daimon
""Before the birth, the soul of each of us chooses an image or design that then we will live on earth, and receive a companion to guide us up here, a daimon, which is unique and typical. However, when we come to the world, we forget all this and we believe we have been empty. It is the daimon who remembers the content of our image, the elements of the chosen drawing, he is the bearer of our destiny." --James Hillman,
The Code of the Soul (p. 23)
"It will be good for your humility if you can accept the gifts of your unconscious guide that dwells in yourself, and it is good for your pride to humiliate itself to such an extent that you can accept what you receive." --Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 459
Self-knowledge is mirroring the daimon -- our inborn genius, vocation, and fate -- in a one-on-one relationship. The relationship locates us in a larger story. It arouses and reacquaints us with our ancestors, soul-guides, daimon, and wisdom figures. Possibilities rather than probabilities direct our attention towards those choices, attitudes, and decisions shaping our lives -- feeling and sensing through to the heart of the daimonic.
Plato suggested we are each born with a unique daimon or guardian before we are born, and it has selected an image or a pattern that we will live on earth. The daimon oversaw our experiences with mortality — our fate — our personal yet transcendent god. When it wears a personal face, it is called an angel or a daimon, or genius. Its incorporeal form is the soul. It does not develop with education or maturity.
The daimon is the soul companion that guides us, but at birth we forget. The daimon remembers, however, what belongs to us, and therefore, it is our daimon that is the carrier of our destiny. It is essentially identical with Jung's notion of the Self. Our daimon is a soul-guide, helpful awareness through the dark.
We can call it a daemon, genius, or muse, guardian angel, death, nature, or any conventional element for the abyss of the transcendent imagination, which has infinite aspects. It is our true calling -- self-determination -- our fate -- soul's intimate connection with death.
The Greeks called it “daimon,” the Romans “genius,” the Christians “guardian angel”. We call it “heart,” “spirit,” and “soul.” -- anima or anima mundi. Anima is the ongoing source of life, the very breath of life that is generative, not only of the body, but also of what makes us human, giving us identity, personality and character. It shapes the way we perceive, understand, and make sense of the world. The ancients understood soul as the carrier of one’s genius or daimon. This invisible otherness is an animating force connecting us to the ancestors and to the gods themselves.
Palaeolithic, Neolithic and later Bronze-Age associated serpent veneration with rain and fertility religious invocations in India. In the South Pacific, in Australia and in Central and South America, serpents were regarded as chthonian spirits of earth who possessed life-giving powers. Chaldean and Arabic words for "serpent" and "life" have a synergy. In Classical Greece, the Agathos Daimon was literally the "noble spirit", a personal companion spirit ensuing health and good fortune. The Agathos Daimon was the numinous element portrayed in iconography as a serpent, The serpentine staff of Asklepios, the Drakon god of healing, is forerunner of the caduceus symbol of medicine.
Our destiny leads us to soul-work; telos is the urge that propels the soul. Affects have telos, and it is through the transformational process that the telos is invoked. The locus, of our eternal individuality, the telos of that spiritual motion is the Angel, genius, or daimon. the "telos" or end-goal of eternity is not just at our personal end or the end of time , but in each moment. All psychic events have an innate telos. Telos compels life force.
Soul awakens encountering its archetypal image in the “imaginal world.” The personified presence of the soul’s heavenly twin is our guiding angel, or daimon. The angel is the inner guide, the hermeneutical principle, the opening to the origin, unveiling the divine face. It is uniquely and “imaginally” discernable by each visionary, where knowledge and being interpenetrate. Daemon is the soul that rules and moves our entire living being. The 'daemonic' includes all parts of the body.
In A Blue Fire and Healing Fiction, James Hillman has much to say about the overweening ego and its Faustian pursuit of manic psychic growth. When applied as a sort of prescription, he considers it to be self-aggrandizement, a hubris with a relentless drive to be shunned and avoided for a more soulful, fundamentally imagistic poetic approach. He cautions that the maxim originally meant, "Know that you are but human, not divine." If we take a person, even ourselves, as a god and venerate them, then all possibility of illumination vanishes. Eliminating belief and conditioning ideologies opens us to images as they present themselves phenomenologically.
Hillman concludes, "The daimon motivates. It protects. It invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists compromising reasonableness and often forces deviance and oddity upon its keeper, especially when neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life - and it prefers them.
It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns. It has much to do with feelings of uniqueness, of grandeur and with the restlessness of the heart, its impatience, its dissatisfaction, its yearning. It needs its share of beauty. It wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition, particularly by the person who is its caretaker.
The daimon is also our suffering, emotional disorders, and more, but could also heal, and promote health, happiness, resilience, perseverance, and harmony. The vitality of the inner universe is mobilized in happiness, misery, regret. The daimon can inform even a painful death with some poetry and grace. Jung referred to the daimon as something alien from the unconscious, an “archetype” or “numinous imperative." This force is as real as hunger and the fear of death, making demands of us and acting with authority.
When we look for 'signs', we attend to our daimon, but it can also hide things from us in our blind spots. Daemons, linked by Jung to anima/animus, are usually the opposite sex of their host. They share our feelings, thoughts and experiences. The daemon is an extension of the human but semi-independent, with praeternatural knowledge. When the human dies, the daimon fades away becoming part of everything.
Metaphoric images are its first unlearned language, which provides the poetic basis of mind, making possible communication between all people and all things by means of metaphors.”
The daimon is a paleo-god, one that has always been with us. Jung called soul a life-giving daemon. Every person has their "seed-self", "guiding force", or acorn of character from birth. Our spirits grow from this seed that is our daimon. Like all archetypes, it has a light and a dark side -- a mania, destructiveness, dark impulses, or possession (existential anxiety, anger, rage).
The inspirational spirit guides us toward the fulfillment of our potential and shows us our vulnerabilities and dream or imaginal life. Creativity is a constructive capacity to express the daimonic, which demands either positive or negative expression. The effect is naturally therapeutic, a channel for psychic energy.
Those for whom it becomes a vocation are called to the creative life, sometimes even possessed by the daimonic creative dynamic, giving substance and meaning to their artistry. When artists open to the unknown, they open to the unconscious.
Anxiety self-arises in the process itself as a sort of guide. When we surrender ego control of the process to the daimon, there are also moments of lucidity, clarity, passionate intensity that transcend mundane concerns.
Pliny called daimons 'the generating breath of the universe’ (XVI xxxix, 93). Plato called daimons envoys and interpreters between heaven and earth. They are the medium of the prophetic and esoteric arts, and mediators of the spirit world. Vocation is the voice that calls us to authentic being. Socrates said his daimon inevitably spoke to him in the negative—telling him what to avoid.
Leonardo da Vinci experienced it as his own sense of fate. Goethe's daimon was a kind of spirit dwelling within him, compelling him to fulfill his destiny. Einstein's inner voice shaped the direction of his speculations. In The Soul’s Code, James Hillman discusses Plato’s Er myth—that the soul is given a daimon (inner attendant spirit or inspiring force) at birth, which is the carrier of one’s destiny. We may forget our daimon, but it doesn’t forget us.
Hillman suggests restlessness of heart, impatience, dissatisfaction, and yearning are daimonic feelings. Daimon is character and character is destiny, the individual, immortal part of ourselves. Each unique image acts as a personal daimon, the force of fate. We care for our soul by allowing that force to move through us constantly and to have expression. Sometimes we may seem possessed by it.
Jung described it as a spirit with a degree of autonomy, an inner urge, both guide and tempter, having a strong influence on interior life. The daimon helps us know ourselves. A daimon is our divine element, an intercessor between gods and mankind. It's a 'serpentine' companion spirit, the impersonal collective power of the gods to dispense destiny and the numinous as individual events and experience.
Psychologist Rollo May describes the classic Greek conception of the “daimonic” or darker side of our being, noting that the daimonic (unlike the demonic, which is merely destructive) is as much concerned with creativity as with negative reactions.
The daimon is our spiritual guide or self, and our character -- a divine mediating power that impels our action and drives or mediates our destiny. It is what makes us unique in relation to the world. This inborn immortal factor embodies our innate talents, inherent gifts, and positive or negative natural tendencies.
A destiny spirit, muse, or guardian angel, it also personifies conscience, the voice of our unconscious, or higher self -- a doppelganger through who's eyes we can catch of glimpse of our far-flung future, the life we will live in reverse. It is our protector, but it only protects the part of us that serves its plan for us, because it springs from the impersonal Ground of being.
The muse supports imaginal life from the yawning darkness of the psychological depths, the soul of which is love itself. The muse moves within us and the story comes up and out, conjuring images, deepening awareness -- a dialogue with nature.
Hillman argues that watered-down, popularized routine performance of active imagination feeds fantasies of power. He thinks we reach too far, grasping desperately with our unconscious drives for control. In other words, our motivation is the exact opposite of what we may think it is. A feedback loop shapes information flow.
He quotes Plotinus, saying, "It is for them to come to me, not for me to go to them." For Hillman, "Each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny." He makes a clear distinction that Jung's method is not for "spiritual discipline, artistic creativity, premature escapism or transcendence of the worldly, moral philosophy, mystical vision or union, personal betterment, or magical effect."
Active imagination is aimed at speech, not silence, or mystical activity. It is not for working on or by images with the human will. He doesn't use words like individuation, projection, the Self as a 'center of psyche', or even unconscious. Hermeneutics just leads away from the specificity and inherent significance of the image into cross-cultural amplifications.
The soul is profoundly other with its own integrity. Ficino claimed three powers to soul's essence: the powers of life, understanding, and desiring. It frees consciousness of science, turning events into experience of images. We know by means of vision those things we cannot see. Only the image actually presented embodies meaning. Metaphorical insight emerges from hearing while seeing.
Favoring soul over ego, the aim he claims is to avoid "the disease of literalism." Psychic consciousness is a dialogue, a conversation rooted in love of soul and its inherent beauty. Its aim differs from art because it is not product-oriented but ouroboric self-understanding, unfolding story without end. So, "Know Thyself" becomes revelatory, nonlinear, discontinuous, and self-organizing.
Plato and Socrates used a mythical mode of imagination to heal souls -- a healing return to the middle realm of mythology within this cosmos we actually inhabit. Myth captures the mystery and essence of living and being alive. Like alchemy, myth cannot be taken literally.
Hillman thought "Know Thyself" terminates when we leave linear time with the imaginal act, seeing the archetypal in an image through an imagistic approach sensing images and living nature. He brushes off the heroic, symbolic, and allegorical. We know ourselves through the pure uninterpreted revelations of psyche's nature, a sort of disintegrated integration, not imposed self-improvement that constrains the soul.
As Hillman advises in The Soul's Code, “For the daimon surprises. It crosses my intentions with its interventions, sometimes with a little twinge of hesitation, sometimes with a quick crush on someone or something. These surprises feel small and irrational; you can brush them aside; yet they also convey a sense of importance, which can make you say afterward: “Fate.”
