point of debate to be had on the level of form? Most discussions/comparisons of these writers tend to become dualistic in nature, and dualistic argument gets us nowhere. Northrup Frye would say that Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia have an Apocolyptic view of religous archetypes(that is to say positive) and that His Dark Materials has a Demonic view(that is to say negative)of religous archetypes. Which ties in intriguingly with the use of the "daemon".

It's been talked about how daemon is the component of one's soul that is the better angel of our nature; but suppose it were one's evil twin instead(I find this is certainly the function of Mrs. Coulter's golden monkey daemon in His Dark Materials) ? Or really, that it is both of them at once, and that trying to rid oneself of the potential dark side of your nature will not lead to anything good(exemplified by the General Oblation Boards intercision operations in The Golden Compass). Also, I did not know that this same notion was to be found in Egyptian mythology; there the word is the ka.

And this leads into the discussion of the necessary co-existence of the good God and the wrathful God(which Frye would say is necessary for the good God to exist). William Blake's evil God is called Nobadaddy, but is also the same as the "good" God, Urizen. After all, the Satan that appears in the book of Job is presented as a cynical member of the heavenly court, and inflicts all of the torments upon Job with God's permission.

And really, Pullman is really more like a Gnostic, who saw God(the creator of the material world) as the Demi-urge, and views the Serpent as the real God. The reason for this is that the Serpent broght liberation from ignorance; and Gnostics believe that holiness arises from knowledge, in fact privelaging knowledge over belief.