The Down Side of Daemons

[Shadow_Poet2]

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DavidC wrote:

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Nadine wrote:
... Daemons not only reflected your true self but your station in life. If your daemon was a dog you were locked into the servant class. There is no way to change your situation in life and aspire to something else.

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I understand the general point you're making in your post, but on this one thing above I want to disagree. I don't think it's quite that firm. Having a dog daemon wouldn't lock you into the servant class. But, as you've implied, an employee might not hire you unless you had one.

Anyway, dogs sometimes bite, or run off!

Message Edited by DavidC on 09-04-2007 05:42 PM

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DavidC,

I agree with your point about our daemons not firming up our future. I believe that the daemon only takes its final form once the characters have grown to a place where their disposition is decided...by life and experience. Having a dog daemon does not force you to be a servant...however, if you are disposed to becoming a servant, then your daemon may take the shape of a dog. The character determines who he/she is going to be...the daemon is just an exterior projection of an interior predisposition.

[Nadine]

Something I've been thinking about lately is whether I would really want to live in a world with external daemons. There are good things and not so good things about it. Of course the biggest plus is having a constant, sympathetic and supportive companion. But what about the advantages or disadvantages of having daemons visible to everyone and revealing the true you.

I can see some advantages in choose friends, companions, and mates. Like a young woman meets this really nice guy who seems to say all the right things and behaves in a most gentlemanly way but he has this snarling wolf daemon.

But the shoe can be on the other foot if a guy is timid and shy and has this small mouse demon but he would really like to come across more cool and macho and wished he had a tiger for a daemon.

It would have to be a more honest world (although I didn't notice Lyra's world being any more honest).

I guess it is a bit like asking a person what their astrological sign is but then being a virgo or a scorpio is far less revealing.

I was curious about how the rest of you would feel about living in a world where everyone had daemons. Would you consider it a positive or a negative thing?

Those of you who haven't meet your daemon yet and might want to test what it might be like can go to the address below and get your daemon assigned to you. It isn't a general assignment and if you took the test a second time it would probably come up different. But it might be fun to play "what if my daemon was ----

http://www.goldencompassmovie.com/

[Nadine]

Well, I found that daemon assignment at the movie site most interesting. Several days ago I answered the 20 questions and it assigned my daemon as a chimpanzee called Erasmus. I just went back to see what it would assign me this time around and it again assigned my daemon as a chimpanzee but this time by the name of Calanon. I guess my daemon would be a chimp. If you want to try yours again:

http://www.goldencompassmovie.com/

I guess I wouldn't mind having a chimpanzee as a daemon. They are friendly, resourceful, and intelligent animals. There is nothing inherently revealing about them either in a positive or negative way.

However, the revealing part might be the daemon's own personality. Mrs. Coulter had a primate daemon, a beautiful golden monkey. But it was the personality of the monkey that was revealing. Mrs. Coulter could mask her evil intentions very well but not necessarily those of her malicious monkey.

It might not be the outward manifestation of the daemon that is important. Like with all creatures, it is their own personality that is the revealing part. Even those with dogs had different types of dogs with different personalities in the book. They were very much more like their person.

[Kreacherteacher]

Mine is a mouse daemon and I am not shy or timid. I have to giggle here bacause it appears that I am really buying into my fictional daemon. Sometimes, I call him "Precious".

Anyway, I don't think you could profess to knowing a person based on their daemon's appearance. Remember also, the appearance for the first part of their life is not set and it could change depending on the need. The daemon will ultimately choose for itself a permanent existence. Is existence the right word?

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Nadine wrote:
Something I've been thinking about lately is whether I would really want to live in a world with external daemons. There are good things and not so good things about it. Of course the biggest plus is having a constant, sympathetic and supportive companion. But what about the advantages or disadvantages of having daemons visible to everyone and revealing the true you.

I can see some advantages in choose friends, companions, and mates. Like a young woman meets this really nice guy who seems to say all the right things and behaves in a most gentlemanly way but he has this snarling wolf daemon.

But the shoe can be on the other foot if a guy is timid and shy and has this small mouse demon but he would really like to come across more cool and macho and wished he had a tiger for a daemon.

It would have to be a more honest world (although I didn't notice Lyra's world being any more honest).

I guess it is a bit like asking a person what their astrological sign is but then being a virgo or a scorpio is far less revealing.

I was curious about how the rest of you would feel about living in a world where everyone had daemons. Would you consider it a positive or a negative thing?

