The Golden Compass Study Guide

Philip Pullman's father was a Royal Air Force pilot and when the family wasn't traveling for his job, they spent most of their time in North Wales. His father died when Pullman was seven and his mother remarried. Pullman discovered John Milton's Paradise Lost as a teenager and was later drawn to the illustrations of William Blake. Both would go on to be major influences in Pullman's later work, His Dark Materials especially. Beginning in the late 1960s, Pullman taught middle-grade students and wrote children's plays. These plays inspired his first children's book, Count Karlstein. He began writing His Dark Materials in 1993 while teaching at Oxford and after it was published, Pullman turned to writing full time. The entire series has won numerous awards—particularly The Golden Compass and The Amber Spyglass. Throughout his life, Pullman has been an advocate for not age- and gender-labeling children's books, and he's spoken out on behalf of authors' rights to fair compensation for speaking engagements and e-book library loans. As an agnostic and critic of Christianity, Pullman has delighted in the criticism lobbed at His Dark Materials and even asked his publisher to include a critical quote from 1999 in The Amber Spyglass.

The Magisterium in The Golden Compass is modeled closely after the organization of the Roman Catholic Church. Like the real-life church, the Magisterium has a pope that leads it in making decisions about what is considered to be the correct interpretation of scripture. The control that the Magisterium has over society in The Golden Compass more closely mirrors a historical version of the church than a contemporary one, and the way that characters discuss the fate of Dr. Rusakov (the man who discovered Dust) specifically draws on the way that the church developed the wider Catholic Inquisition (which manifested as the Spanish, Portuguese, and Roman Inquisitions) to investigate and crack down on everything from witchcraft to scientific discoveries that challenged church doctrine. The Inquisitions arrested and tried scientists like Galileo Galilei and Gerolamo Cardano—who, incidentally, developed the mechanism that allows compass rings to rotate.

Pullman wrote the His Dark Materials series (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass) with the intention of creating an inverse retelling of John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost, targeted at children and teens. He has also cited the work of William Blake and Heinrich von Kleist as influences on the series. His skepticism of religion and his intended audience means that he's often compared with C.S. Lewis, whose Chronicles of Narnia series is rooted in Christian imagery and portrays religious teachings in a positive light. Pullman published His Dark Materials around the same time as J.K. Rowling was publishing the Harry Potter books, and both series sparked outrage and boycotts from religious groups (though Pullman has expressed surprise that Harry Potter has received far more pushback than his books). Other books that have been banned or the subject of controversy on religious grounds include Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses and John McGahern's The Dark, which has, like The Golden Compass, also faced criticism for its treatment of puberty and sexuality.