More on Daemons

I'm so glad Constance reminded me of the Meet Your Daemon feature on the Golden Compass website. We did it as a family, with interesting results on all counts.

First up was my daughter, Maya (8 years in this world). She answered the twenty questions with honest precision. The thing you have to know is that Maya already knew what her daemon was. She is a fan of all things feline. She documents this quite often on her blog, Maya Calypso Durham Talks. But she particularly loves snow leopards. She studies them, draws them, writes poems about them, plays with figures of them, and has even visited with one at the Cat Haven. So, she said ahead of time that her daemon was clearly a snow leopard. But... then she had to answer all these random questions. I was worried. What creature would show up? Would Maya accept it?

Well, duh, yeah she would. Because what strolled on to the page was Brynn, the Snow Leopard! I was flabbergast. Mystified. Just generally surprised. But I'm over it. I'll not doubt Maya's feline knowledge again!

Next up was my son, Sage (walking the earth in all his wisdom for six years). His answers to the twenty questions were somewhat dubious, I thought. But he seemed quite happy to end up with a gibbon monkey.

My wife was not nearly so sanguine with her daemon. Much to her horror, her daemon appears to be a big, hairy spider! She was so aghast at this - please know that she kills black widows daily (or so it seems) and dreams of their revenge on her nightly - that she started over again and did the best she could to give the right ("You've got your math, I've got the math") answers. What was the result?

Big hairy spider. I do have to say that neither I nor the kids found this pairing that strange, but... Gudrun walked away, unimpressed by process.

And then myself. My daemon, it turns out, is Calista, a fox. For a second I wasn't sure what I thought of this, but then I remembered the way I'd described feeling about my unseen daemon in the previous post. Remember that? She doesn't like being inside, wants to walk, preferably in woods and meadows and windswept ridges... and when I do this with her she starts to chatter away with all sorts of cunning plot ideas... Um, well, that sounds quite a bit like a fox to me. I may not be quite as resolutely perceptive as Maya, but at some level maybe I did know my daemon after all...