Anyway, with the help of the singular Mrs. Why? Apparently they believe it to be physical evidence of the original sin (harking back to biblical days and Adam and Eve’s gallivanting in the Garden of Eden… with their daemons). However, the Magisterium, which is basically the headquarters of the Holy Church, is also interested in Dust. Asriel is interested in travelling to these other worlds and visits Jordan College to seek its Master’s approval, and funds, to do so. From Asriel she learns that there are Dust particles in the Aurora Borealis, which provides a window into other worlds that people can sometimes glimpse. This begins to come about when she learns from her Uncle Asriel, an explorer, about the presence of Dust - which I think of as magic particles. The story here is focused on Lyra beginning to fulfill her destiny, which is prophesied to be great and lead her away from her present world. Children’s daemons are quite versatile and can take on any animal form, it seems, but daemons stop changing as the human grows older and more settled into who they are.

A daemon completes a human, so to see a human without one is akin to seeing someone without a head, or other essential body part. It’s natural, in this world, that every human has a daemon, a being in the form of an animal that’s an outward expression of the human’s inner self. In this book, the story is set in a world that mirrors our own and is centered on Lyra Belacqua, a brave golden-haired girl who’s supposedly an orphan, which is why she’s raised among the Scholars of Jordan College (which I thought of as the equivalent of Oxford) - the only girl there as women are not often Scholars. The Golden Compass is the first novel in a young-adult fantasy series. Reading it in 2023 was the best time to pick it up. I’d attempted it shortly after graduating college, but didn’t feel drawn to the story and had difficulty with the concept of daemons, so I gave up on the book but vowed to return to it when I felt more receptive to the story. The Golden Compass is a book I’ve wanted to read for over 10 years now, but I kept putting it off.

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman