One of the posts that consistently draws the most traffic here at Demon Muse is “A Brief History of the Daimon and the Genius.” This confirms what I already knew when I launched this project: that interest in the subject of the “inner other” — the sensed presence of another mind, an autonomous/independent force that each of us carries in his or her psyche, and that came to be known as “the unconscious” with the advent of psychoanalytic theory in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — is running high these days, and that this is leading to an increased interest in the deep cultural history of the subject.
This runs entirely in tandem with the wider phenomenon of a steadily increasing interest among the mainstream of consumer-technological society in matters related to consciousness, reality, metaphysics, and so on. In a recent post at my other blog, The Teeming Brain, I described the whole thing as follows:
[In the 1960s] it seemed as if the collective cranium of Western and global civilization was primed to erupt in a psychedelic expansion into new realms of thought, experience, and being that would inevitably lead to new patterns of social, political, religious, and cultural arrangement.
. . . . Now fast forward to the first decade of the 21st century, and what do we find? As in the sixties, everything seems apocalyptic. Everything seems poised to melt away and reveal an ugly truth lurking beneath the facade of what we have collectively agreed to call a normal way of life. For Americans especially, what primed us for this was the Y2K non-event. Then 9/11 deflowered us. After that, successive waves of tentative financial calamity, followed by our current and ongoing full-blown financial-economic collapse, erased our (illusionary) innocence entirely. Additionally, fears about serious and calamitous climate change have made significant attitudinal contributions, along with other ecological portents, fears about peak oil and 2012, and the first-ever wide-open recognition, by pretty much the entire public at large, of the entrenched and seemingly incurable corruption of our most prominent political and business institutions, as illustrated most recently by the collusion of BP and the U.S. federal government in creating a total fustercluck in the Gulf of Mexico.
And running neck in neck with this — again as in the 60s — we’re seeing a concomitant explosion of new discourse, expressed in books (including those by the likes of, e.g., Anthony Peake and Deborah Wells), films, music, and more, that appears to pick right back up where the original consciousness revolution left off. This formerly esoteric and marginal realm of investigation and experience, which deals with a true upending of conventional notions about selfhood, identity, time, space, and reality, presently appears to be snowballing into a major cultural force with transformative and mainstream-invading potential.
– Matt Cardin, “The 1960s Redux: In our new age of apocalypse, is the consciousness revolution back on?” The Teeming Brain, August 18, 2010
In light of all this, when I sat down to write this week’s Demon Muse post, I realized it would be valuable and worthwhile to say more about the daimon, because this concept, or tropes and themes closely akin to it, lurks behind and figures into most if not all aspects of this ongoing cultural metamorphosis, which in turn is deeply linked to our shared focus here on recognizing the reality of, and then cultivating a harmonious relationship with, your muse/daimon/genius/unconscious mind in order to empower your creative work with an organic and deeply meaningful sense of inspiration and direction.
(Need examples of the way the daimon is involved in our current cultural fermentation of consciousness exploration?
- Read Victoria Nelson’s The Secret Life of Puppets with its examination of the way the repressed Platonic-mystical impulse of Western civilization has crept back into cultural discourse over the centuries through popular entertainments about monsters, demons, consciousness expansion, virtual worlds, etc. Nelson also wrote On Writer’s Block, one of the books that I quote most frequently here at Demon Muse, since it offers one of the best explorations of creativity as an inner collaboration between you and your unconscious muse.
- Read Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, in which a successful and respected American journalist (with, yes, a venerable pedigree and lifelong steeping in countercultural philosophy) claims to have entered a kind of metaphysical-philosophical funhouse while studying the 2012 meme, and to have received an apparently “transmitted” prophecy from an apparent “higher intelligence” that was/is none other than the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl himself.
- Read Tony Peake’s Is There Life After Death? and, most pointedly, The Daemon: A Guide to Your Extraordinary Secret Self, both of which advance a scientifically-based theory of subjective immortality erected on the notion that each of us is living a virtual replay of a life that we’ve already lived, as experienced within a metamind that he terms “the daemon,” drawing the term from the ancient Greeks.
- Consider the idea of selves projected into dream worlds, or psyches projected into other bodies, or other, similar scenarios, as presented by the likes of massively popular mainstream entertainments like The Matrix, Avatar, and Inception, in an entertainment culture wave that appears to be doing nothing but swelling.
Additional examples are ubiquitous.)
Interest in the subject of the “inner other” — the sensed presence of another mind, an autonomous force that each of us carries in his or her psyche, and that came to be known as “the unconscious” with the advent of psychoanalytic theory in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — is running high these days.
What follows is the complete text of one key section of my essay/article “Icons of Supernatural Horror: A Brief History of the Angel and the Demon,” which appears in my recently published horror fiction-and-nonfiction collection Dark Awakenings. The same article was published in shorter form in the 2006 reference work Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares. One of the passages that was considerably foreshortened there was this one, which offers a consideration of the crucial role that daimons played in the cultural history of the ancient Greeks, and also, therefore, in the Hellenistic and Roman civilizations that drew upon their legacy — and from which we today inherit, through a direct and potent line of cultural descent, a host of deeply formative notions of self and society.