Following Plato, Hillman asserts that every soul (psyche) is granted a unique daimon before birth, and this daimon has chosen a pattern that individuals must live while on earth. The daimon leads the soul into the world, but the daimon is forgotten at birth. Although forgotten, the daimon remembers the destiny of the soul and guides the person through life, “therefore the daimon is the carrier of your destiny” (Hillman, p. 8).
Plotinus says one’s character is one’s daimon, your character “given” to you in some sense, something granted by the divine. Daimon is the uncanny because it presents itself in everything ordinary without being the ordinary. With the ancient Greeks, the daemonic appears not only through elements “inside” the self but also “outside” the self.
Hillman concludes, "The daimon motivates. It protects. It invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists compromising reasonableness and often forces deviance and oddity upon its keeper, especially when neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life - and it prefers them.
It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns. It has much to do with feelings of uniqueness, of grandeur and with the restlessness of the heart, its impatience, its dissatisfaction, its yearning. It needs its share of beauty. It wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition, particularly by the person who is its caretaker.
Metaphoric images are its first unlearned language, which provides the poetic basis of mind, making possible communication between all people and all things by means of metaphors.” The daimon is also our suffering, emotional disorders, and more, but could also heal, and promote health, happiness, resilience, perseverance, and harmony. The vitality of the inner universe is mobilized in happiness, misery, regret. The daimon can inform even a painful death with some poetry and grace.
Jung referred to the daimon as something alien from the unconscious, an “archetype” or “numinous imperative." This force is as real as hunger and the fear of death, making demands of us and acting with authority. When we look for 'signs', we attend to our daimon, but it can also hide things from us in our blind spots. Daemons, linked by Jung to anima/animus, are usually the opposite sex of their host. They share our feelings, thoughts and experiences. The daemon is an extension of the human but semi-independent, with praeternatural knowledge.
When the human dies, the daimon fades away becoming part of everything. The path through the opposites may be termed "The Middle Way" and is seen in examples from many cultures. For example, the Chinese concept of the Tao with its components Yin and Yang; the dictum of from ancient Delphi and Greek philosopher Aristotle to "Know Thyself" springs from Apollonian religion which asserts that "The Mean is best." This is the basis of the Golden Mean in art and philosophy. In the working of the Tree of Life in Hermetic Qabalism, the mean is symbolized by the Middle Pillar.
More recently the opposites were united in the philosophical formula of Hegel: thesis-antithesis and synthesis. The path through the opposites is also symbolized as walking the razor's edge. --Iona Miller, 2017
The Code of the Soul (p. 23)
"It will be good for your humility if you can accept the gifts of your unconscious guide that dwells in yourself, and it is good for your pride to humiliate itself to such an extent that you can accept what you receive." --Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 459
Self-knowledge is mirroring the daimon -- our inborn genius, vocation, and fate -- in a one-on-one relationship. The relationship locates us in a larger story. It arouses and reacquaints us with our ancestors, soul-guides, daimon, and wisdom figures. Possibilities rather than probabilities direct our attention towards those choices, attitudes, and decisions shaping our lives -- feeling and sensing through to the heart of the daimonic.
Plato suggested we are each born with a unique daimon or guardian before we are born, and it has selected an image or a pattern that we will live on earth. The daimon oversaw our experiences with mortality — our fate — our personal yet transcendent god. When it wears a personal face, it is called an angel or a daimon, or genius. Its incorporeal form is the soul. It does not develop with education or maturity.
The daimon is the soul companion that guides us, but at birth we forget. The daimon remembers, however, what belongs to us, and therefore, it is our daimon that is the carrier of our destiny. It is essentially identical with Jung's notion of the Self. Our daimon is a soul-guide, helpful awareness through the dark.
We can call it a daemon, genius, or muse, guardian angel, death, nature, or any conventional element for the abyss of the transcendent imagination, which has infinite aspects. It is our true calling -- self-determination -- our fate -- soul's intimate connection with death.
The Greeks called it “daimon,” the Romans “genius,” the Christians “guardian angel”. We call it “heart,” “spirit,” and “soul.” -- anima or anima mundi. Anima is the ongoing source of life, the very breath of life that is generative, not only of the body, but also of what makes us human, giving us identity, personality and character. It shapes the way we perceive, understand, and make sense of the world. The ancients understood soul as the carrier of one’s genius or daimon. This invisible otherness is an animating force connecting us to the ancestors and to the gods themselves.
Palaeolithic, Neolithic and later Bronze-Age associated serpent veneration with rain and fertility religious invocations in India. In the South Pacific, in Australia and in Central and South America, serpents were regarded as chthonian spirits of earth who possessed life-giving powers. Chaldean and Arabic words for "serpent" and "life" have a synergy. In Classical Greece, the Agathos Daimon was literally the "noble spirit", a personal companion spirit ensuing health and good fortune. The Agathos Daimon was the numinous element portrayed in iconography as a serpent, The serpentine staff of Asklepios, the Drakon god of healing, is forerunner of the caduceus symbol of medicine.
Our destiny leads us to soul-work; telos is the urge that propels the soul. Affects have telos, and it is through the transformational process that the telos is invoked. The locus, of our eternal individuality, the telos of that spiritual motion is the Angel, genius, or daimon. the "telos" or end-goal of eternity is not just at our personal end or the end of time , but in each moment. All psychic events have an innate telos. Telos compels life force.
Soul awakens encountering its archetypal image in the “imaginal world.” The personified presence of the soul’s heavenly twin is our guiding angel, or daimon. The angel is the inner guide, the hermeneutical principle, the opening to the origin, unveiling the divine face. It is uniquely and “imaginally” discernable by each visionary, where knowledge and being interpenetrate. Daemon is the soul that rules and moves our entire living being. The 'daemonic' includes all parts of the body.
In A Blue Fire and Healing Fiction, James Hillman has much to say about the overweening ego and its Faustian pursuit of manic psychic growth. When applied as a sort of prescription, he considers it to be self-aggrandizement, a hubris with a relentless drive to be shunned and avoided for a more soulful, fundamentally imagistic poetic approach. He cautions that the maxim originally meant, "Know that you are but human, not divine." If we take a person, even ourselves, as a god and venerate them, then all possibility of illumination vanishes. Eliminating belief and conditioning ideologies opens us to images as they present themselves phenomenologically.
Hillman concludes, "The daimon motivates. It protects. It invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists compromising reasonableness and often forces deviance and oddity upon its keeper, especially when neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life - and it prefers them.
It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns. It has much to do with feelings of uniqueness, of grandeur and with the restlessness of the heart, its impatience, its dissatisfaction, its yearning. It needs its share of beauty. It wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition, particularly by the person who is its caretaker.
The daimon is also our suffering, emotional disorders, and more, but could also heal, and promote health, happiness, resilience, perseverance, and harmony. The vitality of the inner universe is mobilized in happiness, misery, regret. The daimon can inform even a painful death with some poetry and grace. Jung referred to the daimon as something alien from the unconscious, an “archetype” or “numinous imperative." This force is as real as hunger and the fear of death, making demands of us and acting with authority.
When we look for 'signs', we attend to our daimon, but it can also hide things from us in our blind spots. Daemons, linked by Jung to anima/animus, are usually the opposite sex of their host. They share our feelings, thoughts and experiences. The daemon is an extension of the human but semi-independent, with praeternatural knowledge. When the human dies, the daimon fades away becoming part of everything.
Metaphoric images are its first unlearned language, which provides the poetic basis of mind, making possible communication between all people and all things by means of metaphors.”
The daimon is a paleo-god, one that has always been with us. Jung called soul a life-giving daemon. Every person has their "seed-self", "guiding force", or acorn of character from birth. Our spirits grow from this seed that is our daimon. Like all archetypes, it has a light and a dark side -- a mania, destructiveness, dark impulses, or possession (existential anxiety, anger, rage).
The inspirational spirit guides us toward the fulfillment of our potential and shows us our vulnerabilities and dream or imaginal life. Creativity is a constructive capacity to express the daimonic, which demands either positive or negative expression. The effect is naturally therapeutic, a channel for psychic energy.
Those for whom it becomes a vocation are called to the creative life, sometimes even possessed by the daimonic creative dynamic, giving substance and meaning to their artistry. When artists open to the unknown, they open to the unconscious.
Anxiety self-arises in the process itself as a sort of guide. When we surrender ego control of the process to the daimon, there are also moments of lucidity, clarity, passionate intensity that transcend mundane concerns.
Pliny called daimons 'the generating breath of the universe’ (XVI xxxix, 93). Plato called daimons envoys and interpreters between heaven and earth. They are the medium of the prophetic and esoteric arts, and mediators of the spirit world. Vocation is the voice that calls us to authentic being. Socrates said his daimon inevitably spoke to him in the negative—telling him what to avoid.
Leonardo da Vinci experienced it as his own sense of fate. Goethe's daimon was a kind of spirit dwelling within him, compelling him to fulfill his destiny. Einstein's inner voice shaped the direction of his speculations. In The Soul’s Code, James Hillman discusses Plato’s Er myth—that the soul is given a daimon (inner attendant spirit or inspiring force) at birth, which is the carrier of one’s destiny. We may forget our daimon, but it doesn’t forget us.
Hillman suggests restlessness of heart, impatience, dissatisfaction, and yearning are daimonic feelings. Daimon is character and character is destiny, the individual, immortal part of ourselves. Each unique image acts as a personal daimon, the force of fate. We care for our soul by allowing that force to move through us constantly and to have expression. Sometimes we may seem possessed by it.
Jung described it as a spirit with a degree of autonomy, an inner urge, both guide and tempter, having a strong influence on interior life. The daimon helps us know ourselves. A daimon is our divine element, an intercessor between gods and mankind. It's a 'serpentine' companion spirit, the impersonal collective power of the gods to dispense destiny and the numinous as individual events and experience.
Psychologist Rollo May describes the classic Greek conception of the “daimonic” or darker side of our being, noting that the daimonic (unlike the demonic, which is merely destructive) is as much concerned with creativity as with negative reactions.
The daimon is our spiritual guide or self, and our character -- a divine mediating power that impels our action and drives or mediates our destiny. It is what makes us unique in relation to the world. This inborn immortal factor embodies our innate talents, inherent gifts, and positive or negative natural tendencies.
A destiny spirit, muse, or guardian angel, it also personifies conscience, the voice of our unconscious, or higher self -- a doppelganger through who's eyes we can catch of glimpse of our far-flung future, the life we will live in reverse. It is our protector, but it only protects the part of us that serves its plan for us, because it springs from the impersonal Ground of being.
The muse supports imaginal life from the yawning darkness of the psychological depths, the soul of which is love itself. The muse moves within us and the story comes up and out, conjuring images, deepening awareness -- a dialogue with nature.
Hillman argues that watered-down, popularized routine performance of active imagination feeds fantasies of power. He thinks we reach too far, grasping desperately with our unconscious drives for control. In other words, our motivation is the exact opposite of what we may think it is. A feedback loop shapes information flow.
