gigi | pariscial @the-alethiometrist - Tumblr Blog

The beautiful concept art of His Dark Materials (2019-2022) by artists Po Sing Chu, Alessandro Chirico, Jules Darriulat and Nandor Moldovan

alethiosr

I think there’s something so symbolic about people who have daemons who settled as animals not native to where they grew up. People who are so far from where they belong but often don’t even realize it or give their daemon’s form a second thought. Do they long to go to where their daemon would be more at home? If so, do they chase that feeling or do they ignore it?

Lee Scorseby ended up far in the arctic simply looking for work, not even aware that Hester was an Arctic Hare until Iorek told him. He had assumed that Hester was a Jackrabbit and only realized that the arctic meant something to him after speaking with Iorek. He could’ve found work anywhere else but he somehow ended up where he needed to be anyways.

Lord Asriel is probably the most interesting example of this though. He was always traveling, always looking for something, never being content to relax and exist in one place for long. The first time we ever see him he’s described as looking like a wild animal trapped in a small cage, totally out of place with his surroundings. When he finally stops moving is when he creates the Republic of Heaven and the basalt fortress is built. It’s in another world with vague geography, but it’s likely roughly within natural snow leopard range. The last place Asriel ever lives is where he and Stelmaria might’ve finally felt some sense of belonging.

It’s not something given much depth and thought within the books, but in a way it doesn’t need to be. We get to see it naturally in a way that isn’t forced. It’s beautiful and real just like many of the other intricacies regarding daemons. It adds to these people as people instead of becoming something too fantastical and bizarre.

mamsellechosette24601

the rose field spoilers - my thoughts

I have no idea what the intention with the Olivier reveal was, and it upsets me that Philman felt like he had to give Lyra a biological brother to be some sort of companion at the end, instead of going for a sibling dynamic for Malcolm and Lyra, which would’ve been so much better than all that stress we had to go through thinking “will they won’t they”. And then if he wanted a half-brother, wouldn’t a child Asriel was not aware of make so much more sense? How can a previous pregnancy fit into Mrs Coulter’s life? I have no clue

That being said, I am OVERJOYED at Lyra’s character arc and all the theories brought in about the imagination and the windows. With Philman I know never to think too literally (what about the spectres now? What about Dust being dragged away? What is the truth?), especially when he’s telling it to our faces that he wants us to be able to hold paradoxical truths. The conversation with the angel midway through made me ugly sob. So it had always been unfair! It had always been weird that Will and Lyra didn’t insist more! It had always been too mathematical to make sense within such an emotional context! And then… isn’t that what facing reality as a child feels like? When you tire out of fighting and just give in that the reasonable adult must indeed be right, and you have to live as they tell you? They were too young, too broken, too much yearning for a guidance they never had. They were left speechless before angels, after battling death. How many of us have known that speechlessness?

Lyra never fully voices whether she believes that things she’s learned will allow her to find Will, and I believe it was the perfect right call to let that remain silent. For one, it’d be to make her arc revolve too much around romance, when it’s been about her finding herself as an artist. Second, how many barriers must she have put up to convince herself there was no way of seeing Will again? It’ll take her a while to realise the maybe behind the alethiometer’s needle, and to have the bravery to try it without the existence of the tiniest of openings, as was the case when she did open a window. Third, it’s for the reader to decide. As a storyteller, Lyra is now conscious of what to leave in and what to leave out, as to make the audience pass by the greatest amount of emotion. I wonder if she herself will be tormented by the artist’s choice - try out real life, or treasure the idea? I believe she’ll wish to cherish the idea of Will a bit longer, and that will hold her from realising the possibilities too. But the possibility is already there in her subconscious, especially in how she cries at the old man and the old woman living their last days together. I guess the role of Malcolm as a possible romantic interest had a part in this too - somebody getting as close as possible to what she had with Will, all the unending parallels that made me sweat cold, but it just isn’t it. We who receive the artwork are better off left with the tragedy and the wonderings, but the philosophy of the books pushes her to give real life a try.