The thing is, some aspects of this influence show up overtly, in the explicit architecture of our shared assumptions and our social, political, economic, and psychological institutions. Others are more subtle, less obvious, perhaps even subliminal — and therefore all the more potentially subversive.
I leave it up to you to ferret out which are which as you imbibe the following information from a living stream in our contemporary and collective religious-spiritual-psychological-metaphysical landscape. I also leave it up to you intuit how and whether your creative process is enhanced or affected when informed by these things.
The Greeks and their daimones
Although most reasonably educated moderns are familiar with the Olympian gods and goddesses of classical Greek mythology, decidedly fewer are aware that long before the Greeks developed their beliefs about the humanlike gods of Olympus, they believed in vague and mysterious spirits called daimones that exerted a ubiquitous influence over people and events. Using the alternative form “daemon” to refer to these spirits, E.R. Dodds writes in his classic The Greeks and the Irrational that the “daemonic, as distinct from the divine, has at all periods played a large part in Greek popular belief (and still does).” Indeed, as psychologist Stephen A. Diamond points out in Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity, while some classical scholars maintain that Greek writers such as Homer, Hesiod, and Plato did use daimon as a synonym for theos (god), others “point to a definite distinction between these terms. The term ‘daimon’ referred to something indeterminate, invisible, incorporeal, amorphous, and unknown, whereas ‘theos’ was the personification of a god, such as Zeus or Apollo.”
If we are to believe classical scholar Reginald Barrow, modern ignorance of the daimons must be counted among the many ironies of history; Barrow argues provocatively that belief in them was so powerful, important, and prevalent that it actually formed a kind of underground mainstream in ancient Greek religion:
Because the daemons have left few memorials of themselves in architecture and literature, their importance tends to be overlooked. . . . They are omnipresent and all-powerful, they are embedded deep in the religious memories of the peoples, for they go back to days long before the days of Greek philosophy and religion. The cults of the Greek states, recognised and officially sanctioned, were only one-tenth of the iceberg; the rest, the submerged nine-tenths, were the daemons (quoted in Diamond).
Like so many religious beliefs throughout history, the idea of the daimones took many different and sometimes contradictory forms. In the beginning they were conceived as abstract forces in the neuter gender. Hesiod and others described them as “invisible and wrapped in mist” (Diamond). Much farther back, Mycenaean and Minoan daimons, in a period ranging from 1100 to 3000 B.C.E., were regarded as servants or attendants to deities and were pictured in the form of animal-human hybrids, much like their Egyptian and Mesopotamian analogs. Barrow offers a concise summary of the evolution of beliefs about these daimons over half a millennium, and also, again, of their vaguely shadowy and underground nature as they lurked perpetually in the background of orthodox Greek religious thought:
[T]he histories of Greek religion or philosophy do not usually say much, if anything, about daemons. Though the idea occurs as early as Homer, it plays little or no part in recognized cults; for it had no mythology of its own; rather it attached itself to existing beliefs. In philosophy it lurks in the background from Thales, to whom “the universe is alive and full of daemons,” through Heraclitus and Xenophanes, to Plato and his pupil Xenocrates, who elaborated it in detail. . . . In Hesiod the daemons are the souls of heroes or past ages now kindly to men; in Aeschylus the dead become daemons; in Theognis and Menander the daemon is the guardian angel of the individual man and sometimes a family.
In their most ancient forms, the daimons were neither good nor evil, or rather were potentially both. In Homer’s time (around the eighth century B.C.E.) people commonly believed that daimons caused all human ailments but at the same time also believed they could cure disease and give blessings such as health and happiness. Several centuries later the Hellenistic Greeks developed the more concrete categories of eudaimones (good daimons) and kakodaimones (evil daimons).
Arguably the most famous description or definition of daimons and the daimonic comes from a “canonical” source: Plato’s Symposium, wherein Plato has the old wise woman Diotima describe the daimonic realm as a kind of bridge or intermediary between the human and divine worlds:
All that is daemonic lies between the mortal and the immortal. Its functions are to interpret to men communications from the gods—commandments and favours from the gods in return for men’s attentions—and to convey prayers and offerings from men to the gods. Being thus between men and gods the daemon fills up the gap and so acts as a link joining up the whole. Through it as intermediary pass all forms of divination and sorcery. God does not mix with man; the daemonic is the agency through which intercourse and converse take place between men and gods, whether in waking visions or in dreams.
It is also Plato who provides probably the most familiar example of specific daimonic influence when he writes of Socrates’ famous daimonion (the gender-neutral form of daimon, which is either male or female). This has often been translated into English as the “sign” that Socrates claimed had visited him frequently since childhood in the form of an audible voice that warned him when he was about to commit an error.
