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 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. Read the rest of this entry »