And then, the relationship with Pan… absolute chills thinking about all the parallels in the scene when they almost get separated in between worlds. When you think they couldn’t undergo worse fears of separation than what they’ve already faced, here’s yet another way, which is just the way they got cut from Will. The panic of undergoing it again - losing Will, leaving Pan in the shores of the dead, being under the blade in Bolvangar, and all of it at once, and all because they had separated in the worst and (now, perceived as dumbest) possible way, through the hatred for oneself.

Overall I’m not bothered by the amount of retconning that went into it, especially when it seems to me to reflect so much of how we grow throughout life. We learn to be silent, to make ourselves responsible for our communities, to accept how arduous it is to go by day by day. We learn to hate ourselves, until somehow new possibilities present themselves, showing you that you do not need to do all you thought you had to do when you were 12, while the harsh reality you did face back then has not actually changed. It’s you who has changed, who has been able to see things a little less in black and white. And you wouldn’t have gotten there if you hadn’t gone through pain, and one thing does not annul the other, you’re just able to live within the realms of uncertainty and possibility.

That’s it for now, I will have more to say later when I’ve gathered my thoughts.

alrightsnaps

She knew he was right, but it wasn’t right that he should speak to her accusingly, as if it was something to blame her for.

“I used to be young”, was all she could find to say.

He made no response.

– The Book of Dust Volume Two, The Secret Commonwealth

velvetmirrors

Lyra Belacqua

the-korova

Harry Potter is trending at #1 on tumblr so I thought I’d take the opportunity to say fuck JKR, fuck transphobes, fuck her stupid books, her theme park, her endless landfill fodder merch slop, and her fucking castle on a hill. Read another book yall!! Read another book!!!!!!!

leadoodles

"But I want a book about children going to a magical educational establishment!"

Amari and the night brothers. Actually interesting magic system.

Percy Jackson. Picks a mythology and DIVES into the details.

"But I want a book about children growing up!"

HIS DARK MATERIALS. READ HIS DARK MATERIALS. PHILIP PULLMAN IS A LEFTIST AND HIS BOOKS ARE AMAZING

"I want something more whimsical!"

The Worldquake sequence. D&D class system meets fey and Inception using books in a world without internet.

kammartinez

lizardsfromspace

Today I was shown a fan recreation of the original ending of The Golden Compass but also I had no idea they actually shot the full final act and just. Removed it. Bc ending on a child dying is a total bummer but starting movie 2 with a child dying is cool I guess

lizardsfromspace

Do you think this is still sitting in the vaults of Warner Bros or have they junked it by now. I don't know which one is worse but it drives me nuts to think the ENTIRE FINAL ACT of The Golden Compass movie is just sitting somewhere, never to be seen by anyone ever again

I honestly had no idea they had shot the whole thing and cut it until I saw this I just thought they changed the ending from the get (though in retrospect this should've been obvious, like how the lack of any real transition makes it clear Bolvangar & the bears were shot in book order and swapped)

encyclope-dae-a

One thing I think is important for understanding the daemian community – especially if you're coming from an alterhuman perspective – is that daemonism is not a word for a shared experience, nor a shared identity.

Daemonism is a practice. The concept of it can be used by anyone: alterhuman or not, plural or not. It can be pure playfulness. It can be imaginary, and that's okay! That's a beautiful experience in its own respect!

There's no universal daemian experience because we accept and embrace that our minds, and our experiences, are ours alone.

The community isn't built on a shared experience – just a shared idea which we all create unique versions of.

Some people stick closer to the basic idea we started with. Some just take what they like from it and throw out the rest. Some only take vague inspiration from it. Some people adapt it more than others, sometimes due to being neurodivergent, plural, and/or alterhuman.

It's still daemonism because daemonism isn't defined by us all "doing the same thing" or "having the same experience".

Daemonism is, for the most part, defined by a person deciding that they want to call what they are doing or experiencing daemonism.

