Dæmonism Sideblog

"Iorek Byrnison" Watercolor on paper, 11x14", 2026.

I think that drive to discover oneself & become independent is what drives a dæmon to settle. It’s not so much that you know who you are, it’s that you start to consider who you want to be.

Children are also a lot more open & malleable in the way they see the world. Once they get to be a teenager, they have more or less formed an idea of how the world works. It slowly becomes harder to change that idea.

Follow up:

Which is completely absurd. Children would be touching each other’s daemons all the time, as play or bullying or experimentation. Parents would be grabbing or even hurting daemons on a regular basis and criticizing this practice would be seen as radical and crazy the same way that criticizing spanking is. And of course there’s other kinds of assault. I actually do not believe there would be a meaningful taboo about it.

@venus-ceros ok no that actually makes a lot of sense both in the narrative and on an analysis level. i support ur reading of this

- a human touching their own daemon feels good to both.

- humans touching humans can mean anything.

- daemons touching daemons can mean anything

- humans touching another person’s daemon feels DISORIENTING for both the human and the daemon. It’s taboo because it makes the human feel something like - revolting, scary, nauseating, disturbing.

- a parent (human) might grab a child’s daemon, but it makes a lot more sense for THEIR daemon to manage the child’s daemon as much as possible. Same with kids playing, grabbing each other - their daemons should touch each other.

- lovers touching across this boundary without discomfort is possibly an indicator that the theme is actually: if you are sympathetic enough to someone else’s (internal) soul, then you can manage the discomfort of touching/Knowing their (external) soul.

- rather than getting hung up on the mechanics of the animal, the storytelling mechanic of the daemon is to reveal character, so “touching the daemon causes physically disorienting dissociation of your own self as you temporarily mesh with someone else’s Soul. People generally don’t like it (it feels like bloodloss, like madness, like losing your sense of self, like falling into a well; or whatever!) but lovers might find it intimate” could be practical/believable and not clog the gears. “Taboo” is a clumsy, lazy articulation of something Pullman might have wanted to use later and didn’t want to bother with. Behind “taboo” he gestured at something more interesting, but again - clumsiness, laziness, he was paid for a book, not for a full theology.

My understanding was that when a person touches someone else’s dæmon, the way the recipient feels about it is heavily dependent on the intention of the person touching their demon. When the person grabs Pan to throw him in the cutting machine, Lyra describes it as very painful and disorienting. There’s a deep feeling of wrongness. When Will touches Pan, consensually, it’s described as pleasant, and exciting, if a little disorienting.

It’s no secret that a person touching another person’s dæmon is used as a metaphor for sex. Specifically the way that having sex is very intimate, and taboo in the church. You’re allowing someone access to a very sensitive and vulnerable part of yourself.

Dæmon to dæmon interaction is used as a metaphor for communication, rather than sex. We can do a bit of hand waving and explain this with in-world lore. Dæmons are beings made of dust, rather than normal, physical matter. Dust is the medium of ideas. It’s less disorienting for ideas to interact directly.

As for the taboo itself: people definitely break it all the time. Kids irl will sometimes take off their underwear to look at each other’s genitalia, out of innocent curiosity. I’ve made a post about parents grabbing their children’s dæmons before. And there are DEFINITELY situations where a human is forced to restrain someone else’s dæmon. Perhaps someone is acting crazy/violent and the person(s) trying to restrain them have dæmons that are significantly smaller than the dangerous person’s. There’s no way a rat or a bird could hope to restrain a dog. (Not to mention police violence. That’s another can of worms. Probably an extremely controversial subject in Lyra’s world.)

In the HDM version of The Thing, the titular Thing tries to imitate the both the humans and the accompanying daemons at the camp, but there's something Off about the daemons in the same way there's something Off about Thing!Jed the dog. They don't act right, they don't feel right when next to a real daemon.

In HDM! Dracula, Dracula, being a souless vampire, has to use his wolf control ability to manipulate a wild wolf to act as his 'daemon' when Jonathan is at the castle. Of course, since Dracula has not interacted with a daemon in hundreds of years, the wolf does not act right. Jonathan can tell there's something off about this 'daemon' but brushes it off at first, his daemon (a dog, to contrast Dracula's fake wolf 'daemon') can tell there's something off about the wolf...it's all very off.

hmmm this his dark materials fanmade animated trailer is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen this year… wow

I've seen a few different posts about Daemons in theatre and movies (I've got thoughts on this too, maybe one day I'll write them down here) but surprisingly I haven't come across any about music. I thought I'd write down some thoughts I had.

So firstly I don't think there would be much change with instruments. Most forms wouldn't be able to play any existing instruments well or even at all. Fingers are pretty important for that. That said, different instruments could have been invented for Daemons to play. I have no idea what those would look like or how they would work, but it would be fun to see different interpretations of what those could be.

I also don't think that genres would change too much. Because it's a way we categorize music I can't see it being affected. There might me new genres, but I think country would still be country, rap would be wrap, and etc. I DO think that lyrics would be different, or would at least be expanded upon. There would be a ton of different metaphors and says in a world with Daes that would undoubtedly get worked into songs. Romanticizing certain forms would common place in songs and might even popularize those forms.

On another note, I bet it would be super fun to sing with your Daemon. I already sing in the shower and if I'm home alone, but I very rarely sing in front of other people. I imagine belting out a song with your daemon would be a very special and personal experience.