He quotes Plotinus, saying, "It is for them to come to me, not for me to go to them." For Hillman, "Each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny." He makes a clear distinction that Jung's method is not for "spiritual discipline, artistic creativity, premature escapism or transcendence of the worldly, moral philosophy, mystical vision or union, personal betterment, or magical effect."
Active imagination is aimed at speech, not silence, or mystical activity. It is not for working on or by images with the human will. He doesn't use words like individuation, projection, the Self as a 'center of psyche', or even unconscious. Hermeneutics just leads away from the specificity and inherent significance of the image into cross-cultural amplifications.
The soul is profoundly other with its own integrity. Ficino claimed three powers to soul's essence: the powers of life, understanding, and desiring. It frees consciousness of science, turning events into experience of images. We know by means of vision those things we cannot see. Only the image actually presented embodies meaning. Metaphorical insight emerges from hearing while seeing.
Favoring soul over ego, the aim he claims is to avoid "the disease of literalism." Psychic consciousness is a dialogue, a conversation rooted in love of soul and its inherent beauty. Its aim differs from art because it is not product-oriented but ouroboric self-understanding, unfolding story without end. So, "Know Thyself" becomes revelatory, nonlinear, discontinuous, and self-organizing.
Plato and Socrates used a mythical mode of imagination to heal souls -- a healing return to the middle realm of mythology within this cosmos we actually inhabit. Myth captures the mystery and essence of living and being alive. Like alchemy, myth cannot be taken literally.
Hillman thought "Know Thyself" terminates when we leave linear time with the imaginal act, seeing the archetypal in an image through an imagistic approach sensing images and living nature. He brushes off the heroic, symbolic, and allegorical. We know ourselves through the pure uninterpreted revelations of psyche's nature, a sort of disintegrated integration, not imposed self-improvement that constrains the soul.
As Hillman advises in The Soul's Code, “For the daimon surprises. It crosses my intentions with its interventions, sometimes with a little twinge of hesitation, sometimes with a quick crush on someone or something. These surprises feel small and irrational; you can brush them aside; yet they also convey a sense of importance, which can make you say afterward: “Fate.”
Following Plato, Hillman asserts that every soul (psyche) is granted a unique daimon before birth, and this daimon has chosen a pattern that individuals must live while on earth. The daimon leads the soul into the world, but the daimon is forgotten at birth. Although forgotten, the daimon remembers the destiny of the soul and guides the person through life, “therefore the daimon is the carrier of your destiny” (Hillman, p. 8).
Plotinus says one’s character is one’s daimon, your character “given” to you in some sense, something granted by the divine. Daimon is the uncanny because it presents itself in everything ordinary without being the ordinary. With the ancient Greeks, the daemonic appears not only through elements “inside” the self but also “outside” the self.
Hillman concludes, "The daimon motivates. It protects. It invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists compromising reasonableness and often forces deviance and oddity upon its keeper, especially when neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life - and it prefers them.
It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns. It has much to do with feelings of uniqueness, of grandeur and with the restlessness of the heart, its impatience, its dissatisfaction, its yearning. It needs its share of beauty. It wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition, particularly by the person who is its caretaker.
Metaphoric images are its first unlearned language, which provides the poetic basis of mind, making possible communication between all people and all things by means of metaphors.” The daimon is also our suffering, emotional disorders, and more, but could also heal, and promote health, happiness, resilience, perseverance, and harmony. The vitality of the inner universe is mobilized in happiness, misery, regret. The daimon can inform even a painful death with some poetry and grace.
Jung referred to the daimon as something alien from the unconscious, an “archetype” or “numinous imperative." This force is as real as hunger and the fear of death, making demands of us and acting with authority. When we look for 'signs', we attend to our daimon, but it can also hide things from us in our blind spots. Daemons, linked by Jung to anima/animus, are usually the opposite sex of their host. They share our feelings, thoughts and experiences. The daemon is an extension of the human but semi-independent, with praeternatural knowledge.
When the human dies, the daimon fades away becoming part of everything. The path through the opposites may be termed "The Middle Way" and is seen in examples from many cultures. For example, the Chinese concept of the Tao with its components Yin and Yang; the dictum of from ancient Delphi and Greek philosopher Aristotle to "Know Thyself" springs from Apollonian religion which asserts that "The Mean is best." This is the basis of the Golden Mean in art and philosophy. In the working of the Tree of Life in Hermetic Qabalism, the mean is symbolized by the Middle Pillar.
More recently the opposites were united in the philosophical formula of Hegel: thesis-antithesis and synthesis. The path through the opposites is also symbolized as walking the razor's edge. --Iona Miller, 2017
Whoever . . . scrutinizes his mind . . . will find his own natural work, and will find likewise his own star and daemon, and following their beginnings he will thrive and live happily. Otherwise, he will find fortune to be adverse, and he will feel that heaven hates him (Ficino 169).
Augoeides is an obscure term meaning "luminous body" and thought to refer to the planets. Aleister Crowley considered the term to refer to the Holy Guardian Angel of Abramelin; the Atman of Hinduism the Daemon of the ancient Greeks.
Jung said, “The daimon throws us down, makes us traitors to our ideals and cherished convictions—traitors to the selves we thought we were.” Rollo May pointed out that, “The daimonic . . . can be either creative or destructive and is normally both.” It carries the energy of the demonic (destructive aspect) and daimonic (creative aspect). Freud called Jung, "a man in the grip of his daimon." And it is the daemon that has a specific interest in the outcome of our lives.
All old trees had their daimon, and the World Tree -- mankind's most magnificent legend -- is no exception. The personified tree is the daimon at the same time because they are different categories of existence -- secular and sacred. When we are 'called', we are called by our daimon. If we ignore that call we may wither away or live half a life. The daimon helps us know ourselves. If we are fortunate the daimon informs our life and death with some nobility and poetry.
Anima Mundi, the World Soul also has a daimon that guides and cajoles her to her destiny, whatever that may be. The Anima Mundi and her Daimon are archetypal powers.
The Genius of Genealogy
Iona Miller, (c)2016
"The eye of the heart that ‘sees’ is also the eye of death that sees through visible presentations to an invisible core. When Michelangelo sculpted portraits of his contemporaries or of the figures of religion and myth, he attempted to see what he called the immagine del cuor, the heart’s image, “a prefiguration” of what he was sculpting, as if the chisel that cut the rock followed the eye that penetrated his subject to the heart. The portrait aimed to reveal the inner soul of what he was carving." (Hillman, Soul's Code, p146)
DAIMON:
Voice of the Higher Presence
The ancient Greeks believed that our character or genius was a daimon [Latin daemon] or divine spirit who oversaw our experiences with mortality -- dispenser of our fate -- our personal yet transcendent god. The root of daimon, from the Indo-European, is to “deal out” --inspirations, ideas, imaginings, illnesses, problems, all the things that compose personality.
Plato suggested we are each born with a unique daimon or guardian before we are born, and it has selected an image or a pattern that we will live on earth. The daimon is the soul companion that guides us, but at birth we forget. The daimon remembers, however, what belongs to us, and therefore, it is our daimon that is the carrier of our destiny, our inner self. It is essentially identical with Jung's notion of the Self.
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho echoes Jung's theory in biological terms. She postulates that, "a pure coherent state for the entire system would be a many-mode quantum electrodynamical field with a collective phase over all modes. It may be attainable only under very exceptional circumstances, as during an aesthetic or religious experience when the ‘pure duration’ of the here and now becomes completely delocalized in the realm of no-time and no-space.”
Daimon is character and character is destiny, the individual, immortal and potentially divine part of ourselves. Each unique image acts as a personal daimon, the force of fate. We care for our soul by allowing that force to move through us constantly and to have expression. Sometimes we may seem possessed by it. Jung described it as a spirit with a degree of autonomy, an inner urge, both guide and tempter, having a strong influence on interior life.
In the Hellenistic ruler cult that began with Alexander the Great, it was not the ruler, but his guiding daemon that was venerated. Telesphorus is one of the Cabiri, and the daimon of Aesclepius (see fig. 77, Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12), who was also regarded as a God of healing.
In the Archaic or early Classical period, the daimon had been democratized and internalized for each person, whom it served to guide, motivate, and inspire, as one possessed of such good spirits. Similarly, the first-century Roman imperial cult began by venerating the genius or numen of Augustus, a distinction that blurred in time.
Guardian Angels
The daimon is a personification of the ancestors, intimately related, yet separate and remote, like the dead. A daimon is our divine element, an intercessor between gods and mankind -- a 'serpentine' companion spirit, the impersonal collective power of the gods to dispense destiny and the numinous as individual events and experience.
A destiny spirit or guardian angel, it also personifies conscience, the voice of our unconscious, or higher self -- a doppelganger through who's eyes we can catch of glimpse of our far-flung future, the life we will live in reverse. It is our destiny and protector, but it only protects the part of us that serves its plan for your self, because it springs from the impersonal Ground of being.
But to have soul is the whole venture of life, for soul is a life-giving daemon who plays his elfin game above and below human existence, for which reason-in the realm of dogma he is threatened and propitiated with superhuman punishments and blessings that go far beyond the possible deserts of human
beings. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 26-27
All old trees had their daimon or tree numen, and the World Tree is no exception. This is the ancestral or family daimon -- the secret voice of family memories. The tree is the wise or knowing diamon at the same time because they are different categories of existence -- secular and sacred in phase co-existence, (an influence perceptible by mind if not by the senses). Active in many contexts, sometimes the daimon appears in the form of Asklepios the healer, whose staff is entwined with the serpent.
The daimon lives in the thymus in our trunk, and we can converse with it. In fact, it needs talk. It can waken you to your innermost passions, so you need to talk with it and work out a liveable connection to the creative spirit. It can appear in love triangles, difficult relationships, and partnerships.
When we are 'called', we are called by our daimon. If we ignore that call we may wither away or live half a life. To answer that call is essentially a shamanic initiation that opens relations with the Otherworld -- equilibrium of conscious and unconscious. If we are fortunate the daimon informs our creativity and death with some nobility.
We were infused with the value of our potential. Creativity has frequently been treated as a form of self-expression or a way of understanding or coping with life that is intimately connected with personal dignity, expression of one's inner being, self-actualization, and the like (e.g., Maslow, 1973; May, 1976; Rogers, 1961). Moustakis (1977) summarized the individualistic approach to creativity by seeing it as the pathway to living your own life your own way.
This plant is an inner, spiritual growth, the development of a tree of life and knowledge which played a great role in alchemy....In general it is advisable to watch these inner developments and not let them slip back into the unconscious, lest they get stuck in the physiological sphere, or rather in the realm of the [psychoid] unconscious which merges with the body, where they give rise to pathological formations which a wise man carefully avoids. (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 607-608)
Constructive/Destructive Polar Opposites
Jung called compulsions the greatest mystery of human behavior. The heterogeneous character of the daimon is confirmed by the description of its body as an “alien garment.” As trickster, it urges us toward the deathless mental aspects of compulsions. The daimon both instigates an abrupt change of behavior pattern and at the same time gives a conscious reason or narrative account. Sometimes the daimon is inhibiting - a cautionary spirit and works against our desires.