And a large part of that is often in connection to the community, whether directly or in a peripheral way, by taking inspiration from the practice, making use of the community's writings, and so on.

This is why I think daemonism is often misunderstood in an alterhuman context. Daemonism is not an experience, it's not an identity – it's just an idea we each take and make our own. And that's what it should be. That's the beauty of it!

Anyone could be a daemian if they want to. There's no requirements. A lot of people get started with daemonism purely because it sounds fun! A lot of people start with only their imagination, and many people remain so.

For others, it might become something else in time, or they might discover there was something underlying their imaginings all along. It's no more or less a practice of daemonism, either way.

A lot of alterhuman concepts don't apply to daemonism because of this. Fact is, there's plenty of daemians who are orthohumans too, and plenty of people who specifically see their daemonism as an orthohuman practice.

I see it get included under the alterhuman umbrella a lot, and I feel like it gives the wrong first impression to come at it from that angle by default.

Really, it's more comparable with being a furry. For some people, it is a deep, impactful, life-altering experience, and the people who feel that way are a vital part of the community. But equally, for some it is an exercise in whimsy, playfulness, or creativity – and those people are no less members of the community for it.

We're not united by being plural, or having thoughtforms, or being alterhuman. We're united by being a bunch of people who were inspired by some books (or a film or TV show) to play around with the idea of daemons, and ended up sticking with it for one reason or another.

While the individual experience can be very deep indeed, that isn't what makes daemonism what it is.

leehallfae

fucked up sick and twisted that daemons aren’t a thing in real life. i want a little guy

mamsellechosette24601

The Rose Field poetic parallels + spoilers

I saw once somebody here link Lyra to Christina Rossetti’s poem “Afterthought, An” and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since

And before TRF, “sure she kept one part of Eden / Angels could not strip her of” was such a silver lining and consolation to which I held on with every fibre of my being, but after TRF it’s literally true!!! God possesses creative love, and so do humans, but Angels do not. It’s literally the imagination Lyra talks about that was shut out of Eden together with her.

And then the Faerie Queene extract we’re left with…

It’s just shouting again to me, she kept one part of Eden Angels could not strip her of!!!!! The “sure” of an uncertain supposition has been turned into fact!! She did!! These lines keep rotating in my brain ever since finishing TRF and I’ve been having bursts of Joy.

Like yesterday I was in class pretending to pay attention and could feel my eyes swelling up with tears because I was hit by such certainty that Will and Lyra would now get to grow old together. And we don’t need to see it written to know it will happen, because we have our imaginations too.

It was such a short bit, but such an echo to Will and Lyra’s words about growing old together.

P 614-615 “‘And the way they…’ She had to swallow hard. ‘Just the way they sat there, on their old sofa, side by side and holding hands, and I could see how much they loved each other and how completely he relied on her and she relied on him, and how they…’ She sobbed, suddenly, surprising herself, and finding it hard to carry on.”

The fact that right after this Lyra concludes she has no romantic feelings for Malcolm tell me that, unknown even to herself, this was the point when she decided she’d try to find Will. And all because of the “imagination” she now possesses, which gives her the knowledge that the windows should not be shut and that the alethiometer can be used in other ways than it was intended to. The things angels could not strip her of. I’m too happy.

mamsellechosette24601

On Malcolm - the rose field spoilers

disclaimer: ofc I was not happy with any of the Malcolm/Lyra moments and grieve for 2017-19 when we thought they’d have a sibling dynamic, but now that evil’s been 100% defeated, I’d like to take a more nuanced view on him rather than just dismiss him as a creep and blame Philman for how “problematic” the storyline was

To begin with, as much as we readers were made very uncomfortable by most scenes, especially the one in TSC when Malcolm talks about being conscious of Lyra’s “warm body” as a teenager, no one was more uncomfortable than Malcolm himself. And then we have to think of all the trauma he must still be carrying from Bonneville, a predator on young girls who would talk to a 12yo Malcolm as if he were complicit in the manhood of being unable to control themselves before attractive girls. I can only think that the encounters with Bonneville as a pubescent boy made Malcolm have a very repressive subconscious attitude towards his own sexuality, which then fought back through increased desire. Even when looking at the witch in TRF, Malcolm cannot help but think of how he’s attracted to her, feel hyper conscious of that, and then have to repress it without acceptance or any sort of working through his feelings that would allow for it to go away.