Those of you who haven't meet your daemon yet and might want to test what it might be like can go to the address below and get your daemon assigned to you. It isn't a general assignment and if you took the test a second time it would probably come up different. But it might be fun to play "what if my daemon was ----

http://www.goldencompassmovie.com/

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[DavidC]

Pullman once said, very intelligently I thought, that if you want to know what kind of daemon you'd have, you should ask your friends instead of yourself.

[maxcat]

I like the idea of daemons, they sound and seem picked for the right person. I like the snow leopard, Stelaria. I'm a cat lover so you got me there. My daemon is a mouse named Photion. Hard to believe as I have cats. Curious!

[Vampyre]

I can't go to the link from my work computer so I'll have to wait until I get home to try it.

I do like the idea though of the daemons. All my life for as long as I can remember, I have had an inner voice that seems to pipe up when i am about to make a mistake. If I ignore it, things usually go very bad for me.

It's not ESP or anything like that or I don't think it is. It will just go on and say something like if you do A then B will happen and C will be the result. It will then show me a better way to deal with a situation to get me my desired result. What it probably is, is just good old plain common sense but a very verbal one. Or it's my inner deamon...who knows.

[kalanikaloni]

For people interested in daemons, I would like to link you to
http://daemonpage.com
where you can check out the website and the (very active) forum.

[Vampyre]

OK then, I'm home and I did the quiz. I got a very nice fox named Bryanna.


http://www.freewebs.com/whitefoxwebmaster/Fox%20Mouse.jpg


It's nice but one of the descriptors said I was fickle and I dont think I m so I must of answered something wrong.

[aldida]

Thanks for the link. My daemon is a lion named Olin.

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kalanikaloni wrote:
For people interested in daemons, I would like to link you to
http://daemonpage.com
where you can check out the website and the (very active) forum.

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[Nadine]

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Vampyre wrote:
I can't go to the link from my work computer so I'll have to wait until I get home to try it.

I do like the idea though of the daemons. All my life for as long as I can remember, I have had an inner voice that seems to pipe up when i am about to make a mistake. If I ignore it, things usually go very bad for me.

It's not ESP or anything like that or I don't think it is. It will just go on and say something like if you do A then B will happen and C will be the result. It will then show me a better way to deal with a situation to get me my desired result. What it probably is, is just good old plain common sense but a very verbal one. Or it's my inner deamon...who knows.

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Vampyre, your post reminded me of the fact that Carl Jung had a daemon similar to the one you described. He took it very seriously and it was instrumental in the development of his theories about the unconscious. He talked about his daemon in his most interesting autobiography Memories, Dreams and Reflections.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&bnit=H&bnrefer=PPHDM&EAN=97806797239...

For those of you who might not be familiar with Carl Jung here is a reference

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung

I will have to look up the reference about his daemon and will post on it later.

[Nadine]

Philemon

It looks like Jung actually had several daemons. The first of these, and I gather the most important one, was a daemon he called Philemon. I am quoting from page 183, "Confrontation with the Unconscious", of the paperback version of his autobiography:

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Philemon and the other figures in my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said clearly that it was he who spoke, not I. He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, "If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people or that you were responsible for them."

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What an interesting thought. Of course, our perception of external really only takes place in our mind but we do not consider them a figment of our imagination. I will continue with the quote:

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It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche. Through him the distinction was clarified between myself and the object of my thought. He confronted me in an objective manner, and I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me.

Psychologically, Philemon represented superior insight. He was a mysterious figure to me. At times he seemed to me quite real, as if he were a living personality. I went walking up and down the garden with him, and to me he was what the Indians call a guru.
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There seems to be a lot of Pullman's daemons in this piece and Jung is bringing the idea into our real psychological world.

[Nadine]

Philemon

I missed this reference on the preceding page. In fact the whole chapter looks like some fascinating reading. Jung has been experiencing mythic fantasies that have specifically included Elijah, Salome and a snake. Too much to go into here.

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...He developed out of the Elijah figure. I called him Philemon. Philemon was a pagan and brought with him an Egypto-Hellenistic atmosphere with a Gnostic coloration....
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I think I will have to read this chapter. I read it many years ago and only vaguely remembered the daemon.

What just popped out to me here is that I understand (and I have not gotten that far yet) the final section of Pullman's trilogy is based on the Gnostic tradition and not the mainline Christian doctrine as most people assume. I don't know all this yet, but I remember reading it somewhere. It is a little early to get into a discussion of the Gnostic sources of the books but those of you who might want to have some sort of overview of Gnostism before you read the final books might want to look at this source:

http://www.gnosis.org/gnintro.htm

"The Authority" is actually the Gnostic Demiurge.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demiurge

[Nadine]

Ka

Jung had a second daemon. I am quoting from paes 184-185 of his autobiography:

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Later, Philemon became relativized by the emergence of yet another figure, whom I called Ka. In ancient Egypt the "king's ka" was his earthly form, the embodied soul. In my fantasy the ka-soul came from below, out of the earth as if out of a deep shaft....Phelimon had a lame foot, but was a winged spirit, whereas Ka represented a kind of earth demon or metal demon. Philemon was the spiritual aspect, or "meaning." Ka, on the other hand, was a spirit of nature.....Ka was he who made everything real...