The daimon can incite 'oblivion-seeking' in the person -- the escapism and oblivion of addiction and altered states. It seduces the ego into oblivion and anesthetizes it. The incarnate daimon is also the physical principle of love. There is the flesh and blood reality, the character, the daimonic element within and the lived history of the human person, which is a deep mystery.
‘Fate’ is distinguished from ‘fatalism’, ‘telos’ is distinguished from ‘teleology’, and ‘accidents’ and ‘necessity’ are all explanations of how individuals may be guided but not determined by daimonic influence. We must be free to choose to grow into the daimonic image, or to ignore this, or to try to forge another identity, or to find what there is for us to find: the stars do not determine human life, they simply guide.
James Hillman's acorn theory says that the "daimon" selects the egg and the sperm, that their union results from our necessity, not the other way around. This has huge implications. Soul, calling, or image, it guides our unique path. The daimon guides us down into the form of our calling -- in terms of a soul’s descent rather than a developmental ascent from nature and nurture.
Cost of Personal Satisfactions
Sometimes, however the "daimon" asks a great deal from you. You feel as if you've never done enough. You've never written enough, played enough, or fought enough, whatever it is. There is always more because it is like an unquenchable urge. It costs what you might call your normalcy. (Hillman)
"A child defends its daimon's dignity. That's why even a frail child at a 'tender' age refuses to submit to what it feels is unfair and untrue and reacts so savagely to abusive misperecptions. The idea of childhood abuse needs to be expanded beyond the sexual kind--which is so vicious not principally because it is sexual, but because it abuses the dignity at the core of personality, that acorn of myth."[Hillman, Pg.27 The Soul's Code.]
"The acorn theory proposes, and I will bring evidence for the claim that you and I and every single person is born with a defining image. Individuality resides in a formal cause--to use old philosophical language going back to Aristotle. We each embody our own idea, in the language of Plato and Plotinus. And this form, this idea, this image does not tolerate too much straying. The theory also attributes to this innate image an angelic or daimonic intention, as if it were a spark of consciousness; and, moreover, holds that it has our interest at heart because it chose us for its reasons."[James Hillman, Pg. 12, The Soul's Code]
Hillman suggests that the daimon explains the impossible marriages, quick conceptions, and sudden desertions that form the stories of so many of our parents. He goes further to point out the poverty of seeing our mothers and fathers as, literally, mom and dad, when nature could be our mother, books our father - whatever connects us to the world and teaches us. Quoting Alfred North Whitehead, who said that ‘religion is world loyalty’, Hillman says that we must believe in the world’s ability to provide for us and lovingly reveal to us its mysteries.
The Soul’s Code shows how the daimon will assert itself in love, giving rise to obsessions and torments of romantic agony that defy the logic of evolutionary biology.
Fate, Fortune, & Chance
Every person had their spirit or guardian angel, an occult power mediating the celestial and terrestrial realms. It appears 'replete with knowledge' and the power of Presence, perhaps even an audible voice. In popular thought, such daimones were credited with conveying supernatural powers and abilities to humans, resulting in increased physical or intellectual prowess for special occasions. They could also effect changes in human moods and temperaments, and their accompanying actions.
The daimon is our invisible and irrational spiritual guide or self, and our character -- a divine mediating power that impels our action and drives or mediates our destiny. It is what makes us unique in relation to the world. This inborn immortal factor embodies our innate talents, inherent gifts, and positive or negative natural tendencies -- and a way to honor the individuality of soul.
This supreme form of soul is our constant companion and source of inspiration -- like the Latin genii, our genius. This "genius" (from the Latin genere) means to generate, to beget, making the daimon the voice of the generative process in us. It can be a personification of the transcendent function, experienced in dreams and in our acts of doing and becoming. The gifted child tends to be blessed with some sort of self-remembrance. Jung notes, "A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon." (pp. 356-357)
The daimon is also our suffering, emotional disorder, and more, but could also heal, and promote health, happiness, resilience, perseverance, and harmony. The vitality of the inner universe is mobilized in happiness, misery, regret. The daimon can inform even a painful death with some poetry and grace.
Suffering can be produced by painful states of mind such as hatred, envy, alienation, scapegoating, cruelty, and loneliness. The daimon can also bring altruism, empathy, compassion, concern, care, consolation, and pity. It brings understand of the beauty, compassion, and the foundation of wisdom...perhaps even the psychobiological transformations of epigenetics, changing our responses to life experiences.
Regardless of the nature of the genes we inherit from our parents, dynamic change at this level allows us almost unlimited influence on our fate. Beyond "biology a destiny" is “self-directed biological transformation,” but under the daimon, not the ego. the disruptive and transformative reality of the individuation process, the uncanny otherness of the unconscious.
In The Soul’s Code, James Hillman discusses Plato’s Er myth—that the soul is given a daimon (inner attendant spirit or inspiring force) at birth, which is the carrier of one’s destiny. We may forget our daimon, but it doesn’t forget us.
The daimon knows the future and is at all times in touch with the world-spirit, with the Logos or spermatic pneuma of the universe. Masculine and feminine merge in this androgynous symbol of wholeness. This archetypal image, like the lapis in alchemy, unites the opposites of masculine and feminine in one figure (Von Franz).
Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel,
or the daemon, one's true spiritual identity.
The daimon has our interest at heart, guiding providence; it motivates, protects, invents, has prescience, and persists. The daimon can be a force of deviance and oddity, especially when it is opposed or neglected. Hillman enumerates various signs of daimonic feelings: restlessness of heart, impatience, dissatisfaction, and yearning. He notes that the daimon wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition—especially by you.
The daimonic can be both creative and destructive. Some say “The devil is in the details,” meaning solutions break down when you examine them closely enough. Some say “God is in the details,” meaning opportunities for discovery and creativity come from digging into the details. Both are true, but the latter is more interesting. “The daemon is in the details” is more encompassing.
The central aim of Western magic is to attain or stabilize the emergence of Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, or the daemon, one's true spiritual identity. This implies drawing closer to the consciousness of one's authentic individuality, in contradistinction to the active conscious personality.
We can achieve a form of sacred marriage with the inner mate, known in alchemy as the coniunctio. This union produces a Magickal Child that symbolizes our potential for realization of the Higher Self, self-actualization. The “Knowledge and Conversation” of the Holy Guardian Angel is a vital part of the Abramelin Operation to embody. To Crowley, finding one’s true will or purpose in life was the only justifiable use of such Knowledge or gnosis; any other use was black magic.
We get the notion of demonic possession from the destructive workings of these forces; this is also where the notion of “evil genius” comes from. Many artists are haunted by their daimons, showing that our wounds made us who we are and that living creatively with them is key. We can learn to use this inextinguishable heat to forge works and the self.
We experience the muse, daemon, or 'angels' of creativity in their divine autonomy. In a sense, the artist is 'ridden' by the creative daemon that possesses him or her. How often works of creative genius arrive in consciousness almost fully formed. The face of the beloved angel is our divinity -- our light that draws breath, our embodied nakedness.
Jung defined intuition as "perception via the unconscious": using sense-perception only as a starting point, to bring forth ideas, images, possibilities, ways out of a blocked situation, by a process that is mostly unconscious. In the divine act of reconnection, imagination conveys divine thoughts through images, penetrating deeper levels of insight with trans-sensory perception.
Jung said, “the daemonic is the not yet realized creative.” Perceptual diversity helps us access a variety of non-rational altered states of consciousness, including dreams, trance, imagination, divination, and meditation -- presentational illumination.
An interview with Stephen A. Diamond, Ph.D.
by Douglas Eby
A clinical and forensic psychologist, Stephen Diamond works with many talented individuals committed to becoming more creative.
“Creativity,” he states, “is one of humankind’s healthiest inclinations, one of our greatest attributes.”
As he explains in his book, “Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic,” our impulse to be creative “can be understood to some degree as the subjective struggle to give form, structure and constructive expression to inner and outer chaos and conflict.
“It can also be one of the most dynamic methods of meeting and redeeming one’s devils and demons.”
Anger, he asserts, is one of the most troubling emotions for psychotherapy patients in general. Yet, there is, Diamond says, a “very strong correlation between anger, rage and creativity, one which most people are not aware of.
“Most of us tend to view anger or rage negatively, associating it almost exclusively with destructiveness and violence. Certainly this correlation exists. But anger can also motivate constructive and creative behavior.”
In his brief foreword to Diamond’s book, psychologist Rollo May introduces and defines the classic Greek conception of the “daimonic” or darker side of our being, noting that “the daimonic (unlike the demonic, which is merely destructive) is as much concerned with creativity as with negative reactions.
“A special characteristic of the daimonic model is that it considers both creativity on one side, and anger and rage on the other side, as coming from the same source.
“That is, constructiveness and destructiveness have the same source in human personality. The source is simply human potential.”
Dr. Diamond holds that creativity may be a powerful and often dark endeavor: “The more conflict, the more rage, the more anxiety there is, the more the inner necessity to create.“We must also bear in mind that gifted individuals, those with a genius (incidentally, genius was the Latin word for daimon, the basis of the daimonic concept) for certain things, feel this inner necessity even more intensely, and in some respects experience and give voice not only to their own demons but the collective daimonic as well.
“So they are kind of like little oracles of Delphi, or canaries in a coal mine, sensing the dangers, the conflicts, the cultural shadow, and trying to give it some meaningful expression.”
Speaking of his gifted patients and artists in general, he adds, “Who wouldn’t be a little neurotic having that kind of responsibility?
“But, as Freud recognized, we’re all neurotic to some degree. And as Jung once said, we all have complexes. That is not the question. The only question is whether we have complexes or they have us.”
He claims that most mature artists “realize the relationship between rage and creativity. It is their rage that, when redirected and channeled into their work, gives it the intensity and passion that performing artists such as actors and actresses seek.
The acting of Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange, he notes, “are good examples. These artists have learned how to harness the power and intensity of their own rage (among other daimonic emotions), deliberately tapping into their personal demons to animate and intensify their acting.
“Creativity, then, can in part be thought of as the capacity to express the daimonic constructively. This is what all great artists do.”Another powerful actor, acclaimed for her performance in “Mulholland Drive,” Naomi Watts commented about working with director David Lynch, “David saw me for myself and was OK with my self-doubts.
“And I gave him the part of myself I felt I’d been hiding for so long, that didn’t need to be hidden. But he’s an artist and he knows that creativity, humor and sexuality all come out of a dark place.”
“An artist can be understood as someone who strives to express him- or herself creatively rather than destructively.“I see it as a conscious choice one makes in life, to aspire either toward the light or the dark, positive or negative, the creative or destructive.
“The daimonic demands expression, one way or the other. The artist — be it the actor, musician, painter, playwright, poet, novelist or simply a person who lives life very creatively — is able to give voice to his or her demons constructively rather than acting them out destructively.
“So acting and ‘acting out’ are two different things.
“Acting out is a compulsive, unconscious and generally destructive expression in life of the exact same feelings the actor expresses on the stage or set.
