Demon Muse

Embrace your inner genius

Posts Tagged daimonic

Ignorance, Faith, and the Discipline of the Demon Muse, Part 3

May 3

Posted by Matt Cardin in Muse and Psyche: Tapping Your Deep Self, Techniques for Enhancing Creativity | No Comments

I ended Part 2 of this series with a description of the “realm of infinite inner richness and raw, self-evident meaningfulness” that offers to inform your writing when your unconscious mind acts as muse or genius by speaking to you in mental images, persistent thoughts, and intensified emotions. You tap into the nightside of consciousness when you deliberately seek and allow this guidance from beyond your ego shell.

To circle back around to where we started in Part 1, in order to accomplish that necessary nightside tapping you have to give up the idea that you know what you’re doing and where you’re going with it. The reasons for this should be obvious, but in case not: If you think you know what you’re creating, where it’s headed, how it’s going to turn out, what you’re trying to accomplish, what its overall structure is supposed to be, and so on, then this sense of knowledge will almost inevitably result in an attitude of control and ownership over the results. And this is, bar none, the most surefire way to block out the light, whether of the bright or the dark variety, that your genius is trying to shine through you.

The way to overcome this problem is to sidestep it entirely by embracing conscious ignorance and relying on your daemon to carry you through and inform your work with a deep, organically coherent direction. Read the rest of this entry »

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: daemon, daimon, daimonic, demon, Federico Fellini, genius, Huston Smith, Mad Men, Marion Milner, Matthew Weiner, muse, ray bradbury, William Stafford

Ignorance, Faith, and the Discipline of the Demon Muse, Part 1

Apr 19

Posted by Matt Cardin in Creativity and Society, Muse and Psyche: Tapping Your Deep Self, Techniques for Enhancing Creativity | 5 Comments

When you get into a serious study of creativity like the one we’re pursuing here at Demon Muse, it’s all too easy to lose sight of the forest among the trees. That is, it’s easy to get caught up in the attractions of ideas and theories, to the point where you forget what the whole thing is really about. This can dampen your enthusiasm for actually performing creative work, whereas recalibrating your attitude can have the opposite effect of inflaming your muse.

What it’s all about, this daimonic or daemonic approach to creativity, this muse-based theory of inspiration, this discipline of embracing your inner genius, is the alignment of your creative act with your deep creative intent. It’s about divining your daemonic passion and then letting this be your guide when you write (or compose, paint, perform, etc.).

The thing is, you can only get it right when you’re not self-conscious about it. During the act of creation itself, you can only ride the daemonic wave by focusing your attention exclusively and intensively on your sense of rightness — or, as a corrective, your sense of wrongness — as you seek to follow the thread of your passion.

So this is all to say that when you come to the actual moment of putting down words on paper, the way to unleash your demon is to forget all about it. The moment of creation isn’t the time to be reflecting on — or, God help you, deliberately trying to follow or implement — psychological theories or concepts about creativity or anything else. Rather, it’s the moment when you should abandon all reflectiveness about what you’re doing, willingly embrace a sense of ignorance (and therefore openness) about where you’re headed and how you’ll get there, and simply heed the impulse of what wants to be said.

And how, exactly, are you supposed to do that? Simple: You find and follow what feels right, for this is the irrefutable and infallible voice of your creative demon speaking. Read the rest of this entry »

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: carl jung, creative process, creative psychology, creativity, daemon, daimon, daimonic, james hillman, muse, stephen diamond, unconscious mind

A Brief History of the Daimon (and the Genius)

Feb 8

Posted by Matt Cardin in Muse and Psyche: Tapping Your Deep Self | 12 Comments

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. Read the rest of this entry »

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: ancient greeks, angels, artists, carl jung, daimon, daimonic, demons, genius, james hillman, muse

SEO Powered by Platinum SEO from Techblissonline