The Daemon In Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass

The mind is arguably the most significant feature of humans. It allows us to feel, relate, think, process, and countless other sensations. Put simply, the mind is what allows us to survive. In that sense, it can be understood that a human’s mind – our inside – is what counts, or what truly makes us who we are. But what if our insides were on our outsides? What if something personified our mind outside of our bodies? Say, for example, a friend thought for us for the most part. In this case, we would technically still be a whole human, as our thoughts are still with us, just in a different form. Surely, the only thing that matters are the thoughts are still there in some form. In Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, the humans have inseparable …show more content…
In this story, the separation of daemon and human spells loss of life, whether figuratively or literally. One example of this is with Sister Clara. Sister Clara is the nurse at Bolvangar, where the children remain held captive, examined for dust, and “severed”, or separated from the humans. As Sister Clara discusses with Lyra, Sister Clara appears to the narrator to lack imagination and curiosity (238). Not only this, but her daemon, too, was as “brisk and blank as she was” (238). It is later found out that Sister Clara and her daemon have been severed. In other words, Sister Clara has lost her mental connection to her daemon. She still functions, and is able to talk to Lyra (who is under the alias of Lizzie Brooks at this point), but, as previously stated, she and her daemon lack imagination and curiosity, almost like a lost soul in confinement. It is evident that the separation of human and daemon means the separation of two parts of the mind, and without the connection, as shown by Sister Clara, humans are left lost and …show more content…
However, in the alternate universe presented in Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, the exact opposite reigns true. In this world, humans are shown to be in constant presence of beings known as daemons. Countless readers interpret these daemons as pets of sorts. However, these are not pets. Rather, these are a branch of the humans themselves. The daemons represent parts of the human that the human cannot. As such, the daemon is a piece of the individual’s mind – a vital part of the human itself. The daemon helps maintain the human nature of its respective individual, and allows the human to actually live fully. For the characters in The Golden Compass, the daemon is not their pet, it is