“But the actor deliberately, and largely consciously, chooses to express the daimonic artistically — and this is therapeutic insofar as he or she is liberated in some measure from the need to act out such passions literally as, say, a serial killer or other violent criminal does.
[Photo: Christian Bale in The Dark Knight. He gained the nickname “Tandy” because he was always throwing tantrums – see article Anger and creativity.]
“But to confront consciously one’s inner demons — the daimonic — takes great courage.“It is an enormous struggle with one’s self, a coming to terms with who one really is and how one really feels, an arduous, demanding process in which pursuing or persisting in artistic work can be instrumental.”
In his book, Diamond writes about a number of prominent and accomplished artists who exhibit varying degrees of success in accessing and expressing their demons in positive ways.
One such example, painter and sculptor Niki de St. Phalle, was able to find “a fertile outlet for her ferocious rage toward men — and the dominant masculine art establishment — via the creative expression of violence in her highly controversial work.
“Her famous ‘shooting paintings’ resulted from firing live ammunition at paint-filled, white-washed balloons mounted on a blank, virginal canvas.
“Thus, rather than becoming a crazed killer or vengeful victimizer of men, de St. Phalle’s fury — some of which stemmed from having been sexually abused by her father — fostered a fecund creativity, that served her well throughout her prolific career.”
Picasso was also someone who prolifically expressed much violence and dark emotion through his work, but was, Diamond points out, “also quite destructive, especially regarding the women in his life.”
He is an example of what Diamond calls an angry “dysdaimonic genius” — someone possessed by the daimonic.
Other examples he cites include novelist Richard Wright and painters Jackson Pollock and Vincent van Gogh.
“The fact that van Gogh suffered from severe psychopathology — including substance abuse — is indisputable,” Diamond writes.
“Indeed, the presence of marked psychopathology is one of the defining hallmarks of dysdaimonia.”A “career criminal” and writer, Jack Henry Abbott “is an example of someone primarily evil, a furious sociopathic personality, who abruptly became extremely creative, producing a critically-acclaimed book championed by Norman Mailer, prior to committing murder and eventually committing suicide in prison.”
The difference between violent offenders like Abbott, Ted Bundy or Charles Manson and the artist, Diamond suggests, is that “the artist endeavors to express his or her antisocial and aggressive impulses (i.e., the daimonic) via acting, painting, music, etc., whereas the murderer is driven to act out these destructive impulses in reality, imposing them unconsciously onto the canvas of real life with little or no concern as to the devastatingly negative effects on the victims, their families, and society in general.”
All true artists at times function “in a state of daimonic possession to some extent,” Diamond says.“In Steven Spielberg’s classic, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, actor Richard Dreyfuss gives us an incredibly compelling, dynamic and utterly convincing view into the daimonic drivenness of the artist.
“He actually is compelled, against all convention, to become an artist, a sculptor, in order to find some way to realize and give meaning to the vision in his head — in that story, a vision implanted by extraterrestrial visitors.
“Dreyfuss’ character says, ‘I know this means something.’ He can’t figure it out; that’s what he’s struggling with: trying to give meaning to his experience.
“But there is also a lot of destruction in that state: he’s wrecking his marriage, wrecking his home, his health, and this is very much true of that kind of daimonic possession state in intense creativity.
“But art in general can be conceived of as a process of trying to perfectly realize in the outer world a particular interior vision, emotion or idea, regardless of its origin.”
Regarding the paradoxical coincidence of creativity and destructiveness (or evil), Diamond cites Jungian analyst Liliane Frey-Rohn:
“Evil is of fundamental importance also in the creative process.“For although creativity is usually evaluated as exclusively positive, the fact is that whenever creative expression becomes an inner necessity, evil is also constellated.”
This closeness of evil and creativity can be seen in the lives of those who are unsuccessful in finding a positive creative voice.
“If once the daimonic has been wakened,” warns Diamond, “and no constructive conduit for self-expression can be found, violence, destructiveness, and evil offer convenient alternative outlets.
“Hence the perils and importance of assisting patients in pursuing their creative proclivities.”
The goal for psychotherapy with artists and other creative individuals, he explains, is “not to eradicate the daimonic, to drug or rationalize the demons out of existence.
“Not only is this not desirable; it is not possible, at least not in the long-run. As Rollo May put it, the therapist’s task is to awaken and confront the demons, not put them to sleep.
“There was a recent study done which concluded that psychotherapy was at least as effective for treatment of at least some psychiatric disorders as psychotropic drugs — and the positive effects are more enduring!
“Why is this? Because when therapy is done well, the patient has integrated cognitive and other tools to deal more constructively with his or her demons.
“Some artists like Ingmar Bergman, for example, have learned to live with their demons rather than trying to simply suppress or divorce them.
“In therapy, one learns to accept and even befriend one’s demons — the daimonic — recognizing that they not only make us who we are but that they participate in and invigorate our creativity.”
“The poet Rainer Maria Rilke dropped out of therapy after only a few analytic sessions, fearing, ‘If my devils leave me, my angels will too.’
“But that is a false fear as regards any therapy that respects, fosters, and cultivates the daimonic,” Diamond feels.
“Still, many artists understandably resist therapeutic treatments aimed at toning down or suppressing the daimonic cognitively, behaviorally or biochemically.
“Creativity can be simplistically defined as the constructive expression of the daimonic.“When the artist gives voice to his or her darkest impulses in his or her work, the destructive impact is minimized and the daimonic energy positively informs the work.
“When the serial killer or mass murderer or terrorist gives voice to these antisocial impulses, evil is the result.”
During the creative process, Diamond finds, “one can enter into what I call a state of ‘benevolent possession.’ It’s a sort of trance.
“The artist allows herself or himself to be swept up in the raging current of primordial images, ideas, intuitions and emotions emanating from the daimonic or unconscious, while, at the same time, retaining sufficient conscious control to render this raw energy or prima materia into some new creative form.
“This kind of voluntary possession can be a constructive, integrating, even healing experience.
“But its inducement demands specific attributes, discipline and skills, including adequate ego strength to withstand and meaningfully structure (rather than succumbing to) daimonic chaos.
“The boundary between benevolent and malevolent possession is perilously permeable.“The insight, creativity, inspiration and ecstasy of voluntary possession,” he explains, “can quickly deteriorate into destructive, involuntary possession, otherwise known as madness or psychosis.
“This is the dark side of creativity. This is, for example, one way of thinking about mania in bipolar disorder, which has long been associated with possession, madness, and creativity.
“Many artists with this syndrome welcome or seek to intentionally invite possession in order to enhance their creativity. Drugs and alcohol are often employed precisely for this purpose, a sort of chemical lubrication of the creative process.
“But such immersion in the unconscious can be dangerous, and the artist can be swamped, inundated and swept away into full-blown mania. Or the mood can suddenly switch to its opposite, triggering a major depressive episode. So this shows that creativity can also be a dangerous business.”
The idea of possession has been around a long time, he points out, and “it used to be believed — and still is by many people — that it is caused by entities of some kind, demons, devils and so forth.
“Jung is the one who talked about it most. He said the shadow, and the unconscious in general, has the power to possess the individual due to its unconsciousness; the more unconsciousness there is, the more vulnerability there is for that kind of possession in the negative sense.
“And he talked about complexes in particular, having the ability to take possession of one in a destructive way.”
An illustration is the Robert Louis Stevenson story “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” in which an unconscious personality, the shadow, has the power to take over, “because of its very dissociation: that’s what gives it its power.
“When Rollo May talked about it the daimonic, part of the definition is the potentiality to be possessed, to be driven by it unconsciously, for it to take over and usurp the whole personality.”
Anxiety, like anger or rage, is another experience closely connected to creativity.“It is true that not all creativity comes out of anxiety,” Diamond clarifies, “in the same way that not all creativity comes from anger or rage. But anxiety typically, to some extent, accompanies and spurs on the creative process.
“Anxiety can be thought of as one of those demons we don’t want to deal with or even know about. So we tend to deny it, avoid it. Drinking, drugs, compulsive gambling, sexual promiscuity, workaholism — all are futile attempts to avoid anxiety. Anxiety is related to the fear of the unknown, of the unconscious, and of death.
“Creativity requires making use of this existential anxiety. There are two fundamental ways of responding to anxiety: avoidance or confrontation. Creativity involves the confrontation of anxiety, and of that which underlies the anxiety, i.e., discovering the meaning of one’s anxiety.”
Diamond adds that anxiety can be a signal that unacceptable (daimonic) impulses conflicting with consciousness are “threatening to break through their repression. These impulsions can be profoundly threatening to our sense of identity, our ‘persona’ as Jung called it, or our egos.”
Such “unacceptable” impulses come from a dark inner territory Jung called “the shadow” and we typically dread looking “in there” or having impulses appear unbidden.
“But if we can stand firm without running,” Diamond says, “tolerating the anxiety these unwanted visitations, these ‘close encounters’ engender, we can begin to give them form and hear what it is they want of us.
“Creativity comes from this refusal to run, this willing encounter with anxiety and what lies beyond it.“It is an opening up to the unknown, the unconscious, the daimonic.
“And it can be terrifying. The real trick is learning to use the anxiety to work rather than escape. And all of this requires immense courage, the courage to create.
“So anxiety stems from conflict — either inner or outer conflict — and creativity is an attempt to constructively resolve that conflict.
“Why do people create? We create because we seek to give some formal expression to inner experience.
“Certainly, that inner experience is sometimes joy, peace, tranquility, love, etc. We wish to share that experience with our fellow human beings.”
But, he continues, human nature being what it is, “more often the inner experience is conflict, confusion, anxiety, anger, rage, lust, and so forth. So this is what fuels and informs the bulk of creative work, and it is what gives it its resonance, intensity, and cutting edge.”
Anxiety not only motivates most creative activity, it inevitably accompanies the process.“This is because in order to be creative — to bring something new into being, something unique, original, revolutionary — one must take risks: the risk of making a fool of oneself; the risk of being laughed at; the risk of failing; the risk of being rejected.”
This is the reason “true creativity” requires so much courage, he explains. “One can never know the outcome of the process at the outset. Yet, one is putting oneself on the line, fully committing oneself to the uncertain project.
“Hence, one is plagued by the demons of doubt, discouragement, despair, trepidation, intimidation, guilt, and so on. Who wouldn’t feel anxious?
“Nonetheless, it is during this process — once we have decided unequivocally to throw ourselves fully into it, for better or worse, to completely commit to it — that there can be moments of lucidity, clarity, passionate intensity that transcend all petty concerns.
“It is then — when we stop worrying about what others will think, when we stop trying so hard, when we relinquish ego control and surrender to the daimonic, when we relax or play — that what Jung termed the ‘transcendent function’ kicks in, and the conflict is resolved, the problem is solved, the creative answer revealed.”
So this kind of alliance with the daimonic aspect of our selves is of profound value. As Diamond writes in his book: “By bravely voicing our inner ‘demons’ — symbolizing those tendencies in us that we most fear, flee from, and hence, are obsessed or haunted by — we transmute them into helpful allies, in the form of newly liberated, life-giving psychic energy, for use in constructive activity.
