If you want to enhance your creative life, one of the most potent ways to do it — and I speak from personal experience — is to get a handle on the ideas of the daimon and the personal genius. The understanding of creativity as a strange external force with which you carry on “a peculiar, wondrous, bizarre collaboration and conversation” (to quote Elizabeth Gilbert) redefines the normal view of things in our contemporary culture and empowers the artist with new gifts and responsibilities, and to this end, a conscious working knowledge of the intertwined histories of the daimon and the genius in religion, psychology, and philosophy is indispensible.

What follows is distilled from my long essay “Icons of Supernatural Horror: A Brief History of the Angel and the Demon,” which appears in my book Dark Awakenings. A shorter version appears in the two-volume encyclopedia Icons of Horror and the Supernatural.

The Parthenon (Temple of Athena) at Athens

The Greeks and their daimones

Both the idea of the daimon and the idea of the muse come to us via the ancient Greeks, who in addition to the gods and goddesses familiar to us all through the stories of classical mythology (Zeus etc.) believed in spirits they called daimones or daimons. In one respect the daimons weren’t very different from the animistic spirits that have populated the belief systems of all peoples throughout history. They were thought to be local, limited spirits who inhabited certain places, affected the weather, brought good and bad luck, and so on.

But the Greeks also held a more distinctly spiritualized or psychologized view that eventually outstripped the first. In this second version, the daimons were understood to exist deep within the human psyche or spirit, where they made themselves known through their influence upon human thoughts, emotions, attitudes, and actions. They were conceived as intermediate spirits, neither divine nor human but bridging the gap between the two realms, who mediated the will and messages of the gods to people, and vice versa. It was such a potent concept that it eventually swept through the ancient world and became one of the cornerstones of Western psychological and spiritual thought. The iconic figures of both the angel and the demon in Western religion have their origins in the ancient Greek idea of the daimons, as combined with Jewish beliefs about spiritual hierarchies, which themselves had been inherited from Zoroastrianism.

The Romans and their genii

In Hellenistic Rome (circa 4th – 1st centuries BCE), the word genius, like the Greek daimons, referred to spirit beings in general — and also, tangentially (and interestingly), had a direct connection to the word genie, which itself came somehow from the ancient Persian desert demons known as djinnee. In the course of Rome’s enthusiastic (greedy?) absorption of everything having to do with Greek culture, the idea of the genius inherited all of the meanings and connotations associated with the Greek daimons. Thus was born the idea of the personal genius, the individual attendant spirit that accompanies a person and represents his or her divine intelligence and inbuilt life pattern. This idea, like that of the daimon, exerted a profound influence on the course and tenor of Western intellectual, religious, and artistic history, until the outburst of Renaissance-style and Enlightenment-style humanism in the 15th through the 18th centuries subsumed the idea of the genius under the newly emerging rubric of autonomous human selfhood and egoic heroism. The genius as a guiding and inspiring separate spirit morphed rather suddenly  into a perceived quality of extraordinary intellectual intelligence and/or artistic giftedness possessed by only a few titanic and heroic people. This was a significant reversal, since it meant the idea of genius went from referring to a separate force that guided and, in effect, occasionally possessed people to referring to a special inner quality that people themselves possessed. (Among the late-18th and 19th century Romantics, however, there persisted a “cult of genius” that held onto some of the concept’s earlier meanings.)

Daimons in the modern world

The twentieth century saw several stirrings of what might be termed a daimonic revival. Existential psychologist Rollo May (1909-1994), for example, famously turned to the ancient concept of the daimonic for help in articulating his understanding of the human psyche. In his classic Love and Will (1969), he described the daimonic in terms that make clear for us moderns what sort of thing the ancient Greeks were talking about when they referred to spirits that acted with an inner force upon the human mind and personality: “The daimonic is any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person. Sex and eros, anger and rage, and the craving for power are examples. The daimonic can be either creative or destructive and is normally both.”

This last idea — that the daimonic can be either creative or destructive, and often shows up as both — is familiar to fans of SF legend and literary force of nature Harlan Ellison, who closed his classic short horror story “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” (1973) with an epigraph drawn from May’s book that connected modern urban violence and the experience of social alienation to an upsurge of daimonic energy.

Depth psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961) was another major figure who invoked the concept of the daimonic to help explain the nature and workings of the human psyche. With his exquisitely developed articulation of the idea of  “psychic objectivity” — the understanding that the human psyche is as real as the physical world and must therefore be known and dealt with as an entity in its own right — Jung recalled the major tropes of the ancient daimonic psychology of the Greeks. He was also up-front about the non-newness of his fundamental insight, writing that “the idea of psychic objectivity is by no means a new discovery. It is in fact one of the earliest and most universal acquisitions of humanity: it is nothing less than the conviction as to the concrete existence of a spirit world. . . . ‘Spirit’ is a psychic fact” (Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, 1917, 1928).

