Greetings Shadow Chasers and Dust Makers. Hope everyone is having a good holiday season.
The above portrait is Leonardo da Vinci's famous and beguiling "Lady With an Ermine," circa 1485. I came across this information regarding daemons some time ago, but I was just reading through the truly definitive Laurie Frost's The Definitive Guide to His Dark Materials, and saw it again. And it was too good not to pass on this Christmas night, because apparently this very portrait helped solidify Philip Pullman's mythology regarding the human/daemon bond in his novels.
Most of us have heard the story of how Pullman suddenly and unexpectedly stumbled across the idea of daemons. He had written the opening chapter to Northern Lights some dozen times but couldn't quite get it to work. Something was missing, not least of which was Lyra had no one to talk to while debating whether or not to sneak into the Retiring Room at Jordan College and hear what Lord Asriel and the other Scholars were going to discuss.
While out for a walk in his garden, presumably close to the famous shed he wrote in back in those days, Pullman came across the fascinating idea of daemons. He nearly tripped over his own feet in that dizzying burst of inspiration, and can to this day remember the stone he found himself standing on at the time. Not only did the electrifying notion of an externalized part of a person's deepest self embodied in the form of an animal solve some plot problems, he soon after realized it was "the richest idea [he] ever had."
And then followed that iconic opening line "Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening hall .... "
The significance and symbolism and implications of daemons could probably be teased out forever, but I was intrigued to learn of how deeply the above da Vinci portrait captured him when he saw it.
"There's a real connection between the girl and the animal. That is her daemon," Pullman told Catherine Andronik in a 2007 interview, noting that the portrait could be of Lyra herself, "if you made a few small alterations." According to the profile, Pullman even started collecting images like this that give visual artistic form and expression to that very best and most famous of his ideas.
This post led me to wonder if someone more artistically inclined out there has the skill and motivation to "alter" said portrait and craft it to directly resemble our heroine and her pine marten daemon.
And this being the internet, and google images being google images, here we are, courtesy of "Maya Draws" on Tumblr ...
Pretty inspired, eh?
And as Always
Stay Dusty My Friends
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