The Golden Compass / Northern Lights Ch 1-4

Measures of Truth: A His Dark Materials Podcast

Caitlin, Anya, and Alan kick off The Golden Compass by talking about its “real” name of The Northern Lights, the scruffiness of shoes in academia, and the danger of Gargamel’s pussy(cat).

Paradise Lost by John Milton is the source of His Dark Materials and Golden Compasses.

Read more about What’s Up With The Title of the first book and the HDM series itself.

Satan as the protagonist of Paradise Lost is hotly debated (if anything about the criticism of English religious epic-poetry can be “hot”) and Alan is just giving his opinion. Here is another opinion that agrees with Caitlin by John M. Steadman titled “The Idea of Satan as the Hero of Paradise Lost” written for the American Philosophical Society Journal and compiled by jstor.org.

The allusions to Narnia are from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

What is Turkish Delight?

Chocolatl is the Romanized spelling of the Nahuatl word for “food made from cacao seeds”.

Listen to Desire Made Real hosted by Caitlin and Mandi and that featured Anya.

How long does it take wine to go bad?

The use of alternate words like Anberic and Naphtha help to show that history has been different in Lyra’s world.

The Protestant Reformation led to the separation of church and state in Europe and gave rise to secular nationalism during the Enlightenment.

Who is Calvin? Was he the Pope for real?(spoilers: no- the opposite)

The doctrine of Predestination centered reformed Christian theology on God rather than on humans.

A list of all the Popes

Listen to the “Crazy for God” episode of HGSC

Azrael the Cat is not the inspiration for Lord Asriel’s name, but the Islamic angel of death Azrael is.

The Smurfette Principle

Carl Jung and the Animus/ Anima.

Teleology has nothing to do with bananas or phones.

What is a dystopia?

Jewish boys in Czarist Russia were drafted into the army in order to kill/ socially deprogram them.

America is separating families and detaining children.

What’s a Mary Sue?

“Dollar” was used by Shakespeare to refer to money, and the dollar-coin was the most common form of money in Europe- but was rejected by England as it rose into the largest empire in world history.

Read Chapters 5-9 for the next episode!!

Our theme song is Clockwork Conundrum by NathanGunn

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