Thursday, November 20, 2008

Daemons/humans..whats the difference?


In Pullman's books the idea of daemons are incredibly interesting. Here is this animal that is supposed to reflect you and be part of your being, just an extension of you. It was not until I was reading the Lantern Slides for the Subtle Knife when I began to think more about daemons. One slide the Pullman describes on page 538 is...

A daemon is not an animal, of course; a daemon is a person. A real cat, face to face with a daemon in cat form, would not be puzzled for a moment. She would see a human being.

Before the small statement I more or less took daemons at face value but after knowing that another animal would only see a human got me to thinking. Would the cat see two people standing next to each other? Would the cat have seen only one human but "whole" like from our world and Will's? If the cat did see a person does that person look exactly like the other person, are we talking twins or would the animal see different looking people but similar? Like looking at sisters or some sort of relations?

That small sentence has really thrown me into a tizzy, I want to know how Pullman would describe this person. I think that in the case of the cat with Pan that the cat would of seen two different people, because if there is two people one has to acknowledge that there is a "soul" of sorts to a person, hence the reason that daemons would exist. But what would this person look like? I like to think that through an animals eyes that they see two different looking people that look oddly similar. You can tell that they are one but for some reason separate. I don't know if that makes sense but it does in my mind, hopefully its translating into blog form alright.

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