“During this alchemical activity, we come to discover the surprising paradox that many artists perceive: That which we had previously run from and rejected turns out to be the redemptive source of vitality, creativity, and authentic spirituality.”
~ ~ ~
Stephen A. Diamond, Ph.D. is a licensed clinical and forensic psychologist practicing in Los Angeles, CA. Dr. Diamond is a designated forensic consultant for the Los Angeles Superior Court (criminal division), and maintains a private psychotherapy practice where he sees many talented individuals, including members of the Screen Actors Guild.
A former pupil and protege of Dr. Rollo May, he has taught at the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology, J.F.K. University, the C.G. Jung Institute–Zurich and the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology.
He was a contributing author to the best-selling anthology Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature.
He is the author of Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity
and a newer version Anger, Madness and the Daimonic: The Paradoxical Power of Rage in Violence, Evil and Creativity.
Also see Stephen A. Diamond’s site and Psychology Today blog Evil Deeds.
~~~~~~
Photo: Guillermo del Toro and creature from his movie “Pan’s Labyrinth.”
He has commented about intuition and people having two levels of thought, conscious and unconscious or subconscious. “Our problem is that we divide things that may be instinctive and collective and we have compartmentalized our perception so strongly that we only get them in glimpses and I think this is where the idea of the Jungian archetype comes to work…
“I believe that there is a whole dimension that I wouldn’t call supernatural but ‘supranatural,’ that I believe in,” he says.
From my article Developing Creativity and Business Success Using Our Intuition.
Photo: “comfort in shadows” from article Owning Our Shadow Self.
~~~
Embrace of the Daimon: Healing through the Subtle Energy Body/Jungian Psychology & the Dark Feminine
https://www.amazon.com/Embrace-Daimon-Healing-Psychology-Feminine/dp/1939812038
http://soulspelunker.com/2014/04/the-changing-faces-of-daimon-html.html
http://thecreativemind.net/the-psychology-of-creativity-redeeming-our-inner-demons/
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4078612-the-daemon
In The Daemon: A Guide to Your Extraordinary Secret Self, Peake expands on one of the most enigmatic areas of his previous book, the proposition that all consciously aware beings consist of not one but two separate consciousnesses – everyday consciousness and that of The Daemon, a higher being that seems to possess knowledge of future events.
Augoeides is an obscure term meaning "luminous body" and thought to refer to the planets. Aleister Crowley considered the term to refer to the Holy Guardian Angel of Abramelin; the Atman of Hinduism the Daemon of the ancient Greeks.
Jung said, “The daimon throws us down, makes us traitors to our ideals and cherished convictions—traitors to the selves we thought we were.” Rollo May pointed out that, “The daimonic . . . can be either creative or destructive and is normally both.” It carries the energy of the demonic (destructive aspect) and daimonic (creative aspect). Freud called Jung, "a man in the grip of his daimon." And it is the daemon that has a specific interest in the outcome of our lives.
All old trees had their daimon, and the World Tree -- mankind's most magnificent legend -- is no exception. The personified tree is the daimon at the same time because they are different categories of existence -- secular and sacred. When we are 'called', we are called by our daimon. If we ignore that call we may wither away or live half a life. The daimon helps us know ourselves. If we are fortunate the daimon informs our life and death with some nobility and poetry.
Anima Mundi, the World Soul also has a daimon that guides and cajoles her to her destiny, whatever that may be. The Anima Mundi and her Daimon are archetypal powers.
The Genius of Genealogy
Iona Miller, (c)2016
"The eye of the heart that ‘sees’ is also the eye of death that sees through visible presentations to an invisible core. When Michelangelo sculpted portraits of his contemporaries or of the figures of religion and myth, he attempted to see what he called the immagine del cuor, the heart’s image, “a prefiguration” of what he was sculpting, as if the chisel that cut the rock followed the eye that penetrated his subject to the heart. The portrait aimed to reveal the inner soul of what he was carving." (Hillman, Soul's Code, p146)
DAIMON:
Voice of the Higher Presence
The ancient Greeks believed that our character or genius was a daimon [Latin daemon] or divine spirit who oversaw our experiences with mortality -- dispenser of our fate -- our personal yet transcendent god. The root of daimon, from the Indo-European, is to “deal out” --inspirations, ideas, imaginings, illnesses, problems, all the things that compose personality.
Plato suggested we are each born with a unique daimon or guardian before we are born, and it has selected an image or a pattern that we will live on earth. The daimon is the soul companion that guides us, but at birth we forget. The daimon remembers, however, what belongs to us, and therefore, it is our daimon that is the carrier of our destiny, our inner self. It is essentially identical with Jung's notion of the Self.
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho echoes Jung's theory in biological terms. She postulates that, "a pure coherent state for the entire system would be a many-mode quantum electrodynamical field with a collective phase over all modes. It may be attainable only under very exceptional circumstances, as during an aesthetic or religious experience when the ‘pure duration’ of the here and now becomes completely delocalized in the realm of no-time and no-space.”
Daimon is character and character is destiny, the individual, immortal and potentially divine part of ourselves. Each unique image acts as a personal daimon, the force of fate. We care for our soul by allowing that force to move through us constantly and to have expression. Sometimes we may seem possessed by it. Jung described it as a spirit with a degree of autonomy, an inner urge, both guide and tempter, having a strong influence on interior life.
In the Hellenistic ruler cult that began with Alexander the Great, it was not the ruler, but his guiding daemon that was venerated. Telesphorus is one of the Cabiri, and the daimon of Aesclepius (see fig. 77, Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12), who was also regarded as a God of healing.
In the Archaic or early Classical period, the daimon had been democratized and internalized for each person, whom it served to guide, motivate, and inspire, as one possessed of such good spirits. Similarly, the first-century Roman imperial cult began by venerating the genius or numen of Augustus, a distinction that blurred in time.
Guardian Angels
The daimon is a personification of the ancestors, intimately related, yet separate and remote, like the dead. A daimon is our divine element, an intercessor between gods and mankind -- a 'serpentine' companion spirit, the impersonal collective power of the gods to dispense destiny and the numinous as individual events and experience.
A destiny spirit or guardian angel, it also personifies conscience, the voice of our unconscious, or higher self -- a doppelganger through who's eyes we can catch of glimpse of our far-flung future, the life we will live in reverse. It is our destiny and protector, but it only protects the part of us that serves its plan for your self, because it springs from the impersonal Ground of being.
But to have soul is the whole venture of life, for soul is a life-giving daemon who plays his elfin game above and below human existence, for which reason-in the realm of dogma he is threatened and propitiated with superhuman punishments and blessings that go far beyond the possible deserts of human
beings. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 26-27
All old trees had their daimon or tree numen, and the World Tree is no exception. This is the ancestral or family daimon -- the secret voice of family memories. The tree is the wise or knowing diamon at the same time because they are different categories of existence -- secular and sacred in phase co-existence, (an influence perceptible by mind if not by the senses). Active in many contexts, sometimes the daimon appears in the form of Asklepios the healer, whose staff is entwined with the serpent.
The daimon lives in the thymus in our trunk, and we can converse with it. In fact, it needs talk. It can waken you to your innermost passions, so you need to talk with it and work out a liveable connection to the creative spirit. It can appear in love triangles, difficult relationships, and partnerships.
When we are 'called', we are called by our daimon. If we ignore that call we may wither away or live half a life. To answer that call is essentially a shamanic initiation that opens relations with the Otherworld -- equilibrium of conscious and unconscious. If we are fortunate the daimon informs our creativity and death with some nobility.
We were infused with the value of our potential. Creativity has frequently been treated as a form of self-expression or a way of understanding or coping with life that is intimately connected with personal dignity, expression of one's inner being, self-actualization, and the like (e.g., Maslow, 1973; May, 1976; Rogers, 1961). Moustakis (1977) summarized the individualistic approach to creativity by seeing it as the pathway to living your own life your own way.
This plant is an inner, spiritual growth, the development of a tree of life and knowledge which played a great role in alchemy....In general it is advisable to watch these inner developments and not let them slip back into the unconscious, lest they get stuck in the physiological sphere, or rather in the realm of the [psychoid] unconscious which merges with the body, where they give rise to pathological formations which a wise man carefully avoids. (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 607-608)
Constructive/Destructive Polar Opposites
Jung called compulsions the greatest mystery of human behavior. The heterogeneous character of the daimon is confirmed by the description of its body as an “alien garment.” As trickster, it urges us toward the deathless mental aspects of compulsions. The daimon both instigates an abrupt change of behavior pattern and at the same time gives a conscious reason or narrative account. Sometimes the daimon is inhibiting - a cautionary spirit and works against our desires.
The daimon can incite 'oblivion-seeking' in the person -- the escapism and oblivion of addiction and altered states. It seduces the ego into oblivion and anesthetizes it. The incarnate daimon is also the physical principle of love. There is the flesh and blood reality, the character, the daimonic element within and the lived history of the human person, which is a deep mystery.
‘Fate’ is distinguished from ‘fatalism’, ‘telos’ is distinguished from ‘teleology’, and ‘accidents’ and ‘necessity’ are all explanations of how individuals may be guided but not determined by daimonic influence. We must be free to choose to grow into the daimonic image, or to ignore this, or to try to forge another identity, or to find what there is for us to find: the stars do not determine human life, they simply guide.
James Hillman's acorn theory says that the "daimon" selects the egg and the sperm, that their union results from our necessity, not the other way around. This has huge implications. Soul, calling, or image, it guides our unique path. The daimon guides us down into the form of our calling -- in terms of a soul’s descent rather than a developmental ascent from nature and nurture.
Cost of Personal Satisfactions
Sometimes, however the "daimon" asks a great deal from you. You feel as if you've never done enough. You've never written enough, played enough, or fought enough, whatever it is. There is always more because it is like an unquenchable urge. It costs what you might call your normalcy. (Hillman)
"A child defends its daimon's dignity. That's why even a frail child at a 'tender' age refuses to submit to what it feels is unfair and untrue and reacts so savagely to abusive misperecptions. The idea of childhood abuse needs to be expanded beyond the sexual kind--which is so vicious not principally because it is sexual, but because it abuses the dignity at the core of personality, that acorn of myth."[Hillman, Pg.27 The Soul's Code.]
"The acorn theory proposes, and I will bring evidence for the claim that you and I and every single person is born with a defining image. Individuality resides in a formal cause--to use old philosophical language going back to Aristotle. We each embody our own idea, in the language of Plato and Plotinus. And this form, this idea, this image does not tolerate too much straying. The theory also attributes to this innate image an angelic or daimonic intention, as if it were a spark of consciousness; and, moreover, holds that it has our interest at heart because it chose us for its reasons."[James Hillman, Pg. 12, The Soul's Code]
Hillman suggests that the daimon explains the impossible marriages, quick conceptions, and sudden desertions that form the stories of so many of our parents. He goes further to point out the poverty of seeing our mothers and fathers as, literally, mom and dad, when nature could be our mother, books our father - whatever connects us to the world and teaches us. Quoting Alfred North Whitehead, who said that ‘religion is world loyalty’, Hillman says that we must believe in the world’s ability to provide for us and lovingly reveal to us its mysteries.
