S.P. Jayaraj's Blog: Where it all comes from...

When I think about what books inspired me to write, the first one that comes to mind is always The Golden Compass and the rest of the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman
Even though this isn't that book that made me decide 'I'm going to be a writer now!' The universe of this series is so imaginative, and the characters navigating their way through it cast a lifelong spell on me. The vision of this world by Pulman is both complete and infinite. By getting just glimpses of this world, I was able to imagine the lives of people living in places that the series never even mentioned. What daemons do forest rangers have? Do people have elephant daemons, if so how do they get around? What all have the witches seen that would scare even them? What other anthropomorphic societies are there aside from the polar bears, and what do they have that is equivalent to people's daemons and the bear's armor?

Perhaps the most endearing aspect of this series for me is the powerful relationships between people and animals. It might have been my first introduction to the idea of animal spirits, long before I began a self-study of animal totems. It was when I revisited the series much later, after I became aware of how animal species have similar roles in different mythologies, that I understood the seemingly simple genius of the human-daemon relationship in Pulman's world. Through the animal daemons, Pullman effectively characterized one character through the use of two. You learned about who these characters were just by their daemons. There was never a character where the choice of what animal their daemon was didn't seem to fit.
With the connection between animals and people being such a large part of my own make-believe world, mainly through the qui-lahk who are born with the mark of their totem animal, I have nothing but love and appreciation for Pulman's storytelling. His imagination inspired me to push my world and stories beyond their perceived limits, to create something that is also complete and infinite.