I noticed the Pope John Calvin part, but wasn't sure enough of the dates to be sure that was really *the* Calvin.

I generally like the daemons, even though I'm not quite sure what they are. A soul? Daemons don't exactly die--when their human dies they disappear. But it is possible to kill a human by causing serious damage to their daemon.

And the taboo against touching someone else's daemon is interesting. I wonder if the reason some of the bad guys didn't experience it was that their own daemons had been torn away?