The Soul’s Code shows how the daimon will assert itself in love, giving rise to obsessions and torments of romantic agony that defy the logic of evolutionary biology.
Fate, Fortune, & Chance
Every person had their spirit or guardian angel, an occult power mediating the celestial and terrestrial realms. It appears 'replete with knowledge' and the power of Presence, perhaps even an audible voice. In popular thought, such daimones were credited with conveying supernatural powers and abilities to humans, resulting in increased physical or intellectual prowess for special occasions. They could also effect changes in human moods and temperaments, and their accompanying actions.
The daimon is our invisible and irrational spiritual guide or self, and our character -- a divine mediating power that impels our action and drives or mediates our destiny. It is what makes us unique in relation to the world. This inborn immortal factor embodies our innate talents, inherent gifts, and positive or negative natural tendencies -- and a way to honor the individuality of soul.
This supreme form of soul is our constant companion and source of inspiration -- like the Latin genii, our genius. This "genius" (from the Latin genere) means to generate, to beget, making the daimon the voice of the generative process in us. It can be a personification of the transcendent function, experienced in dreams and in our acts of doing and becoming. The gifted child tends to be blessed with some sort of self-remembrance. Jung notes, "A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon." (pp. 356-357)
The daimon is also our suffering, emotional disorder, and more, but could also heal, and promote health, happiness, resilience, perseverance, and harmony. The vitality of the inner universe is mobilized in happiness, misery, regret. The daimon can inform even a painful death with some poetry and grace.
Suffering can be produced by painful states of mind such as hatred, envy, alienation, scapegoating, cruelty, and loneliness. The daimon can also bring altruism, empathy, compassion, concern, care, consolation, and pity. It brings understand of the beauty, compassion, and the foundation of wisdom...perhaps even the psychobiological transformations of epigenetics, changing our responses to life experiences.
Regardless of the nature of the genes we inherit from our parents, dynamic change at this level allows us almost unlimited influence on our fate. Beyond "biology a destiny" is “self-directed biological transformation,” but under the daimon, not the ego. the disruptive and transformative reality of the individuation process, the uncanny otherness of the unconscious.
In The Soul’s Code, James Hillman discusses Plato’s Er myth—that the soul is given a daimon (inner attendant spirit or inspiring force) at birth, which is the carrier of one’s destiny. We may forget our daimon, but it doesn’t forget us.
The daimon knows the future and is at all times in touch with the world-spirit, with the Logos or spermatic pneuma of the universe. Masculine and feminine merge in this androgynous symbol of wholeness. This archetypal image, like the lapis in alchemy, unites the opposites of masculine and feminine in one figure (Von Franz).
Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel,
or the daemon, one's true spiritual identity.
The daimon has our interest at heart, guiding providence; it motivates, protects, invents, has prescience, and persists. The daimon can be a force of deviance and oddity, especially when it is opposed or neglected. Hillman enumerates various signs of daimonic feelings: restlessness of heart, impatience, dissatisfaction, and yearning. He notes that the daimon wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition—especially by you.
The daimonic can be both creative and destructive. Some say “The devil is in the details,” meaning solutions break down when you examine them closely enough. Some say “God is in the details,” meaning opportunities for discovery and creativity come from digging into the details. Both are true, but the latter is more interesting. “The daemon is in the details” is more encompassing.
The central aim of Western magic is to attain or stabilize the emergence of Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, or the daemon, one's true spiritual identity. This implies drawing closer to the consciousness of one's authentic individuality, in contradistinction to the active conscious personality.
We can achieve a form of sacred marriage with the inner mate, known in alchemy as the coniunctio. This union produces a Magickal Child that symbolizes our potential for realization of the Higher Self, self-actualization. The “Knowledge and Conversation” of the Holy Guardian Angel is a vital part of the Abramelin Operation to embody. To Crowley, finding one’s true will or purpose in life was the only justifiable use of such Knowledge or gnosis; any other use was black magic.
We get the notion of demonic possession from the destructive workings of these forces; this is also where the notion of “evil genius” comes from. Many artists are haunted by their daimons, showing that our wounds made us who we are and that living creatively with them is key. We can learn to use this inextinguishable heat to forge works and the self.
We experience the muse, daemon, or 'angels' of creativity in their divine autonomy. In a sense, the artist is 'ridden' by the creative daemon that possesses him or her. How often works of creative genius arrive in consciousness almost fully formed. The face of the beloved angel is our divinity -- our light that draws breath, our embodied nakedness.
Jung defined intuition as "perception via the unconscious": using sense-perception only as a starting point, to bring forth ideas, images, possibilities, ways out of a blocked situation, by a process that is mostly unconscious. In the divine act of reconnection, imagination conveys divine thoughts through images, penetrating deeper levels of insight with trans-sensory perception.
Jung said, “the daemonic is the not yet realized creative.” Perceptual diversity helps us access a variety of non-rational altered states of consciousness, including dreams, trance, imagination, divination, and meditation -- presentational illumination.
An interview with Stephen A. Diamond, Ph.D.
by Douglas Eby
A clinical and forensic psychologist, Stephen Diamond works with many talented individuals committed to becoming more creative.
“Creativity,” he states, “is one of humankind’s healthiest inclinations, one of our greatest attributes.”
As he explains in his book, “Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic,” our impulse to be creative “can be understood to some degree as the subjective struggle to give form, structure and constructive expression to inner and outer chaos and conflict.
“It can also be one of the most dynamic methods of meeting and redeeming one’s devils and demons.”
Anger, he asserts, is one of the most troubling emotions for psychotherapy patients in general. Yet, there is, Diamond says, a “very strong correlation between anger, rage and creativity, one which most people are not aware of.
“Most of us tend to view anger or rage negatively, associating it almost exclusively with destructiveness and violence. Certainly this correlation exists. But anger can also motivate constructive and creative behavior.”
In his brief foreword to Diamond’s book, psychologist Rollo May introduces and defines the classic Greek conception of the “daimonic” or darker side of our being, noting that “the daimonic (unlike the demonic, which is merely destructive) is as much concerned with creativity as with negative reactions.
“A special characteristic of the daimonic model is that it considers both creativity on one side, and anger and rage on the other side, as coming from the same source.
“That is, constructiveness and destructiveness have the same source in human personality. The source is simply human potential.”
Dr. Diamond holds that creativity may be a powerful and often dark endeavor: “The more conflict, the more rage, the more anxiety there is, the more the inner necessity to create.“We must also bear in mind that gifted individuals, those with a genius (incidentally, genius was the Latin word for daimon, the basis of the daimonic concept) for certain things, feel this inner necessity even more intensely, and in some respects experience and give voice not only to their own demons but the collective daimonic as well.
“So they are kind of like little oracles of Delphi, or canaries in a coal mine, sensing the dangers, the conflicts, the cultural shadow, and trying to give it some meaningful expression.”
Speaking of his gifted patients and artists in general, he adds, “Who wouldn’t be a little neurotic having that kind of responsibility?
“But, as Freud recognized, we’re all neurotic to some degree. And as Jung once said, we all have complexes. That is not the question. The only question is whether we have complexes or they have us.”
He claims that most mature artists “realize the relationship between rage and creativity. It is their rage that, when redirected and channeled into their work, gives it the intensity and passion that performing artists such as actors and actresses seek.
The acting of Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange, he notes, “are good examples. These artists have learned how to harness the power and intensity of their own rage (among other daimonic emotions), deliberately tapping into their personal demons to animate and intensify their acting.
“Creativity, then, can in part be thought of as the capacity to express the daimonic constructively. This is what all great artists do.”Another powerful actor, acclaimed for her performance in “Mulholland Drive,” Naomi Watts commented about working with director David Lynch, “David saw me for myself and was OK with my self-doubts.
“And I gave him the part of myself I felt I’d been hiding for so long, that didn’t need to be hidden. But he’s an artist and he knows that creativity, humor and sexuality all come out of a dark place.”
“An artist can be understood as someone who strives to express him- or herself creatively rather than destructively.“I see it as a conscious choice one makes in life, to aspire either toward the light or the dark, positive or negative, the creative or destructive.
“The daimonic demands expression, one way or the other. The artist — be it the actor, musician, painter, playwright, poet, novelist or simply a person who lives life very creatively — is able to give voice to his or her demons constructively rather than acting them out destructively.
“So acting and ‘acting out’ are two different things.
“Acting out is a compulsive, unconscious and generally destructive expression in life of the exact same feelings the actor expresses on the stage or set.
“But the actor deliberately, and largely consciously, chooses to express the daimonic artistically — and this is therapeutic insofar as he or she is liberated in some measure from the need to act out such passions literally as, say, a serial killer or other violent criminal does.
[Photo: Christian Bale in The Dark Knight. He gained the nickname “Tandy” because he was always throwing tantrums – see article Anger and creativity.]
“But to confront consciously one’s inner demons — the daimonic — takes great courage.“It is an enormous struggle with one’s self, a coming to terms with who one really is and how one really feels, an arduous, demanding process in which pursuing or persisting in artistic work can be instrumental.”
In his book, Diamond writes about a number of prominent and accomplished artists who exhibit varying degrees of success in accessing and expressing their demons in positive ways.
One such example, painter and sculptor Niki de St. Phalle, was able to find “a fertile outlet for her ferocious rage toward men — and the dominant masculine art establishment — via the creative expression of violence in her highly controversial work.
“Her famous ‘shooting paintings’ resulted from firing live ammunition at paint-filled, white-washed balloons mounted on a blank, virginal canvas.
“Thus, rather than becoming a crazed killer or vengeful victimizer of men, de St. Phalle’s fury — some of which stemmed from having been sexually abused by her father — fostered a fecund creativity, that served her well throughout her prolific career.”
Picasso was also someone who prolifically expressed much violence and dark emotion through his work, but was, Diamond points out, “also quite destructive, especially regarding the women in his life.”
He is an example of what Diamond calls an angry “dysdaimonic genius” — someone possessed by the daimonic.
Other examples he cites include novelist Richard Wright and painters Jackson Pollock and Vincent van Gogh.
“The fact that van Gogh suffered from severe psychopathology — including substance abuse — is indisputable,” Diamond writes.
“Indeed, the presence of marked psychopathology is one of the defining hallmarks of dysdaimonia.”A “career criminal” and writer, Jack Henry Abbott “is an example of someone primarily evil, a furious sociopathic personality, who abruptly became extremely creative, producing a critically-acclaimed book championed by Norman Mailer, prior to committing murder and eventually committing suicide in prison.”
The difference between violent offenders like Abbott, Ted Bundy or Charles Manson and the artist, Diamond suggests, is that “the artist endeavors to express his or her antisocial and aggressive impulses (i.e., the daimonic) via acting, painting, music, etc., whereas the murderer is driven to act out these destructive impulses in reality, imposing them unconsciously onto the canvas of real life with little or no concern as to the devastatingly negative effects on the victims, their families, and society in general.”
