Demon Muse

Hello and welcome! Without further ado, here are the salient facts:

The blog

Demon Muse is a weekly blog about the deep nature of artistic creativity. Published every Monday (with occasional bonus posts during the rest of the week), it offers an ongoing exploration of the daimonic model of creativity and consciousness, complete with informational articles and practical advice for writers and other creators who want to integrate this model into their creative process.

Its starting point is the understanding that we all possess a deeper or higher intelligence than our everyday ego self, and that learning to live and work harmoniously with this intelligence is the irreducible core of a successful artistic life — and also, not incidentally, of a successful life as a whole, in the deepest and widest sense of the idea.

Call this intelligence the unconscious mind. Call it your silent partner. Call it the id or the secret self. Its names are legion. One of the most obvious things to call it is the muse. Somewhat less obvious — but only slightly so, since awareness of this concept is presently on the rise — is to call it the personal demon, or rather the daemon, or rather the daimon. In deep historical terms a demon was not just, and not even primarily, an evil spirit. One use of the word signified a person’s higher self, akin to a guardian angel, and also the primal pattern for the life that he or she was intended to lead, as decided beforehand by the gods. The original Greek word for this entity or idea is the daimon. The Romans called it the genius. Uniting the genius or daimon with the muse (the latter also being a Greek idea) yields the idea of the demon muse: the inner force that inspires a person to perform the life work for which he or she was born.

The blog Demon Muse, then, is about the ins and outs of learning about and living well with this deep self, thus enabling it to empower and guide our creative work with an inborn sense of vocation or calling. It’s also about the pure sense of fascination associated with such a subject. The focus is evenly divided between the theoretical and the practical. On the theoretical side, the blog will feature essays and articles explaining the concept of the inner genius. On the practical side, it will feature advice and insights about how to use this knowledge for living a creatively energized and productive life. These will include tips and techniques for discovering and working with your own native rhythms and passions, plus case studies of authors and others who have successfully discovered their daimon and learned to channel its energy. You’ll also find discussions of and links to a plethora of books, authors, websites, musicians, films, filmmakers, and thought leaders who cluster around this subject and contribute vitally to its understanding, plus a few original interviews about these matters with interesting people.

The blog is intended specifically for writers and other creators and artists, but the general principle it explores is valuable to everyone.

The author

My name is Matt Cardin, and I’m the creator and author of Demon Muse. I’m a professional writer (fiction writer, blogger, reviewer) and teacher with an M.A. in religious studies and a B.A. in communication. My books include Dark Awakenings (2010) and Divinations of the Deep (2002), both of which explore the electric frontier between religion and horror. I blog in a more freeform style at The Teeming Brain (about horror, religion, culture, doom, and other assorted topics) and am the creator of the instrumental music project Daemonyx, whose first album, Curse of the Daimon (2009), invokes many of the themes pursued here at Demon Muse. In my literary and musical pursuits, the idea of the daimon, the muse, the demon muse that whispers directly into the mind and inspires equal parts exhilaration and dread, has come to define my creative process, and has even entered into the subject matter of my work itself. For more about me, jump to the About page. Also see the bio at my website.

I hasten to add that in creating this blog I’m not setting myself up as an official expert on creativity, philosophy, psychology, spirituality, or “life work.” I’m not a counselor, depth therapist, life coach, clergyman, guru, or shaman, so I lack at least six of the most pertinent credentials for advising people how to navigate between the Scylla of creative death and the Charybdis of daimonic possession. But I am, as stated, a professional writer and long-time musician and composer, and I do have many friends in the literary world, and I did spend nearly eight years studying religion (along with lots of psychology) at the post-graduate level, and I have been formally and informally involved in various religious traditions both Western and Eastern since birth, and I did work alongside numerous showbiz creative types and celebrities for several years as a professional video producer, and I have worked since 2001 as a professional educator at both the high school and college levels. So this has all left me with a highly informed and uniquely inflected understanding of the architecture of the psyche, the nature of selfhood, and the implications of these things for artistic creativity, as verified by my own direct experiences and those of the successful creative crowd with whom I’m in constant contact.

Your role here

Right here at the outset, I want to invite you to participate in the discussion that I hope will unfold at this blog. Nothing I say is sacred writ, and I crave your contributions. My purpose in creating Demon Muse isn’t just to share what I’ve learned but to keep on learning. So I encourage you keep the conversation going by sharing your own thoughts and knowledge via the comment function on all posts. Also feel free to contact me directly. I simply ask that you keep it civil, on-topic, and spam-free — although I and the rest of your readers will certainly appreciate your letting us know if you have an interesting book, album, blog, website, or other work of your own to recommend.

Image credit: Florian Siebeck, Wikipedia, under the GNU Free Documentation License

Tags: creativity, daimon, genius, higher self, matt cardin, psychology, unconscious mind