Socrates conversing with a muse
Socrates’ experience of daimonic communication highlights what is in fact the most significant aspect of the matter: The Greeks understood their daimons to have not only objective but also subjective existence. That is, they believed the daimons were objectively real presences that made themselves known through their influence upon and within the human psyche. This tension between the objective and subjective seems to have existed on a kind of continuum. On the one hand, there were the more typically animistic conceptions of daimons, which associated them with particular places, natural occurrences, circumstances, or souls of the dead. On the other hand were the more subtle, psychologically oriented conceptions that gained preeminence over time, and that regarded the daimons as inner influences upon human thoughts and emotions, and even as arbitrators, keepers, conductors, and emblems of individual character and destiny.
This second type of understanding can be seen in the fact that the characters in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, which were probably composed around the eighth century B.C.E. and represented an inherited oral tradition extending several centuries earlier, attributed many of the events of their lives — not only outer, physical events but also, and especially, inner psychological ones such as moods, emotions, sudden insights, and bursts of motivation to say or do something or to refrain from speaking or acting — to the influence of daimons. Although Homer’s characters seemed to take this idea relatively lightly — “[W]e get the impression,” writes Dodds, “that they do not always mean it very seriously” — in the three centuries between Homer’s epics and Aeschylus’ Oresteia “the daemons seem to draw closer: they grow more persistent, more insidious, more sinister.”
By “sinister” Dodds may have meant not that the daimons came to be regarded as predominantly evil but that they became progressively more entangled with human interiority, and also progressively more mysterious and autonomous. He calls attention to the fact that many Greek writers after Homer drew a connection between the daimons and “those irrational impulses which arise in a man against his will to tempt him,” and says that “behind [this] lies the old Homeric feeling that these things are not truly part of the self; since they are endowed with a life and energy of their own, and so can force a man, as it were from the outside, into conduct foreign to him.”
The twentieth century existential psychologist Rollo May, who resurrected the concept of the daimon and the daimonic for use in modern depth psychotherapy, gave definitive statement to this idea of strange internal influence in his masterwork, Love and Will: “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” (123). Although May wrote about the daimonic in metaphorical terms, his description is still effective for giving an impression of what it must have felt like to the ancients when they found themselves thinking, feeling, saying, and doing things that were outside of their voluntary control. Modern peoples are of course still quite familiar with this experience. We can thus reasonably imagine that ancient peoples must have been all the more awed and disturbed when popular belief attributed these involuntary behaviors to the influence of the mysterious mediators of divine reality, especially since, in more dramatic cases of daimonic influence, the internal power might take control completely. “When this power goes awry,” May wrote, “and one element usurps control over the total personality, we have ‘daimon possession,’ the traditional name through history for psychosis.”
It was Plato (again) who gave definitive voice to this newly developing view of the daimonic as primarily an inner force. He closed his most famous work, the Republic, with the “myth of Er,” which teaches that prior to being born, each human being voluntarily chooses its own daimon, understood in this case to be a combination of guardian angel, spiritual double, and life pattern. The daimon accompanies a person throughout his or her life and constantly recalls him or her to the pre-chosen plan. It guides a person inevitably to evince a certain character, make certain choices, feel certain predilections, and encounter certain experiences, all in the service of fulfilling the fate chosen beforehand.
“The cults of the Greek states, recognised and officially sanctioned, were only one-tenth of the iceberg; the rest, the submerged nine-tenths, were the daemons.” – Classical scholar Reginald Barrow
Thus it is that the Greek word eudaimonia, which in later times came to mean “happiness” or “well being,” in its earliest sense literally meant “having a good daimon.” A person with a good daimon was happy and blessed, while a person with a bad daimon was inevitably miserable. The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus encapsulated this idea in a cryptic statement that has puzzled and fascinated scholars for the past twenty-five hundred years: Ethos anthropoi daimon. The statement translates literally as “A man’s character is his daimon,” but nobody knows for certain what Heraclitus really meant to convey, although various translations and glosses have been offered, as listed by James Hillman in his modern guide to daimonic psychology, The Soul’s Code: “Man’s character is his Genius. A man’s character is his guardian divinity. A man’s character is his fate. Character is fate. A man’s character is the immortal and potentially divine portion of him, Character for man is destiny.”
The bottom line is that it is impossible to overstress the prevalence and significance of beliefs about daimons to the ancient world, and especially to ancient popular understandings of human selfhood and its relation to the divine. For Greek culture, including its underground tradition of daimonism, was destined to become the common coinage, as it were, of the entire ancient world. When first Alexander and then the Romans succeeded in exporting all things Greek to the farthest corners of their respective empires, the resulting cultural matrix was rife with daimons in the Greek mold. According to Dodds in Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine, although the Symposium’s “precise definition of the vague terms ‘daemon’ and ‘daemonios’ was something of a novelty in Plato’s day,” by “the second century after Christ it was the expression of a truism. Virtually everyone, pagan, Jewish, Christian or Gnostic, believed in the existence of these beings and in their function as mediators, whether he called them daemons or angels or aions or simply ‘spirits.’”
BOOKS REFERENCED IN THIS ARTICLE:
IMAGE CREDITS:
- Cosmic Eye used under Creative Commons from hkoppdelaney
- Socrates conversing with a muse — detail from Sarcophage des Muses (the Sarcophagus of the Muses), Musee du Louvre, Paris
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