Will's mother.

[Aletheia Dolorosa]

Getting back to the Spectres=mental illness=all kinds of evil in every world thing, wouldn't that mean that mental illness had only existed in our world for the past 400 years? The Knife was only created around 400 years ago (and the parallel in our world was something to do with Isaac Newton, wasn't it?) but there are recorded cases of mental illness stretching back beyond the 1600s.

To conflate Spectres and mental illness would be to imply that the advent of modernity/the age of reason caused mental illness, which is surely not what Pullman intended...

That being said, in medieval times, people with mental illnesses were sometimes considered to be specially connected to God - 'holy fools'. Not sure how it ties in, but it just occurred to me, and it's interesting.

[HopeToBeWill1]

So did the apparent "original sin". The knife was created, tualapi and mulefa appeared, specters, daemons, they all appeared thirty thousand years ago! So in a way, the HDM worlds are connected. But, they then split. And the BIG question, (in my opinion) is "What is the real reason for these occurences? Are they coincidence? Or did the universe forsee the war and create these events? Or did Will and Lyra and everyone just do what came naturally?" Now, somebody might say, "The universe can't think!" But how do we know? I might be reading too much into this, it's a book trilogy after all, but PP has something special, because no other writer I know has such a website full of people debating fictional occurences.

[Cookiemonster]

I might be reading too much into this, it's a book trilogy after all, but PP has something special, because no other writer I know has such a website full of people debating fictional occurences.

Are you new to the internet, by any chance? There are fansites out there for everything

[HopeToBeWill1]

Are you new to the internet, by any chance? There are fansites out there for everything

Nah. Been using the internet for ages. I was just a little surprised to find such a massive forum completely dedicated to one subject! But it's cool at the same time, because I'm not the only fanatic I know anymore!

[xLITTLE RED FRUITx]

i read in wikipedia that she had some sort of OCD or something

[Rachaman]

well not literally as in they are the same forms...but they both come from the knife..i think it says that at the time the knife was made they came into being, which implies that they and specters bot h come from the abyss.

I don't recall such a direct link between the tualapi and the knife. There WAS a relationship between the knife and the trees dying, as the trees depended on Dust falling downwards, while windows left open caused a 'wind' to blow the dust sideways.

Perhaps some natural predator of the tualapi was also dependent on the trees in some way, so that when the trees started failing, they also decreased, causing an increase in the tualapi population.