#alethiometer

HDM alphabet series → A is for Alethiometer

'Lyra: what will you do when you find this place in the desert, the opening to the world of the roses?'

'"Defend it", Lyra said. "Die defending it."'

When readers left Lyra in The Secret Commonwealth she was alone, in the ruins of a deserted city. Pantalaimon had run from her – part of himself – in search of her imagination, which he believed she had lost. Lyra travelled across the world from her Oxford home in search of her dæmon. And Malcolm, loyal Malcolm, too journeyed far from home, towards the Silk Roads in search of Lyra.

In The Rose Field, their quests converge in the most dangerous, breathtaking and world-changing ways. They must take help from spies and thieves, gryphons and witches, old friends and new, learning all the while the depth and surprising truths of the alethiometer. All around them, the world is aflame – made terrifying by fear, power and greed.

As they move East, towards the red building that will reunite them and give them answers – on Dust, on the special roses, on imagination – so too does the Magisterium, at war against all that Lyra holds dear.

Marking thirty years since the world was first introduced to Pullman’s remarkable heroine Lyra Belacqua in Northern Lights, The Rose Field is the culmination of the cultural phenomenon of The Book of Dust and His Dark Materials.

The Book of Dust Volume Three: The Rose Field is out 23rd October 2025. Pre-order now: https://linktr.ee/PP.BOD3

Long term followers may remember that back in 2020 I decided that I was going to fulfil a long term desire of mine to illustrate my copy of Northern Lights. It was a huge under taking, illustrating all 23 chapters and a second bonus design for chapter 3. As part of that I also designed a front cover, which I was incredibly proud of and included an Alethiometer that, through symbols, explained the whole story of the trilogy.

This year, however, I decided to decorate my office with more of my art, and as part of that I wanted to make a poster version of my Northern Lights cover. With 5 year's worth of experience, and much bigger paper (and significantly better quality watercolour paper at that) I have managed to create something that, while maintaining the same feel as the original, far better depicts it in a way that I am incredibly proud.

In particular I love the truly tiny details I managed to include, like Lyra, Pan, Roger and Salcilia walking on the Oxford roof, and how much clearer I was able to draw the Alethiometer symbols. I really liked how in the original, the 4 sections at the bottom showing the locations of the novel had their own vibes, with Bolvanger in particular giving a clear feeling of Dread. I am also so much happier with the Aurora and seeing Cittagazze shimmering through. I used the city scape that I designed for my Subtle Knife cover to tie the designs together better as well.

This indeed a very big ask, but I don't mind receiving it. I'm very sorry that this is something you are having to grapple with - it's been a pervasive experience in my life, in many different forms (both direct and oblique, as you articulate it), and it's such a painful one, and so very common.

I do have thoughts about what helps me cope with it, though it is of course very much not a completed thing for me. I am also publishing this in the hopes that others may add thoughts about works for them.

This might sound overly simplistic or obvious, but I think what has helped for me has pretty much always come down to a combination of different forms of taking steps to relieve my aloneness and simultaneously creating internal and external separation from the disbelief, and working to balance those two tasks.

Relieving aloneness can be tricky because sometimes the steps we take to reach for that end up reinforcing it - other survivors can certainly have just as strong assumptions and defenses around experiences of trauma different from the ones they personally have experienced, and I've ended up in a lot of painful situations by leaning too readily into closeness with another survivor in the assumption that they would be able to tolerate the knowledge of my experiences.

But, at the same time, experiencing a thread of shared experience, even if it's only around a particular detail of or reaction to an experience, has been crucial for me. Reading survivor memoirs or other nonfiction about violence and letting myself connect to the points of similarity, even alongside the areas of difference. Leaning into relational closeness with other people who can truly tolerate knowing the truth of my experiences, regardless of whether or not they share any aspect of them. Feeling deeply about my own experiences with myself, without minimizing them. The more deeply I can take in those experiences of connection, the less existentially threatening others' disbelief feels.

And then, on the other hand, there's a sort of an internal shift I have needed to make (not that it's finished yet!) to sort of...take myself out of the whole dialogic nexus of belief and disbelief as much as possible. I have the freedom to do this because I have not ever and am not pursuing any kind of redress or systems involvement that is dependent on being believed; for someone who is, this is thorny in a different way.

But for myself, I can decide that I don't care about plausibility or believability or statistical likelihood or proof; for people determined to disbelieve, no amount of proof or telling my story coherently would be enough anyway. (Understanding others' disbelief as a psychological defense against the intolerability of knowing doesn't excuse it, but it does make it easier to set aside and not take in.) For many survivors, I know that understanding their experiences of violence within a broader social context as part of larger dynamics of oppression is central to their healing; for me, it's most important to hold them simply as my own experiences, specific and personal and meaning what they do to me and not bearing the rhetorical weight of being illustrations of social phenomena (so much disbelief circles around an experience of violence being ideologically/politically/rhetorically inconvenient).

Practically speaking, when people express disbelief about the existence of certain types of violence in the world in which they live, or behave in ways that obliquely imply such disbelief, I treat that as a communication which factors into what kinds of closeness I attempt or don't with them. I have boundaries around this for myself. I don't argue with people about whether types of violence are real, and if someone tries I will extricate myself from that interaction. On a very concrete level here on tumblr, if someone repeatedly makes jokes about acts of violence which treat those acts as abstract hypotheticals rather than things that happen in the world, I often quietly unfollow them (I most often end up doing this about torture jokes); this is a much more minor thing than someone actually expressing skepticism, but I've found it's where I want one of my boundaries to be.

The Alethiometer, a zine by The Speaking Squid

I made a system-agnostic RPG add-on to include the Golden Compass in your next session or campaign. The whole supplement fits in this pocket-sized zine.

The Alethiometer is a device that reads the fundamental particles of the multiverse to accurately answer any question posed to it. It was created by Philip Pullman in the amazing His Dark Materials trilogy. 

Save this post to never lose such a powerful tool and download the printable zine here:

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This is a fan work inspired by Philip Pullman’s Golden Compass.

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Be excellent to everyone.

ooof, i'm so deeply flattered by that, and i'd say i have seen ... a distinguished quantity of films, but currently i'm coasting off of mutuals who are much more cineastically inclined anndgbsj whenever i get to it, it's a dogshit horror movie made in the past 10 years. but if you like the commentary of that, i appreciate