Forever Growing: His Dark Materials (A Trilogy Book Series)

His Dark Materials, is a trilogy of fantasy novels, written by Phillip Pullman that follows the adventures of two pre-teens on their hunt for and occasional run from their parents.

Quite the delightful and fun read (think a mash-up between The Chronicles of Narnia and Madeline L’Engle’s a Wrinkle In Time) it attempts to tell the story of “becoming” and the rigorous and delicate process of growing up, while staying true to oneself.

It wasn’t until after finishing the series and binge watching the trilogy made for TV series, that it suddenly dawned on me why I enjoyed this story so much!

Spoiler alert… if you haven’t read this and think that you might want to read these books, stop reading now.

The story bounces back and forth between alternative worlds, in which human’s souls manifest as animal companions, called daemons. For children (pre-puberty), their daemons are able to shift according to the situation and what kind of protection is needed for that child at the moment.

What a brilliant idea, right?

The idea is that by puberty, a child’s daemon will “settle” which means that it will take on one set form for the rest of that human’s life and provide that for that child as they continue to grow up.

The story explores the pursuit of several key characters that seek to separate children from their soul, prior to puberty, in order to control them and manifest a world and experiences in which children have lost their aliveness and can be more easily shaped and controlled.

In short, to get rid of their aliveness. (My words, not Phillip Pullman’s!)

It’s evident that the adults involved in this are working hard to invent a procedure in which separation of soul and body can happen immediately, when you encounter other adult characters who have been separated from their daemons and move about their worlds as if automatons.

As is the case with many children’s adventure stories, it is up to these two children to save others’ “soul” from separation with the body, and oddly enough, one of the leading pursuants of this body/soul separation procedure is the parent of one of the main children characters.

The whole book trilogy series centers around this tension between innocence and evil, light and darkness inside everyone.

It’s a magnificent story about what happens when we lose our connection with our spirit, our soul, and how we end up moving through life with little aliveness or ability to find joy.

The book series does a beautiful job of representing the arduous and sometimes dangerous journey that it takes to fight to maintain the connection or find our way back to our spirit, if we have been separated along the way.

In particular, His Dark Materials book trilogy, represents how it is often the child inside that helps us find our way back to our aliveness.

I found this to be such a wonderful archetypal story about the human experience, and really the crux of what I strive to do with people in my practice, which is to help people reconnect with their spirit inside.

It’s an absolutely wonderful fantasy drama story that you won’t want to miss.

So, if you’re looking for a fun read or perhaps something to do with the family, you might consider reading these books together or watching the series.