Philip Pullman, Owen Barfield, daemons, witches and consciousness

A conversation about Philip Pullman's brilliant Dark Materials story in the light of Owen Barfield's genius account of the evolution of consciousness. I talk with Wesley Schantz, who hosts the Bookwarm Games podcast, about the significance of daemons, dust and witches, about the links to developmental psychology and human experience, and about the divine that lies beyond the Ancient of Days.

[@imogen.magenta]

Great interview. An interesting path in to discussing a whole range of things. I didn’t know anything about Phillip Pullman’s background but realising his atheist stance makes sense to me. The books are imaginative but I found they fell flat somehow. Pretty hard to really believe in another world if the author doesn’t. And it seems both speakers felt the lack of a cosmology underlying the stories. Another indication that religion isn’t something you can remove - it either leaves an empty gap or it fills up with one’s own strange and insular dogma.