Demon and angel with Tamara's soul (Mikhail Vrubel, 1891)

From daimons to demons (and angels)

Of special interest is the connection between the word “daimon” and its modern descendent, “demon.” At some point during the Dark or Middle Ages, the Greek word daimon became the Latinized dæmon or daemon. Eventually the “ai” that had mutated into “æ” or “ae” collapsed into the simple “e” of the modern word. As we all know, a demon in the modern sense is an exclusively evil being that, according to Christian theology, was formerly an angel until it rebelled against the almighty monotheistic God. But when you mentally travel back in time and strip away the various religious/historical accretions and interpretations, you eventually encounter the ancient, pre-Christian dæmons or daimons, which are much more ambiguous and multidimensional, and which, as mentioned above, served not just as a source for the Christian demon but for the Christian angel as well. The conventionally positive and life-giving aspects of the daimon were inherited by the angel, while its dark, negative, wild, destructive aspects went to the demon. Many writers, especially in the fantasy and horror genres, have made a practice of referring to daemons or dæmons instead of demons when they want to invoke these older, wider connotations (think of the epithet that H.P. Lovecraft often used to describe his made-up horrific god Azathoth: “the daemon sultan”). The uniting of the modern angel-figure and demon-figure in the daimon (and genius) help to underscore the simultaneous fear and fascination, terror and joy, dread and exhilaration, destructiveness and creativity, that accompany both the idea of the daimon and the actual experience of its eruptions into consciousness and daily life.

Your daimon and your destiny

For creative artists, and probably for everybody else, one of the most potent and meaningful ideas about the daimon and genius that we have inherited from the ancient Greeks and Romans is the understanding that each person is accompanied throughout life by a specific daimon/genius with whom he or she was paired before birth. The daimon is the guiding “higher self” that holds, guards, and represents the spiritual template for the life that a given person is intended by the gods to lead — or rather, the life that each person has chosen to lead; the major version of the story holds that each of us was allowed before birth to choose the daimon with which we would be paired.

It’s possible to view the idea of the daimon as a kind of perfect metaphor that encapsulates a profound truth about human life and allows us to work with it productively. It’s also possible to refuse to assign the idea an ontological status at all.

We’ve all noticed that everyone seems to be born with certain preset predilections and personality traits. It seems that each of us possesses, or rather is possessed by, a set of innate passions and interests, attractions and aversions, traits and tendencies. It also often seems that we’re each led to encounter and experience certain kinds of life experiences and circumstances that are beyond our power to prevent. The theory of the daimon explains such things as the magnetic workings of the guardian spirit or higher self, which inevitably keeps drawing its chosen individual or “host” back into alignment with the pre-chosen life template. (Tangential to all of this, but still connected and still quite interesting, is the fact that this nexus of ideas entered Western occultism a long time ago in the form of the “Holy Guardian Angel” that each person is charged with contacting in order to initiate and further his or her spiritual development.)

Importantly, crucially, you don’t have to believe in any of this in a literal sense in order to feel its pull and sense its marvelous explanatory power. It’s possible to view the idea of the daimon as a kind of perfect metaphor that encapsulates a profound truth about human life and allows us to work with it productively. It’s also possible to refuse to assign the idea an ontological status at all. This seems to be the tack taken by, for instance, James Hillman, the fascinating and formidable psychologist who studied under Jung and who for the past several decades has pretty much been the heir apparent to the Jungian tradition. Hillman devoted the whole of his best-selling 1997 book The Soul’s Code to laying out his theory of the daimon as a kind of life calling which can serve as a permanent source of personal orientation. And he did so while consciously refusing to define the whole idea as “real” or “fictional.”

Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (Gustave Doré, 1855)

Bringing it all home: my personal daimonic passion, and yours

For a practical illustration of these matters, I present you with the case of myself. When I was eight years old I started taking piano lessons. My identification with the instrument was immediate. I took to it as if I had been waiting all my life to play it. The same instantaneous identification likewise happened with books, reading, and writing. At the age of three and four I got so frustrated at my inability to read that I sometimes cried over it. Later, when I was in high school and college, my passion for playing music became linked to an additional passion to compose it. During and after college my desire to write (short fiction, essays, and more) went volcanic, resulting eventually in publication. Today this entire webwork of passions remains vitally active in a mutually reinforcing loop. My writing flows into my musical performance, which links into my compositional pursuits, which reciprocally feed into and flow out of my writing passions. In daimonic terms this all indicates that these things are aspects of my personal calling.

The same principle applies not only to the activities themselves but to the subject matter that I’m naturally drawn to explore. Without my being able to prevent or explain it, there has always something dark, dreary, horrific, melancholic, and/or mournful lurking beneath the surface and often breaking through into plain sight in all of my creative works. I’m also ineluctably drawn to explore philosophical and spiritual ideas like the ones I’m discussing here. By the time I encountered the concepts of the daimon and the personal genius, I had already spent a many years musing over my sense of being driven by a motivating force that I couldn’t understand, a force that led me to feel passionate about things I hadn’t chosen and couldn’t control. The daimon theory gave me a name and background by which to contemplate these things more effectively.

And of course I’m not alone in all of this. You, too, have your own daimon or genius. It shows up in your inbuilt likes and dislikes, passions and aversions, drives and talents, and also in the life circumstances to which you feel magnetically drawn, and which appear to be magically drawn to you. Learning how to understand the very concept of the daimon or genius as a psychically objective reality — as the very objectivity of the psyche itself — can be a major step in discovering and coming to terms with the calling that’s implanted in you. And please note that my pointing this out isn’t a matter of bland spiritual altruism. People who live in some form of conscious communion with their daimons are inherently fascinating. Spreading the daimonic gospel (as it were) is a way of helping to make planet earth a more interesting place to spend a lifetime.

Parthenon image courtesy of: http://www.flickr.com/photos/roblisameehan/ / CC BY 2.0

Other images are in the public domain.

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  1. Ignorance, Faith, and the Discipline of the Demon Muse, Part 1
  2. Getting to Know Your Creative Demon, Part 2
  3. Ignorance, Faith, and the Discipline of the Demon Muse, Part 2