So when it comes to Lyra, I think the most important is how he never ever acts on it. He is suffering for something he cannot control and that began when Lyra was the same age Alice was when she got raped, hitting that point of prohibition/desire that festered in reaction to repressing what he was told by a predator when aged 12. From a psychoanalysis point of view, it’s quite a natural reaction. So Malcolm is not at all like Bonneville, nor is he “inherently” a creep, but is dealing with how he repressed and never dealt with the trauma of too early an encounter with sexual violence. It goes to such an extent that maybe he never would’ve fallen in love w Lyra at all had it not been for the subconscious association with Bonneville. When all the characters defend him and tell him it’s okay to be in love with Lyra, or when Alice reacts to the police’s story of student/teacher rape, I see it as attempts to balance out Malcolm’s own symptomatic repression. It’s absurd for them Malcolm’s sense of guilt or the idea that he might get charged with rape because they know 100% he’s not a predator, but his repression cannot let him convince himself of that, and fosters a type of self torture that only increases desire for Lyra. His decision to remain silent and not act on it is the final proof that he never was a predator, though I believe his trauma re Bonneville by the end of TRF is far from worked out.

It’s also fascinating to me how, from all the characters, Malcolm is the one most closely associated with fairy tale logic. He devotes himself to Lyra, placing himself as her eternal servant, as proceeds to be the one who crowns her in TRF. He’s “made of gold” because of his migraine, a daily life issue typical of the ones used to trick fairies through a forced metaphor they don’t get. He’s also got the “heart of gold”, which is absolutely true in his goodness, whose reinforcement I saw less with annoyance and more as a continuation of his fairy-tale-like character, as well as a contrast to his own assessment of himself. So the character who best fits into a fairy tale is also the one who best fits a Freudian divan. In terms of storytelling, I love these kinds of contrast, the play between the adult and the childish, and I think it also perfectly mimics Malcolm’s own trauma - having been taken away from innocence too early on.

lordeasriel

THE ROSE FIELD > a playlist for Lyra's journey in the final entry for The Book of Dust (listen here)

in memory of lyra and her journey through the levant. the wounds are still the same, even if they are new.

oakleystreet

A L E T H I O M E T E R

CREATION: 1612 in Prague (first model).

CREATED BY: Pavel Khunrath.

MADE OF: usually gold, the needles being composed of an alloy of titanium and gold.

PURPOSE: interprets the truth by interacting with Dust.

The Alethiometer is an object created by Pavel Khunrath, an alchemist, around 1612 in the city of Prague. Khunrath had meant to create a device that could read the stars alignment, but upon discovering the alloy coming from the mixture of gold and titanium, he realised that the magnetic properties of this alloy worked much like the needle of a compass pointing north, except this one forced its mythical alloy needle to point to the truth.

Khunrath’s experiments benefitted from the rule of the emperor Rudolf II, who was liberal and keen on allowing alchemists to perform in the city, but once he died and his new successor, emperor Frederick, proved to be more conservative, Khunrath was sentenced to death, burned at the stake in the name of the Magisterium.

The Alethiometers were once deemed unreadable without the books, with the extraordinary exception of Lyra Belacqua’s innate skill. It is believed one takes years, even with the help of the books, to read properly and clearly any questions made.

Six instruments are known to exist and they were scattered across the world. Their possession can be considered even heretical depending on the country one is using it, and the Magisterium often tries its best to get ahold of every single one of those, since a good reader with a single instrument and proper books can do a lot.

