His Dark Materials takes place in multiple different universes, but it focuses the most on Lyra Silvertongue’s home universe, which runs parallel to our own but has several major differences. This world has witches, armored bears and an all-powerful totalitarian church called the Magisterium, but the most notable difference between Lyra’s world and ours is that all humans are accompanied by daemons, animal embodiments of their souls. The connection between a person and their daemon is so profoundly personal that touching someone else’s daemon is deeply taboo.
The taboo is pretty self-explanatory in light of the fact daemons are people’s souls. The idea of letting anyone except perhaps those you love and trust the most make physical contact with your soul is a deeply uncomfortable thought. At best, it’s a violation of something personal. At worst, it’s downright lethal.
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Hurting a person’s daemon hurts the person themself. Destroying their daemon will kill them. The Magisterium’s experiments, which involve severing children from their daemons, don’t always result in death, but they cause such a pained zombie-like state that death is preferable. In Northern Lights/The Golden Compass, the first novel in the His Dark Materials series, Philip Pullman writes:
…it was the grossest breach of etiquette imaginable to touch another person’s dæmon. Dæmons might touch each other, of course, or fight; but the prohibition against human-dæmon contact went so deep that even in battle no warrior would touch an enemy’s dæmon. It was utterly forbidden. Lyra couldn’t remember having to be told that: she just knew it, as instinctively as she felt that nausea was bad and comfort good.
Beyond the violation of privacy and potential for murderous violence, there’s a sexual element to both the taboo and to the times it becomes acceptable to break it. The Magisterium’s handling of children’s daemons is an obvious parallel for sexual abuse; the book The Subtle Knife drops all subtlety and directly compares the practice of severing daemons in Lyra’s world with practices of genital mutilation in our own.
When both parties are consenting, however, touching someone else’s daemon can be not only acceptable but pleasurable. The distinction is illustrated clearly in “Tower of the Angels,” the fourth episode of the TV series’ second season. At this point in the story, Lyra is in another universe where people don’t have daemons and thus don’t understand the taboo against touching them. A stranger kicks her daemon Pantalaimon in a fight and her pain is immense.
Later in the same episode, however, Pan reaches out to touch Will and Will responds gently and caringly. Will asks to make sure he didn’t do anything wrong, and both Pan and Lyra affirm that they wanted to. Consensual daemon-touching becomes a major part of Lyra and Will’s blossoming romance in the trilogy’s final book, The Amber Spyglass, and Pullman’s descriptions emphasize the “joy” Lyra feels from the sensation.
So touching someone else’s daemon isn’t always wrong, but it has to be done in very specific circumstances where absolute trust is involved. After all, you wouldn’t let just anyone make contact with your soul, would you?
His Dark Materials Season 2 stars Dafne Keen as Lyra, Amir Wilson as Will Parry, Ruth Wilson as Marisa Coulter, Lin-Manuel Miranda as Lee Scoresby and Andrew Scott as John Parry. The complete season is available on HBO Max.
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