His Daemonic Masculinity

[Tim Regan]

Hi All,

I'm slightly late joining this thread ;-)

<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/11642>

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter on Sat Aug 10, 2002 Queer as John wrote:

> Quick question -- does anyone in the books have a 
> daemon of the same gender as themselves? If not, 
> perhaps there's an interesting gender-daemonic 
> musing to be made there. Is the daemon the 
> suppressed inner opposite gender in us all?

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter on Sat Aug 10, 2002 Amy Z replied: 
> Bernie, the pastry cook of Jordan College, is described as "a 
kindly, 
> solitary man, one of those rare people whose daemon was the same 
sex 
> as himself" (NL/GC 7).  As a friend said when I was explaining 
> daemons to him and said that there were very few people with a 
daemon 
> of the same sex, "about one in ten."  It made me laugh, but it 
seems 
> far rarer than that because I don't think we ever see anyone else 
> whose daemon is identified that way.
 
> I don't think Pullman is suggesting that it corresponds to sexual 
> orientation, but yes, I think the daemon is usually the other 
gender 
> because it completes us, and I think Pullman is saying a lot about 
> the meaning of gender by making most daemons the complement of 
their 
> people.  I don't know exactly what Jung meant by anima and animus, 
> but that's one of the ways I think about daemons. So is Bernie out 
of 
> balance, or are masculine and feminine sufficiently integrated in 
him 
> that his daemon doesn't need to be female?


I just found an interview in which Pullman talks about this.

<http://www.avnet.co.uk/home/amaranth/Critic/ivpullman.htm>

Here are the two relevant questions and answers.

TB: There was one point about demons which – you say, I think, right 
at the beginning of Northern Lights, that somebody's got a demon of 
the same sex as themselves, and this is very rare. Now, does that 
indicate homosexuality? Or what? 

PP: I don't know. There are plenty of things about my worlds I don't 
know, and that's one of them. It might do! But it might not! 
Occasionally, no doubt, people do have a demon of the same sex; that 
might indicate homosexuality, or it might indicate some other sort 
of gift or quality, such as second sight. I do not know. But I don't 
have to know everything about what I write. 

TB: But you can make it up as you go along 
! 

PP: To a certain extent, but then you discover the rules of the 
world that you're building as you build them, I'm sure you're aware 
of that. I can't suddenly invent a rule that contradicts all sorts 
of things that have gone before. Nor do I sit down consciously and 
work out the rules, draw up the constitution of the world before, as 
if one were drawing up a constitution of a bowls club or something. 
It doesn't happen like that. To some extent, it's rather like what 
happens in mathematics, where you discover things – for example, the 
realm of imaginary numbers. Are they invented or are they 
discovered? As soon as you discover – as soon as you come across 
this notion of imaginary numbers, you realise that it is a realm 
which has its own laws, which has its own things that you can't 
contradict and which in turn allow you to do other things with the 
rest of the natural numbers and so on. It's partly like that when 
you're exploring a world in a book that you're writing. You're sort 
of discovering it as well as inventing it. So there are other 
things, no doubt, I haven't yet imagined or thought of about demons. 
I do find it's a very rich idea, and right at the end of AS, after 
1200 or more pages, I was still discovering new things I could do 
with this human-demon link. In a way, it's the best idea I've ever 
had. I don't know all of it; so, to answer your question, `maybe, 
yes, but who knows?'

Cheers,

Dumbledad.