Before the Great Flood (likely post-February 1986, according to the timeline), some of the alethiometers moved hands quite considerably.

one alethiometer was placed in the University of Uppsala, and it’s implied someone read this instrument for Oakley Street (LBS, chapter 13, page 256);

one was placed in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, used by a group of scholars who did studies on the depth of particular symbols and used by Hannah Relf to make questions on behalf of Oakley Street (LBS, chapter 13);

one had been in Bologna, in possession of a scholar who also read on behalf of Oakley Street and who had been killed, and a few weeks prior to the flood, this instrument was handed to Hannah Relf personally, to be read for Oakley Street. (LBS, chapter 13);

one was placed in Geneva, being read by the Magisterium although it is never disclosed which group has it;

one was placed in Paris, assumingly in an university, and was read on behalf of the Magisterium;

one was with Gerard Bonneville, who had stolen it from monks in Bohemia, and then it was stolen by Malcolm Polstead and by the end of the flood, it was gifted to the Master of Jordan College and Lyra Belacqua.

Between the events of NL and TAS (ranging between 1996 and 1998), the alethiometers also seem placed in different places from the original locations in LBS:

one was in possession of the Consistorial Court of Discipline in Geneva, being read by Fra Pavel. It isn’t clear if this is the same one as the one in Geneva during 1986.

one was in possession of the Society of the Work of the Holy Spirit, also in Geneva;

one was in possession of Lyra Belacqua, moving worlds as she did so; this one is the same alethiometer that had been in possession of Bonneville;

one was with Lord Asriel at the Basalt Fortress; it isn’t disclosed which one this was;

two alethiometers are unaccounted for based on their original locations and because the ones owned in this time spot can’t be traced back to the old locations, it’s hard even to guess which one is which. Hannah Relf, for example, could have lent her alethiometer to Asriel’s alethiometrist, or they could have stolen one; the same goes for the CCD and the Society’s one. The only one accounted for is Lyra’s.

During the events of The Secret Commonwealth, the alethiometers seem to have changed hands once again.

one is placed in La Maison Juste, being read by Olivier Bonneville, who eventually leaves the city and takes it with him (i think he loses it when he is arrested but imnot sure /fc);

one is with Hannah Relf, very likely the same one from Bologna;

one is still with Lyra Belacqua, the one which had belonged to Bonneville;

Paris, Uppsala and Bodley’s (fact check but the other 3 are never disclosed but im not sure and im tired)

KNOWN ALETHIOMETRISTS

Hannah Relf, in Oxford (during HDM, although she never is portrayed reading it and TBOD);

Fra Pavel, in Geneva (during TAS);

Teukros Basilides, in the Basalt Fortress (during TAS);

Lyra Belacqua, in Oxford (during HDM, LO, S, TSC);

Olivier Bonneville, in Geneva (TSC);

A reader at Uppsala University (during LBS);

A reader at the Society of the Work of the Holy Spirit (during TAS);

THE SYMBOLS AND THEIR MEANINGS

The Alethiometer is composed of 36 symbols that can be drawn in different styles but that follow a same common principle, such as the hourglass always having a skull on top. (?) (The symbols will get a separate post discussing their meanings in canon).

Hourglass

Sun

Alpha and omega

Marionette

Serpent

Cauldron

Anchor

Angel

Helmet

Beehive

Moon

Madonna

Apple

Bird

Bread

Ant

Bull

Candle

Cornucopia

Chameleon

Thunderbolt

Dolphin

Walled Garden

Globe

Sword

Griffin

Horse

Camel

Elephant

Crocodile

Baby

Compass

Lute

Tree

Wild Man

Owl

novelconcepts

Hey, man, c'mere. Listen. Get in real close, this is important.

You're gonna make stuff again. You're gonna make stuff you're proud of. You're gonna make stuff you're excited to share. You're going to feel that overwhelming drive to create, not just the frantic I want to want to you're stuck in now. You're going to have awesome ideas, and you're going to make them into reality. You're going to create again. You're still an artist. You're still a writer. You're still home to the same passion you had before. You'll find it again. It's not gone. It's just resting. Let it rest. You're going to make stuff again. I promise.