bloodyrosemccoy | "I'm Telling You, It's A Real Animal!"

Today, I’m seeing a shiny meme on Find Your Dæmon. For those of you who don’t know, a dæmon, in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, is an animal manifestation of one’s soul. When you are a child your dæmon is ever-changing; when you hit a certain point in puberty, it settles down into one animal form that somehow reflects your personality.

I considered doing this meme, but I realized that it would be silly, because I know what my dæmon is—I knew almost soon as I found out what one was, years ago. It is, unfortunately, what

ursulav would dub a Charismatic Mammal, but it has slightly less charisma than what you might expect, and it goddamn fits.

My dæmon is a puma.*

I’ve always been a cat person—not just a person who prefers cats, but a person for whom the descriptive term “cat” applies—so I knew that I was some sort of cat. At first I thought it might be an outright lion—that was the only confusion I had, between lion and mountain lion. Come on—lions get along better in small communities of mostly females, and the females are grouchy. They sleep 18 hours a day. And they’re carnivores. Sounds an awful lot like me. But while I’m built stocky and less than sleek and graceful like, say, a margay, I realized I certainly couldn’t be counted as a Big Cat. And therefore, I realized that the puma—a big cat who isn’t actually a Big Cat, who cannot roar but who can yowl** and purr—shared something with me. And while I try to be multicultural, in many respects I’m aggressively American, especially as far as my aesthetic sense of nature is concerned—I love the puma’s habitats, all of them. And I am a predator, but not the dominant predator anywhere I go.

And therefore, my dæmon, my animal avatar, is a puma.

I still sleep like a lion, however. Or perhaps a koala. Or a sloth. I am the sort of puma that would grow moss ...

So tell me, my friends ... ignore the meme. What, according to you, is your dæmon? And why?

Discussion Question: Do dæmons depend on the region the person lives in? Do you have to know what the animal is to have it as a dæmon? Does someone who knows about more animals get a wider variety of dæmon possibilities? And what about mythical animals? Can you have those?

*Or a cougar, or a mountain lion, or a catamount, etc., etc. …

**There’s a reason one of their names is the “mountain screamer”: although they don’t make them often, the noises they make are positively blood-curdling. As I’ve mentioned before when talking about sound effects, pumas don’t sound like big roary cats or scary bears or predators, or even like Chewbacca. They sound like giant mutant housecats from SPACE.