Exhibits, Shows and Displays

What do you think the alethiometer stands for in the Golden Compass book series?

other than just truth i feel it is simply the deductive thought process of the great academic minds. What do you think? granted I haven't read the third book yet but so far that's what I feel it stands for

Public Comments

1. i don't know. i'm only a few chapter into the first book at the moment. i don't know if it's a good thing if its bad, i'm guessing it's good. but if it wasn't it could stand for the bible since whatshisface is an aithiest and he doesn't think the bibles real, or that its misleading. but i really have no clue=]
2. November 27, 2007 - The cornerstone of the forthcoming fantasy film The Golden Compass, based on the first novel in the His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman, is the mysterious device from which the tale borrows its title. The golden compass, more formally referred to as the alethiometer, is an extraordinarily intricate device able to answer any question formed in the mind of the user. Created centuries ago by a metaphysical scientist, the truth-telling, future-seeing machine points not to true North like an ordinary compass, but to Truth itself. The alethiometer's face is ornamented with 36 arcane symbols, each of which may convey different meanings in combination with any of the others and according to the subtleties of the machine's motions. As you can imagine, this makes it incredibly difficult to read. In fact, there's no-one left in the world that possesses the ability, except for the story's young heroine, Lyra. "The alethiometer's 36 symbols have more than 10 or 20 meanings themselves," explains director Chris Weitz. "According to the way the needle moves across these symbols, you can interpret it as an answer to your questions. There's some kind of absolute truth out there that guides the needle of the alethiometer. So, it's an immensely powerful object. It allows you to know anything and everything, but it's incredibly difficult to use. Everyone who has used the alethiometer has had to reference these huge tomes of symbols and their meanings and interpretations in order to get anything about of these devices. But Lyra, for reasons we will discover in part in this movie and in full in later movies in the series, has the ability to read it without these books. She's able to do this through long practice, through her inner nature, and through training by people who have folk wisdom of various kinds like the Gyptians in the story." I think it stands for the sum of all human knowledge, which many can laboriously acquire through books, but which a precious few know intuitively. And more than that, it stands for wisdom, which can come from knowledge, but only to those who can distill it.
3. The closest modern equivalent is a deck of Tarot cards. Like the alethiometer, the tarot is based on the language of symbols. The reading of tarot is based on position and sequence, and it can also be highly intuitive like Lyra's readings or carefully studied, like the scholars who read them. Whether you believe the tarot tells the future or the truth is up to you, but I think it's the closest equivalent in our world to Lyra's Golden Compass.