When I was writing down these fantasies, I once asked myself, "what am I really doing? Certainly this has nothing to do with science. But what is it?" Whereupon a voice within me said, "It is art."...Obviously what I was doing wasn't science. What then could it be but art? It was as though these were the only alternatives in the world.
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This last part came from a female daemon. And he continues:

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...My conclusion was that she must be the "soul" in the primitive sense, and I began to speculate on the reasons why the name "anima" was given to the soul. ...Later I came to see that this inner feminine figure plays a typical, or archetypal, role in the unconscious of a man, and I called her the "anima." The corresponding figure in the unconscious of woman I called the "animus."
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Well folks, now you know why Pullman's daemons are alway the opposite sex.

I do not know if Pullman got some of his ideas from Jung. I will have to read more about his sources. This just struck me as having interesting parallels with the idea of daemons.

[Vampyre]

I can give you a couple of examples of when my inner voice tried to work for me.

We moved to Alabama from Ohio just before the start of my Junior year of high school. I eventually made friends with the guy that all the local kids seemed to be scared of. It was a rep he didn't deserve and we became good friends.

One week end we decided to take a road trip to Six Flags in Atlanta. Off we went and had a great day. As we were getting gas, Don decided he wanted a bottle of Boon's Farm wine. He was 18 and that was the legal age for buying beer and wine back then.

I got red flags shooting off at once. My inner voice didn't like it. We're still minors in Alabama and we have to go through a dry county/speed trap to get home. I told Don he need to not open the bottle and put it in the trunk.

Full of himself and his ability to buy alcohol, he had to take one drink. After doing so he put the bottle under the front passenger seat. After driving about halfway home, he said he wanted to jump in the back and sleep. I could drive the rest of the way. OK I still didn't have a driver's license for a car. It was only good for motorcycles.

Thirty minutes later, I get pulled over for a bad tail light. It's about midnight and of course we're in the aforementioned dry county/speed trap. I have no license, the bottle rolled out and the cop's not buying my story. To make things even more fun, the cop didn't see Don in the back so when he sat up, he almost got his head blown off.

We spent the next 4-5 hours in jail while we waited for his parents to come bail us out. Mine had gone to Kentucky, I was supposed to go but opted out. Sort of wished I was there.

If Don had listened to me none of this would have happened. As he got to know me, he eventually learned to trust my inner voice.



The second example is shorter. I was driving home after picking up a pizza for my sister's B'Day. It was raining really hard and I was driving pretty fast at first. Inner voice kicked in.

"You need to slow down and get in the right lane. Stay back until you can barely see the lead car's taillights,"

not being one to argue because I am aware of what happens if I do, I did what it said. Just before I got home, the 2 cars that passed me were all piled up with a pick upcoming for the other way. It was a pretty bad wreck.

If I hadn't listened, I'd be in there as car number 4 and no Pizza for the sis.

Inner voice screwed up a few weeks ago. It kept yammering about how i should ask this woman for her phone number. (something I never do) It turned out pretty bad.

[Nadine]

Transferred from Off-Topic:

I'm curious. Does anyone know the name of Mrs. Coulter's Daemon?
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I was just reading David Colbert's book (I skip around trying to avoid topics that cross book lines) and he explains the origin of Mrs. Coulter's daemon: Monkeyshines pg 78-81:

Apparently Pullman never gave her daemon a name. As David quoted in his book:

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The monkey will remain nameless. As Pullman told one interviewer, "The golden monkey doesn't have a name because every time I tried to think of one, he snarled and frightened me."
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However, David also points out that a BBC radio adaptation did give her daemon the name of Ozymandias from the Shelley poem of the same name:

http://www.rc.umd.edu/rchs/reader/ozymandias.html

[Shadow_Poet2]

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Nadine wrote:
Transferred from Off-Topic:

I'm curious. Does anyone know the name of Mrs. Coulter's Daemon?
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I was just reading David Colbert's book (I skip around trying to avoid topics that cross book lines) and he explains the origin of Mrs. Coulter's daemon: Monkeyshines pg 78-81:

Apparently Pullman never gave her daemon a name. As David quoted in his book:

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The monkey will remain nameless. As Pullman told one interviewer, "The golden monkey doesn't have a name because every time I tried to think of one, he snarled and frightened me."
---------------

That's funny!