Building on that, I imagine certain singers and song writers would preform with their Daemon. I don't think everyone would. Factors like genre, style, comfort, song, and of course personal preference would go into how often someone would do this, or even if they would at all. But just imagine. A singer sits dow with a guitar, their Daemon siting on their shoulder and preforming a song about a past love. Once they reach the chorus their Daemon joins them in a duet. Another part of them, their soul, joining in and expanding the song. Goose bumps.

- singing duets YES Oh my god yes

- sports God this one strikes me as a thing that’d be totally different in Lyra’s world. If the distance limit before it hurt was like, a hundred meters or even 50 it’d be different, but the canonical limit is so short that most of the team sports we know just… wouldn’t be possible. Contact sports like rugby, hockey, and American football would inherently have such a high risk of violating the no-touching taboo, and something like baseball would just be too dangerous except for people with larger daemons like wolves, because an MLB pitch is dangerous enough for humans, but if you’ve ever seen video of birds being in the wrong place at the wrong time, it would just be so unsafe because for most daemon species getting hit by a pitch would be instant death. I think that world would be dominated by various individual sports like racing, javelin/discus throwing, and individual combat sports such as wrestling and boxing where the playing area is small enough that the daemons can sit on the sidelines.

- emergency services (how do they get the daemon out of a bad situation if they’re passed out? Are all units required to have at least one person with a daemon capable of manipulating and carrying things?)

I’m curious what qualifies as “touching” for the purposes of the taboo. Like, carrying an unconscious daemon in a cage or on a stretcher ought to be fine because you’re not touching them. Does nudging / pushing onto a stretcher with tweezers and popsicle sticks count? Do really thick gloves?

- faking ones’ death (how can you act dead on screen/in real life when your daemon is right there?)

I guess IRL it’d kind of be limited to making sure your body is never found, or at the very least your actual body. On-screen? I think movies would by necessity evolve to have the same level of willing suspension of disbelief as stage plays. Y’know how the idea of ninjas dressing in black may have originally come from Japanese plays where stage hands wear all-black to signify that they don’t exist in-universe and their presence should be ignored? I’ll bet the simplest method is literally just “drop a black or background/colored cloth over the actor’s daemon when a character dies,” followed by: “Set off a colored smoke effect to represent them dissolving and drop them through a trapdoor in the stage/set.” As the medium evolved effects could improve, including innovations such as: “Make sure only the dying character is in the shot, and cut away the couple seconds it takes for their daemon to hide out of the camera range / behind part of the set.” Some productions might use other tricks such as having the daemons be played by puppets, and later CGI, which would also help with situations where they wanted to cast someone whose daemon is a different species than the character ought to have.

Animation might also be a big deal in that world. Imagine the first serious animated feature film appearing in theaters - like, a Disney level production - and having a heart-wrenching death scene that shows a daemon dissolving with a level of realism that’s impossible in live action with the technology of the time.

- wait??? Would personified animals like Micky Mouse have daemons??? They have souls like people right? Soooo?????? Um??

Ooooh, this is a cool one… Anthromomorphized animals in folklore might or might not have daemons - Panserbjorne don’t, after all - and might just be way less common because the symbolism of Beast Fables might just be replaced with human characters with daemons of that species.

— I think LARGE Dæmons and separation would probably go hand in hand, primarily for practicality.

For example, I wrote a character who’s dæ settles as a 40-foot long dragon (alt world where dragons are real) and they’re forced to Separate because he wouldn’t fit in most buildings. I imagine that there would be places built to accommodate larger dæmons (specialized housing, and certain public spaces) but if your dæ settles as something larger than, say, an average horse, you’re generally expected to separate.

It’s also common for people with large dæmons to prefer working from home whenever possible, so they don’t have to be apart all day. Imagine using your large dæmon for transport, or even physical labor. My aforementioned character with the dragon dæmon actually rides on his back! He finds it very entertaining to return the favor of carrying them!

It would be really cool if there were certain cities/settlements built with LARGE dæmons in mind though.

— Science on dæmons

This would undoubtedly be treated like human experimentation is irl: heavily regulated. It would be very interesting to imagine how behavioral sciences might be changed by the presence of dæmons though! Specialized experiments designed to measure how much a person’s dæmon affects their behavior/reactions/decision making etc.

What about medications designed for one’s dæmon? The possibilities are immense!

— singing and the arts in a world with dæmons would be very interesting indeed. Imagine “Monologues” including a call-and-response between the actor and their dæmon.

Songs where the dæmon sings one part and the human sings the other. Happier songs are typically sung in harmony, where songs about sadness and turmoil may be sung with parts sung in counterpoint. Example (TW: discussion of suicide) in this song there’s technically only one singer, but some parts are sung in minor key, while others are sung in major, creating the effect of two voices. I imagine the person singing the negative parts, while the dæmon sings the more positive ones.

Alternatively, a funny, lighthearted song where the person is falling in love while their dæmon is trying to talk them out of it, singing over them.

— as far as emergency services, I don’t think the taboo really applies to unconscious people’s dæmons. The responder is going to be wearing gloves the whole time anyways. It’s obviously preferable for the responder’s dæmon to be the one handling the victim’s dæ, but when that’s not possible, then I don’t think it really violates the taboo. (The Taboo is a thinly veiled metaphor for sex. You wouldn’t say it’s Assault to deal with an injury to someone’s genitals, right?)

Hester’s real winter coat didn’t start coming in until after she’d been in the north for a couple years. She sort of wishes it didn’t because Lee does the “make a second rabbit out of all the fur that comes off when brushing” joke Every. God. Damn. Year. and still thinks he’s absolutely hilarious.