Having learned of the witches' prophecy that Lyra Belacqua is the second Eve, the Magisterium decides she must be killed to prevent a new fall.

Lyra's ambitious and hardhearted mother, Mrs Coulter, hides her in a remote cave.

In her drugged sleep, Lyra dreams of meeting her friend Roger in the land of the dead, and promises to help.

After finding Roger, they persuade the harpies that control the world to allow them to open a window so the dead can leave.

Mrs Coulter, who has allied herself with Asriel, enters the Authority's citadel, tempts Metatron, and then betrays him.

Lyra and Will free the Authority from a crystal litter in which he is being carried, and find him demented and powerless – so feeble that mere exposure to the wind causes his form to dissolve.

She decides to take up the academic study of alethiometry and, together with Pantalaimon who has now taken the permanent form of a pine marten, she resolves to build the Republic of Heaven.

Pullman said Lyra's sexual awakening "is exactly what happens in the Garden of Eden … Why the Christian Church has spent 2,000 years condemning this glorious moment, well, that's a mystery.

"[3] The North American edition alters passages describing Lyra's incipient sexuality.

[3] The text in the UK edition[4] includes this passage in the chapter "Marzipan": As Mary said that, Lyra felt something strange happen to her body.

[5] Each chapter carried at the beginning a quotation from one of Pullman's favourite authors, including Milton (Paradise Lost), William Blake and Emily Dickinson.

Besides finding hints of Paradise Lost and Blake's poetry, the astute will pick up echoes of the following: Christ's harrowing of hell, Jewish Kabbalah (the legend of the godlike angel Metatron), Gnostic doctrine (Dust, our sleeping souls needing to be awakened), the 'death of God' controversy, Perelandra, the Oz books (the Wheelers), Wagner's Ring of the Nibelungs (Siegfried's mending of the sword), Aeneas, Odysseus and Dante in the Underworld, the Grail legend and the wounded Fisher King, Peter Pan, Wordsworth's pantheistic 'Immortality Ode', the doctrine of the hidden God and speculation about the plurality of worlds, situational ethics (actions, not people, being good or bad), the cessation of miracles, Star Wars...and even Pullman's own early novel for adults, Galatea."

He concludes by writing that "His Dark Materials is a novel of electrifying power and splendor, deserving celebration, as violent as a fairy tale and as shocking as art must be.

[13] The third series of the joint BBC-HBO television adaptation of His Dark Materials, released in December 2022, mainly covers The Amber Spyglass.