I think it is important, though, that the monkey doesn't have a name. When we name things, they become more "human" to us. The other daemons in the books have names and personalities that make them more tame, or sophisticated. It is obvious that daemons are capable of great contemplation and have intelects to match their human counterparts. The fact that they have names emphasized this for me.

The fact that the monkey doesn't have a name makes it appear more wild and unpredictable. Like real monkies here...you never know what is going to happen. Apes are strong, wild, courageous animals that are not to be taken lightly. By giving the golden monkey a name, I think the reader would have been influenced to consider this daemon as a free thinking logical creature versus an unpredictable wild animal. THat is part of what is so scary about the monkey, after all, you don't know when it is going to jump across the room and throddle you! You never know what it is thinking, or what it will do next.

I think this adds to Mrs. Coulter's overall "scary" air.

I wonder...do you think the unpredictability of a person's daemon could reflect an inner psychosis of the human? Does the golden monkey's behavior reflect a mental imbalance in Mrs. Coulter?

[Nadine]

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Shadow_Poet2 wrote:

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Nadine wrote:
Transferred from Off-Topic:

I'm curious. Does anyone know the name of Mrs. Coulter's Daemon?
-----------------------------------------

I was just reading David Colbert's book (I skip around trying to avoid topics that cross book lines) and he explains the origin of Mrs. Coulter's daemon: Monkeyshines pg 78-81:

Apparently Pullman never gave her daemon a name. As David quoted in his book:

----------------
The monkey will remain nameless. As Pullman told one interviewer, "The golden monkey doesn't have a name because every time I tried to think of one, he snarled and frightened me."
---------------

That's funny!

I think it is important, though, that the monkey doesn't have a name. When we name things, they become more "human" to us. The other daemons in the books have names and personalities that make them more tame, or sophisticated. It is obvious that daemons are capable of great contemplation and have intelects to match their human counterparts. The fact that they have names emphasized this for me.

The fact that the monkey doesn't have a name makes it appear more wild and unpredictable. Like real monkies here...you never know what is going to happen. Apes are strong, wild, courageous animals that are not to be taken lightly. By giving the golden monkey a name, I think the reader would have been influenced to consider this daemon as a free thinking logical creature versus an unpredictable wild animal. THat is part of what is so scary about the monkey, after all, you don't know when it is going to jump across the room and throddle you! You never know what it is thinking, or what it will do next.

I think this adds to Mrs. Coulter's overall "scary" air.

I wonder...do you think the unpredictability of a person's daemon could reflect an inner psychosis of the human? Does the golden monkey's behavior reflect a mental imbalance in Mrs. Coulter?

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That is a good thought. The naming of something does make it more familiar and "controllable." Mrs. Coulter's daemon is evil and malicious. He is all her basic animal instincts--and I think you have a good point there as well. Mrs. Coulter can hid her own personal feelings very well when she needs to (though they occasionally slip through), but her monkey is revealing and it appears that she can't control him either. We have only had a few encounters with Mrs. Coulter and her daemon so far. It will be interesting to note her daemon's behavior as we go along especially when it run counters to what she herself is trying to put across.

This brings up another interesting point. Daemon's are set when a person becomes an adult. Does that mean that people are set as well and do not change? Will Mrs. Coulter remain on the evil side? Is there any possibility for her to be redeemed as a "good" individual as long as her daemon is inherently evil?

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[DavidC]

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Vampyre wrote:
...I do like the idea though of the daemons. All my life for as long as I can remember, I have had an inner voice that seems to pipe up when i am about to make a mistake. If I ignore it, things usually go very bad for me.

It's not ESP or anything like that or I don't think it is. It will just go on and say something like if you do A then B will happen and C will be the result. It will then show me a better way to deal with a situation to get me my desired result. What it probably is, is just good old plain common sense but a very verbal one. Or it's my inner deamon...who knows.

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You're in good company. That's pretty much how Plato described it.

[Eldarion]

Ultimately I think what Pullman is doing here is trying to break the mainline Christian idea that the soul is separate from the body. Most Christians believe that when we die our souls go to heaven and our bodies rot. What makes the Daemons so amazing is that they highlight the deep, inseparable connection that exists between a person and their soul. The body and the soul are forever intwined--note what happens when the children are separated from their daemons.

I have a hard time picking a favorite, but I'd probably have to say Lee Scorsbee and his rabbit, what a team.