Animalistic

By Anonymous -
In thinking about the escapable absolute definition of what the sixth sense is, I thought back to fantasy books I had read as a child. The Golden Compass Trilogy provides a good perception of humans relationship with the natural world. Within the confines of this alternate world, the human soul takes the form or lifelong animal companions, referred to daemons. There is an indestructible tether between an individual and their daemon, they cannot be separated by more than a few feet at a time. It is believed that the daemon shape shifts at will into any animal until it's human enters puberty, at this stage the daemon achieves permanence of one animal. This seems to symbolize how, as we get older, our personality solidifies and settles. We gain a more distinct identity than we had as a kid.
The word "daemon" has old religious context as well. In Christian writings the word is used in reference to a demon, or evil spirit. The Greeks used the term in mythology to explain a supernatural creature in the purgatory between god and man. 
Within the Golden Compass books, daemons are your soul manifested as a outside of the body creature, essentially worn on your sleeve. Those in this world can communicate and discuss with their talking animal counterparts. It is described by the author as the ability to talk to yourself, "like having a conversation with your conscience or your memory."
The final shape a daemon settles on is symbolic of its person's personality. We discover in this series that certain groups of people have similar daemons. For example, all witches' daemons are birds, which correlates to their human - witches fly and love the freedom of the skies. Servants' daemons take the permanent form of dogs - again correlates to subservience, undying loyalty, fetching and retrieving things for their bosses.

So that prompts me to ask, what is your daemon?
What animal will best embody who you are as a person and the individual attributes of your personality?

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