GNOSTIC SPIRITUAL HERITAGE IN PHILIP PULLMAN’S HIS DARK MATERIALS FANTASY TRILOGY
GNOSTIC SPIRITUAL HERITAGE IN PHILIP PULLMAN’S HIS DARK MATERIALS FANTASY TRILOGY

Summary/Abstract: In Western culture Judeo-Christianity as the mainstream and Gnosticism with Hellenistic-Jewish roots as its rivalling counter-religion have had different approaches to the Tempter, the Temptation and the Fall of Man. Philip Pullman (1946- ) incorporated the alternative memories of the formerly repressed Gnostic traditions into the mythopoesis of His Dark Materials (1995-2000) fantasy trilogy so as to express his antipathy for dogmatized and organized Christianity. In this paper I will rely on Renate Lachmann’s hypothesis according to which Romantic literature of the fantastic served to preserve unofficial or forbidden philosophicaltheological knowledge. On this basis, the connecting link between the pre-modern Gnostics and the contemporary Pullman seems to be the heretical William Blake (1757-1827), the successful (pre) Romantic transmitter of Gnosticism in English literature. I focus my attention to the trilogy’s second and third books, The Subtle Knife (1997) and The Amber Spyglass (2000), to explore how the British author shaped particular Gnostic elements (self-development, emancipation and dualism) to his own liking instead of a slavish loyalty to Gnostic mythology. My aim is to argue that the acquisition of gnosis (special, liberating knowledge), the central item of Gnostic mythology, inevitably functions as the plot-organizing device of Pullman’s narrative set in several parallel universes. To see what the original meaning can produce in a new context, I will analyse Pullman’s conception of Dust as an all embracing and vitalizing force, characters such as the female angel named Xaphania as Sophia (Wisdom), the male angels called the Authority and Metatron as the demiurge(s), and a setting or rather an attitude named the Republic of Heaven as the proof for the anti-nihilistic position of Pullman’s mythopoesis.

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