Philip Pullman’s trilogy of novels, His Dark Materials, succeeds in telling a story which is both engaging to children, its original intended readership, and to adults, through its imaginative qualities and its range of reference. In these novels, Pullman took on nothing less than a re-working of the biblical story of Genesis, taking many grown-up readers back to Paradise Lost as one of the author’s main inspirations.

The stories are interesting in many ways, but our particular approach, coming from psychoanalysis, is in their exploration of the development of its two principal characters, Lyra and Will, who are each aged 11 when Northern Lights begins. The power of the novels owes much to Pullman’s understanding of the pains and turbulence of emotional growth in young people. It will be very interesting to see if this element is captured in the film version of the first volume which is out next month.
In this article, we are going to focus on one aspect of this developmental story, by discussing Pullman’s representation of human duality in the figure of a daemon which accompanies him through life. Lyra and Pantalaimon, her daemon, introduce us to a world in which each character appears in two manifestations and has two voices, a mind in continuous dialogue with itself. Passion and liveliness characterise the ongoing conversation and physical intimacy between self and daemon. What ideas about human beings is Pullman exploring through this device?

To set the scene, we must remind ourselves of the basic facts about daemons. All the human characters in Northern Lights possess one. A daemon has the form of an animal or bird, usually opposite in gender to its human counterpart. Person and daemon must stay close, and great anxiety and pain is occasioned when they are separated. Daemons have a quicksilver quality and can change their form at will, disguising themselves and evading any fixed shape, and they take great pleasure in this aspect of their being.

But this malleable character only persists while their human partner remains a child. At puberty, a person’s daemon assumes a final form - the white leopard of Lyra’s father Lord Asriel or the golden monkey of her mother Mrs Coulter for example. The daemon of an adult lacks the potential for playfulness and fluidity, and no longer represents the as-yet undefined exploratory potential of the child. The powerful flow of energy linking child and daemon is related to the mysterious matter of “Dust” which is of such interest to the scientists and theologians of Lyra’s world. An imagined church hierarchy, hostile to the free expression of human sexuality and feeling, has conceived a plan to free the world of “original sin”, to tame and order sexuality through solving the problem of “Dust”.

To this end, experiments to separate children from their daemons are in progress, thus eliminating a core element of individual consciousness. The horror this notion elicits in the story makes it evident that Pullman is describing something quasi-sacriligious, and indeed the Bolvanger experimental station has powerful echoes of Nazi medical atrocities. A daemon is something like a child’s soul, and without it, as the children subjected to “incision” at Bolvanger reveal, one is less than human. If the link is destroyed, spiritual death ensues.

Here is an understanding of human personality in which there is a necessary dynamic relationship between many parts of the self. The changing form of the child’s daemon allows us to imagine the enormous range of feelings and perspectives which add up to the mind of one individual. Pantalaimon can be Lyra’s protector, her baby, her spy, her conscience, her memory, and is always her friend with an absolute commitment to her above all else.

The changing form of the child's daemon allows us to imagine the enormous range of feelings and perspectives which add up to the mind of one individual

We suggest that the origin of a relationship of such total reliability lies in the human infant’s earliest relationship with mother. A child’s belief in a completely trustworthy source of inner support is achieved in ordinary development through the internalisation of a relationship to a loving and reliable parental figure. In Pullman’s hands, this conception has been turned into the living form of a daemon, a part of the self that can be trusted to be present and loyal to the child at all times.

The evocation of the lost and desperate condition of Tony Makarios, one of the children who has been separated from his daemon, is one of the most poignant images of Northern Lights. He is wandering, searching for his lost daemon, clutching a piece of dried fish as a pathetic source of comfort. His kindly rescuers take this from him, and without this last vestige of attachment to the source of life, he dies.

However, Pullman is also interested in the idea that the parts of the human personality are not just many and various but are also in a necessarily dynamic and conflictual relationship. The fact that person and daemon are of opposite genders is not only a neat representation of human bisexuality - the mix of “masculine” and “feminine” elements which is in each of us, as Freud described - an idea revolutionary 100 years ago, but now something of a commonplace - but also a way of heightening our awareness that a complete person will be one able to live with the contradictions of his or her own nature. Pullman embraces with enthusiasm the recognition of the complex human condition.

Lyra is a great story-spinner, indeed a great liar, as the terrifying harpies of the underworld she visits in The Amber Spyglass don’t let her forget. Much of the time it is Pantalaimon, therefore, who keeps her in touch with the truth she is so keen to embroider, evade, or otherwise put to one side. The truth-seeking potential of the mind is dependent on the self’s relationship to its daemon, because the two voices ensure that all claims and observations are open to question. A splendid scepticism about what is really true is kept in place by the knowledgeable comments of the daemon who knows all the secrets of the heart.

Inner truthfulness is supported by another of Pullman’s good inventions, the alethiometer. Consulting this magical instrument (aletheia = truth in Greek) is a vital resource during Lyra’s adventures. We might see this as representing her need to depend on resources outside herself and thus to become aware of the limits of her omnipotence, just as Will has to rely on the “subtle knife” he is given. By contrast, Pullman is clear that one’s daemon is limited in the precise respect that it can only give access to one’s own qualities. It can contain elements of oneself one is out of touch with and in that way help in re-integrating temporarily lost aspects of the self.

This is Pullman's credo. He speaks of himself as a realist, not a writer of fantasy. His aspiration is to tell the truth about growing up through stories

However, not all human beings are aware of the presence of their daemon. We learn how surprised Will’s father was to meet up with him for the first time - to become capable of recognising her after his journey to the North. “Can you imagine my astonishment at learning that part of my nature was female, and bird-formed and beautiful?” he tells Lee Scoresby, the balloonist. Indeed Will is to meet his own daemon towards the end of the third volume, but that does not happen until after the momentous climax of the visit to the underworld in search of Roger, the child Lyra feels she betrayed.

To cross into the underworld, she has to leave Pantalaimon behind. This is a mutually excruciating separation with the possibility of never finding each other again, and it exposes Lyra to the most terrible discoveries about herself. Without Pantalaimon’s wise counsel, she is carried away by her story-weaving and provokes the cruel wrath of the Harpies. What she comes to understand (without either alethiometer or Pantalaimon to help her at this point) is that the stories she could tell to hearten the thousands of dead she encounters are not going to be any use unless they are true. When the stories are true, they can magically enliven and free the burdened spirits of the dead.

This is Pullman’s credo. He speaks of himself as a realist, not a writer of fantasy. His aspiration is to tell the truth about growing up through his stories. His concept of “the republic of heaven” is that it is constituted by the way we live our lives in the present, because a daemon “can only live its full life in the world in which it is born”. That, of course, is why the children cannot stay together at the end of the story. Their full lives have to be lived in the two different real worlds from which they come, worlds that got mixed up because of the disasters brought about by mistaken human ambition. A person in touch with his daemon is at home with himself, and finding the way home is the conclusion of the children’s adventures.

Margaret Rustin is a Principal Child Psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic, London. Michael Rustin is Professor of Sociology at the University of East London and a Visiting Professor at the Tavistock Clinic. They are joint authors of Narratives of Love and Loss: Studies in Modern Children’s Fiction and Mirror to Nature: Drama, Psychoanalysis and Society, and of essays on the three volumes of Pullman’s trilogy.