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. Read the rest of this entry »
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