Daemons

"[Y]ou must help your humans, not hinder them. You must help them and guide them and encourage them toward wisdom. That's what daemons are for" (895). True words spoken by Serrafina Pekkala to Pan and Kirjava. If you had just read The Golden Compass, you would have an incomplete concept of daemons. They would seem to be external, inseparable friends who usually agree with you, and always help you in a benign and beneficial way. Your daemon is the one "person" in the world who will always be on your side. While most of this is true, they are not always external. As Will, Mary, and Dr. Grumman discovered, daemons always exist, and every person has one, even if it is internal, and you can't physically see it. Daemons are part of your personality, part that you don't always want to face or think about. This is why when Father MacPhail was going to sacrifice himself for the bomb to kill Lyra, he was very calm and excited in a martyr sort of way, while his daemon was extremely agitated. This merely represents conflicting feelings that are always present in an individual. When Lyra is trying to explain about daemons to Will, she says that "As you grow up you start thinking, well, they might be this or that...And usually they end up something that fits. I mean something like your real nature. Like if your daemon's a dog, that means you like doing what you're told.... So it helps to know what you're like and to find what you'd be good at" (884). Daemons are an external manifestation of our other thoughts and character traits.

Like every other motif in His Dark Materials, daemons are affected when Lyra and Will make the transition from innocence to experience, from ignorance to love. When they touched each other's daemons, they settled permanently in the form they were in the moment they felt the other's touch. "And [Lyra] knew too, that neither daemon would change now, having felt a lover's hands on them. These were their shapes for life: they would want no other" (915). So Pan settled as a pine marten, and Kirjava settled as a large beautiful cat, with intricate subtleties in her fur. And like every other daemon, they symbolize their person. Lyra and the pine marten are large and powerful, "lithe and sinuous and full of grace" (914). Will and the large cat have a million subtleties and nuances, and are beautiful and fierce. It makes sense, considering the importance of the Christian message of love, that their daemons settle, which I think is one of the ultimatums of the story, when their love is consumated (although not technically :-) ), reflecting the now permanent state of their daemons. Having their daemons settle is the last step from innocence to experience, since a settled daemon embodies experience, and in Will and Lyra's case, love also.