In this thesis we analyze His dark materials trilogy written by Philip Pullman. The trilogy contains various religious elements such as the church, original sin, God, angels, the underworld, shamanism and Chinese divination.
The first part of the thesis deals with analyzing and comparing religious concepts taken from Christianity with author's personal views in mind. The elements of the story were put in their original context and compared with it. We sought the connection between objective descriptions of the church in the trilogy and the Catholic church, commented on the representation of its actions and researched the way the author deals with original sin in comparison to the official Catholic teachings. We compared the kingdom of heaven and the Republic of heaven; the underworld with the Christian conception of the afterlife. The key element examined is the image of God, with the most profound subversion of Christian theology. We examined the sources behind the concept of angels.
The second part of the thesis deals with analyzing secondary religious phenomena such as pantheism, panpsychism, shamanism, greco-roman elements and the Book of Changes. Pantheism and panpsychism were connected with the arising philosophy of the trilogy after the subversion of Christian elements. In regards to shamanism we were mostly concerned with the character of John Parry, we were also interested in the use of the Book of Changes by Mary Malone. We examined certain greco-roman elements to shed more light on already analyzed concepts such as the underworld and daemons.
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