All true artists at times function “in a state of daimonic possession to some extent,” Diamond says.“In Steven Spielberg’s classic, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, actor Richard Dreyfuss gives us an incredibly compelling, dynamic and utterly convincing view into the daimonic drivenness of the artist.
“He actually is compelled, against all convention, to become an artist, a sculptor, in order to find some way to realize and give meaning to the vision in his head — in that story, a vision implanted by extraterrestrial visitors.
“Dreyfuss’ character says, ‘I know this means something.’ He can’t figure it out; that’s what he’s struggling with: trying to give meaning to his experience.
“But there is also a lot of destruction in that state: he’s wrecking his marriage, wrecking his home, his health, and this is very much true of that kind of daimonic possession state in intense creativity.
“But art in general can be conceived of as a process of trying to perfectly realize in the outer world a particular interior vision, emotion or idea, regardless of its origin.”
Regarding the paradoxical coincidence of creativity and destructiveness (or evil), Diamond cites Jungian analyst Liliane Frey-Rohn:
“Evil is of fundamental importance also in the creative process.“For although creativity is usually evaluated as exclusively positive, the fact is that whenever creative expression becomes an inner necessity, evil is also constellated.”
This closeness of evil and creativity can be seen in the lives of those who are unsuccessful in finding a positive creative voice.
“If once the daimonic has been wakened,” warns Diamond, “and no constructive conduit for self-expression can be found, violence, destructiveness, and evil offer convenient alternative outlets.
“Hence the perils and importance of assisting patients in pursuing their creative proclivities.”
The goal for psychotherapy with artists and other creative individuals, he explains, is “not to eradicate the daimonic, to drug or rationalize the demons out of existence.
“Not only is this not desirable; it is not possible, at least not in the long-run. As Rollo May put it, the therapist’s task is to awaken and confront the demons, not put them to sleep.
“There was a recent study done which concluded that psychotherapy was at least as effective for treatment of at least some psychiatric disorders as psychotropic drugs — and the positive effects are more enduring!
“Why is this? Because when therapy is done well, the patient has integrated cognitive and other tools to deal more constructively with his or her demons.
“Some artists like Ingmar Bergman, for example, have learned to live with their demons rather than trying to simply suppress or divorce them.
“In therapy, one learns to accept and even befriend one’s demons — the daimonic — recognizing that they not only make us who we are but that they participate in and invigorate our creativity.”
“The poet Rainer Maria Rilke dropped out of therapy after only a few analytic sessions, fearing, ‘If my devils leave me, my angels will too.’
“But that is a false fear as regards any therapy that respects, fosters, and cultivates the daimonic,” Diamond feels.
“Still, many artists understandably resist therapeutic treatments aimed at toning down or suppressing the daimonic cognitively, behaviorally or biochemically.
“Creativity can be simplistically defined as the constructive expression of the daimonic.“When the artist gives voice to his or her darkest impulses in his or her work, the destructive impact is minimized and the daimonic energy positively informs the work.
“When the serial killer or mass murderer or terrorist gives voice to these antisocial impulses, evil is the result.”
During the creative process, Diamond finds, “one can enter into what I call a state of ‘benevolent possession.’ It’s a sort of trance.
“The artist allows herself or himself to be swept up in the raging current of primordial images, ideas, intuitions and emotions emanating from the daimonic or unconscious, while, at the same time, retaining sufficient conscious control to render this raw energy or prima materia into some new creative form.
“This kind of voluntary possession can be a constructive, integrating, even healing experience.
“But its inducement demands specific attributes, discipline and skills, including adequate ego strength to withstand and meaningfully structure (rather than succumbing to) daimonic chaos.
“The boundary between benevolent and malevolent possession is perilously permeable.“The insight, creativity, inspiration and ecstasy of voluntary possession,” he explains, “can quickly deteriorate into destructive, involuntary possession, otherwise known as madness or psychosis.
“This is the dark side of creativity. This is, for example, one way of thinking about mania in bipolar disorder, which has long been associated with possession, madness, and creativity.
“Many artists with this syndrome welcome or seek to intentionally invite possession in order to enhance their creativity. Drugs and alcohol are often employed precisely for this purpose, a sort of chemical lubrication of the creative process.
“But such immersion in the unconscious can be dangerous, and the artist can be swamped, inundated and swept away into full-blown mania. Or the mood can suddenly switch to its opposite, triggering a major depressive episode. So this shows that creativity can also be a dangerous business.”
The idea of possession has been around a long time, he points out, and “it used to be believed — and still is by many people — that it is caused by entities of some kind, demons, devils and so forth.
“Jung is the one who talked about it most. He said the shadow, and the unconscious in general, has the power to possess the individual due to its unconsciousness; the more unconsciousness there is, the more vulnerability there is for that kind of possession in the negative sense.
“And he talked about complexes in particular, having the ability to take possession of one in a destructive way.”
An illustration is the Robert Louis Stevenson story “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” in which an unconscious personality, the shadow, has the power to take over, “because of its very dissociation: that’s what gives it its power.
“When Rollo May talked about it the daimonic, part of the definition is the potentiality to be possessed, to be driven by it unconsciously, for it to take over and usurp the whole personality.”
Anxiety, like anger or rage, is another experience closely connected to creativity.“It is true that not all creativity comes out of anxiety,” Diamond clarifies, “in the same way that not all creativity comes from anger or rage. But anxiety typically, to some extent, accompanies and spurs on the creative process.
“Anxiety can be thought of as one of those demons we don’t want to deal with or even know about. So we tend to deny it, avoid it. Drinking, drugs, compulsive gambling, sexual promiscuity, workaholism — all are futile attempts to avoid anxiety. Anxiety is related to the fear of the unknown, of the unconscious, and of death.
“Creativity requires making use of this existential anxiety. There are two fundamental ways of responding to anxiety: avoidance or confrontation. Creativity involves the confrontation of anxiety, and of that which underlies the anxiety, i.e., discovering the meaning of one’s anxiety.”
Diamond adds that anxiety can be a signal that unacceptable (daimonic) impulses conflicting with consciousness are “threatening to break through their repression. These impulsions can be profoundly threatening to our sense of identity, our ‘persona’ as Jung called it, or our egos.”
Such “unacceptable” impulses come from a dark inner territory Jung called “the shadow” and we typically dread looking “in there” or having impulses appear unbidden.
“But if we can stand firm without running,” Diamond says, “tolerating the anxiety these unwanted visitations, these ‘close encounters’ engender, we can begin to give them form and hear what it is they want of us.
“Creativity comes from this refusal to run, this willing encounter with anxiety and what lies beyond it.“It is an opening up to the unknown, the unconscious, the daimonic.
“And it can be terrifying. The real trick is learning to use the anxiety to work rather than escape. And all of this requires immense courage, the courage to create.
“So anxiety stems from conflict — either inner or outer conflict — and creativity is an attempt to constructively resolve that conflict.
“Why do people create? We create because we seek to give some formal expression to inner experience.
“Certainly, that inner experience is sometimes joy, peace, tranquility, love, etc. We wish to share that experience with our fellow human beings.”
But, he continues, human nature being what it is, “more often the inner experience is conflict, confusion, anxiety, anger, rage, lust, and so forth. So this is what fuels and informs the bulk of creative work, and it is what gives it its resonance, intensity, and cutting edge.”
Anxiety not only motivates most creative activity, it inevitably accompanies the process.“This is because in order to be creative — to bring something new into being, something unique, original, revolutionary — one must take risks: the risk of making a fool of oneself; the risk of being laughed at; the risk of failing; the risk of being rejected.”
This is the reason “true creativity” requires so much courage, he explains. “One can never know the outcome of the process at the outset. Yet, one is putting oneself on the line, fully committing oneself to the uncertain project.
“Hence, one is plagued by the demons of doubt, discouragement, despair, trepidation, intimidation, guilt, and so on. Who wouldn’t feel anxious?
“Nonetheless, it is during this process — once we have decided unequivocally to throw ourselves fully into it, for better or worse, to completely commit to it — that there can be moments of lucidity, clarity, passionate intensity that transcend all petty concerns.
“It is then — when we stop worrying about what others will think, when we stop trying so hard, when we relinquish ego control and surrender to the daimonic, when we relax or play — that what Jung termed the ‘transcendent function’ kicks in, and the conflict is resolved, the problem is solved, the creative answer revealed.”
So this kind of alliance with the daimonic aspect of our selves is of profound value. As Diamond writes in his book: “By bravely voicing our inner ‘demons’ — symbolizing those tendencies in us that we most fear, flee from, and hence, are obsessed or haunted by — we transmute them into helpful allies, in the form of newly liberated, life-giving psychic energy, for use in constructive activity.
“During this alchemical activity, we come to discover the surprising paradox that many artists perceive: That which we had previously run from and rejected turns out to be the redemptive source of vitality, creativity, and authentic spirituality.”
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Stephen A. Diamond, Ph.D. is a licensed clinical and forensic psychologist practicing in Los Angeles, CA. Dr. Diamond is a designated forensic consultant for the Los Angeles Superior Court (criminal division), and maintains a private psychotherapy practice where he sees many talented individuals, including members of the Screen Actors Guild.
A former pupil and protege of Dr. Rollo May, he has taught at the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology, J.F.K. University, the C.G. Jung Institute–Zurich and the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology.
He was a contributing author to the best-selling anthology Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature.
He is the author of Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity
and a newer version Anger, Madness and the Daimonic: The Paradoxical Power of Rage in Violence, Evil and Creativity.
Also see Stephen A. Diamond’s site and Psychology Today blog Evil Deeds.
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Photo: Guillermo del Toro and creature from his movie “Pan’s Labyrinth.”
He has commented about intuition and people having two levels of thought, conscious and unconscious or subconscious. “Our problem is that we divide things that may be instinctive and collective and we have compartmentalized our perception so strongly that we only get them in glimpses and I think this is where the idea of the Jungian archetype comes to work…
“I believe that there is a whole dimension that I wouldn’t call supernatural but ‘supranatural,’ that I believe in,” he says.
From my article Developing Creativity and Business Success Using Our Intuition.
Photo: “comfort in shadows” from article Owning Our Shadow Self.
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Embrace of the Daimon: Healing through the Subtle Energy Body/Jungian Psychology & the Dark Feminine
https://www.amazon.com/Embrace-Daimon-Healing-Psychology-Feminine/dp/1939812038
http://soulspelunker.com/2014/04/the-changing-faces-of-daimon-html.html
http://thecreativemind.net/the-psychology-of-creativity-redeeming-our-inner-demons/
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4078612-the-daemon
In The Daemon: A Guide to Your Extraordinary Secret Self, Peake expands on one of the most enigmatic areas of his previous book, the proposition that all consciously aware beings consist of not one but two separate consciousnesses – everyday consciousness and that of The Daemon, a higher being that seems to possess knowledge of future events.