The Golden Compass Synopsis and Excerpts

The Golden Compass, the first in the series, takes place in the world of Lyra Belacqua, a land that is similar to our own but with marked differences. (Lyra’s world has not caught up with the technology of our own, and “the feel is more Inquisition Spain than 19th century England.”)33 The Church, frequently called the Magisterium, is a Calvinized version of the Catholic Church. The power the Magisterium wields over Lyra’s world is explained early on: “Ever since Pope John Calvin had moved the seat of the Papacy to Geneva and set up the Consistorial Court of Discipline, the Church’s power over every aspect of life had been absolute. The Papacy itself had been abolished after Calvin’s death, and a tangle of courts, colleges, and councils, collectively known as the Magisterium, had grown up in its place.”34

Lyra, effectively an orphan, resides in Oxford’s Jordan College, and spends her days larking with her chums and getting into mischief. Children start to disappear, however, and Lyra and her friends suspect the kidnappers are a mysterious group called “the Gobblers.” The Gobblers, it turns out, are not just a figment of the fertile minds of children: the moniker comes from the initials of the General Oblation Board, a division of the Magisterium headed by a sinister beauty named Mrs. Marisa Coulter (later revealed to be Lyra’s mother).

The group is explained as follows: “Very old idea, as a matter of fact. In the MiddleAges, parents would give their children to the church to be monks or nuns. And the unfortunate brats were known as oblates. Means a sacrifice, an offering up, something of that sort. So the same idea was taken up when they were looking into the Dust business.”35 This “Dust business” drives the plot, and is a source of strife between Church authorities (the bad guys) who see the invisible substance as original sin and want to suppress it, and those scientists and rebels (the good guys, led by the enigmatic scientist Lord Asriel) who want to promote it.

The Church kidnaps children because Dust isn’t attracted to children as much as it is to adults. The General Oblation Board exists to perform vile experiments on children, the cruelest being one where they sever the child’s soul, called a dæmon (pronounced “demon”), which lives outside the body in animal form. Though severing a person’s dæmon effectively turns him into a zombie, it is the Church’s idea that it is better to do this than let the children grow up and fall into sin. With the help of an alethiometer (a magic device that can answer questions truthfully), talking bears, witches and the gyptians (a nomadic group of sailors), Lyra is able to elude Mrs. Coulter and the other agents of the Church and free the kidnapped children. Lord Asriel (revealed to be Lyra’s father) has discovered that severing a child’s dæmon releases enough energy to actually create a break between worlds. He chooses a victim recently freed from the Church’s clutches and destroys the boy, opening a doorway into a parallel universe. Lyra erroneously believes that Lord Asriel is out to annihilate Dust, just like the Church, and follows him into the new world.

Selected quotes:

_ A gyptian leader, discussing the Church: “The Church in recent times, Lyra, it’s been getting more commanding. There’s councils for this and councils for that; there’s talk of reviving the Office of the Inquisition, God forbid.”36

_ Mrs. Coulter, speaking about Lord Asriel: “He’s pushed his heretical investigations to the point where it’s positively dangerous to let him live. At any rate, it seems that the Vatican Council has begun to debate the question of the sentence of death, and the probability is that it’ll be carried out.”37

_ Lord Asriel, telling Lyra about the Church and the discovery of Dust: “Now all discoveries of this sort, because they have a bearing on the doctrines of the Church, have to be announced through the Magisterium in Geneva. And this discovery of Rusakov’s was so unlikely and strange that the inspector from the Consistorial Court of Discipline suspected Rusakov of diabolic possession. He performed an exorcism in the laboratory, he interrogated Rusakov under the rules of the Inquisition, but finally they had to accept the fact that Rusakov wasn’t lying or deceiving them.”38

*_ Lord Asriel, discussing the General Oblation Board severing children’s dæmons: “There was a precedent. Something like it had happened before. Do you know what the word castration means? It means removing the sexual organs of 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.”39

*_ Lord Asriel: “The General Oblation Board grew out of…the Church’s obsession with original sin.”40

*_ Lord Asriel, speaking gleefully of his plans: “This will mean the end of the Church, Marisa, the end of the Magisterium, the end of all those centuries of darkness!”41

33“Northern Lights (The Golden Compass) by Phillip Pullman,”
www.complete-review.com
34Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass, p. 27.
35Ibid., pp. 79-80.
36Ibid., p. 113.
37Ibid., p. 239.
38Ibid., p. 325.
39Ibid., p. 328.
40Ibid., p. 329.
41Ibid., p. 347.

Taken from The Golden Compass: Agenda Unmasked by the Catholic League