Angel-Daimon-Genius-Muse-Self
in Philosophy, Magic, Depth Psychology,
Self-Knowledge, Creativity & Mysticism
in Philosophy, Magic, Depth Psychology,
Self-Knowledge, Creativity & Mysticism
If you can manage and live with your daimon,
you may have a special life.
"Happiness is to live in harmony with one’s daimon."
— Aristotle
"To live in accord with one’s daimon is difficult but profoundly rewarding."
— psychiatrist Rollo May, from Love & Will
you may have a special life.
"Happiness is to live in harmony with one’s daimon."
— Aristotle
"To live in accord with one’s daimon is difficult but profoundly rewarding."
— psychiatrist Rollo May, from Love & Will
The classical conception of daimonion ti, as Plato suggested, internalizes the influences external to the spirit and objectifies its inner demands, thus maintaining a dynamic balance between man and god. The belief in daimones as mediating spirits between gods and men was customary in ancient Athens and sacrosanct in Vedic India.
Socrates regarded the intervention of the daimon – what Gandhi called his "inner voice", which sometimes spoke to him and remained silent at other times to his deep despair – not so much as a command laid down on the human spirit by an external power as "an absolute law of the spirit itself", to quote Hegel's terms for the sacred task of the Delphic oracle.
To make this interior voice wholly subjective is to destroy its spiritual character and distort the position claimed by Socrates and Gandhi. For a few pre-Socratic writers and for some Indian mystics, the daimon or devata was no more than the genius or overbrooding spirit unique to each person.
If we adopt a facile rationalist attitude and take the daimon merely as an inflated metaphor for a familiar psychological process, thus denying it all transcendence and regarding it simply as a pathological oddity, a hallucination or a paranoid or hysterical symptom, we are, in fact, denying that it is an instrument of any meaningful communication and leaving Gandhi and Socrates, and many of the great mystics, enclosed in themselves, in a sort of autarchy, a pathetic state of self-deception.
Even if we wish to deny the objective reality of the mystic's experience, which is strictly no easier than to affirm it, it is both unnecessary and presumptuous to deny categorically its subjective validity, or the veracity and testimony of the mystics.
https://www.theosophytrust.org/805-the-daimon
Socrates regarded the intervention of the daimon – what Gandhi called his "inner voice", which sometimes spoke to him and remained silent at other times to his deep despair – not so much as a command laid down on the human spirit by an external power as "an absolute law of the spirit itself", to quote Hegel's terms for the sacred task of the Delphic oracle.
To make this interior voice wholly subjective is to destroy its spiritual character and distort the position claimed by Socrates and Gandhi. For a few pre-Socratic writers and for some Indian mystics, the daimon or devata was no more than the genius or overbrooding spirit unique to each person.
If we adopt a facile rationalist attitude and take the daimon merely as an inflated metaphor for a familiar psychological process, thus denying it all transcendence and regarding it simply as a pathological oddity, a hallucination or a paranoid or hysterical symptom, we are, in fact, denying that it is an instrument of any meaningful communication and leaving Gandhi and Socrates, and many of the great mystics, enclosed in themselves, in a sort of autarchy, a pathetic state of self-deception.
Even if we wish to deny the objective reality of the mystic's experience, which is strictly no easier than to affirm it, it is both unnecessary and presumptuous to deny categorically its subjective validity, or the veracity and testimony of the mystics.
https://www.theosophytrust.org/805-the-daimon
Great Zeus, Father of men, you would deliver them all from the evils that oppress them, if you would show them what is the Daimon of whom they make use. --PYTHAGORAS
"Seeing Through" My Daimon Eyes
“A very interesting thing is our… interpretation of the word ‘demon’… it refers to the dynamic of life, your daimon is the dynamic of your life, and we are so against the dynamic of life in our tradition that we have turned it into a devil. The word ‘demon’ has negative meaning in our tradition.” — Joseph Campbell
"We’re in a time when each person needs to embrace their own genius not by the standards of the authorities of the past, but by the felt sense of each person’s intelligence splashing its paint on the canvas of human discourse and innovation." (astrologer Nate Speare)
Liminal Presence
Our psychological history is mixed together with our archetypal needs. Liberating the Angel is the ethic of depth psychology, the essence of genius, the telos of magic, and magic of art.
The Greeks believed the Daimon was the soul communicating with the body, the timeless and formless interacting with our time-bound, finite forms. The Daimon still walks invisibly in our footsteps, as faithful a companion as Mephisto.
James Hillman often spoke of “seeing through” the literal to discover the imaginal underpinnings, a way of seeing, a way of imaging. He listens to the saying of the soul, and it speaks in his writing through him. A self-revelatory imaginal force generates imagery and a way of "seeing through" events from the literal to the concealed metaphor or overlooked presence.
We cannot disengage from mythologizing and philosophizing at the same time -- psychologizing, seeing through in the mind's eye. Memory is apt to become mytho-poetic, to exaggerate closeness of coincidence, or to add romantic details, etc.
This is soul-making, the act of noticing, tending, and actively creating with the act of reflecting upon -- to acquire a certain sense of awareness and understanding of what we created. This is a fluctuating process which drives humanity to richer experience.
Rather than explain, it complicates; rather than define, it confirms the enigma, only possible when critical work leads to spatial relations being “unhinged” from the concept of time.
Looking or seeing through events and things to their imaginal image is not a method, but a way of living, engaging intuitive intelligence. Subjective perspectives deepen vision, reflection, rhetoric, values, and ideas. Presence presents with paradoxical tendencies and shifting contours. Ficino suggested the art of magic "consists in comparing one thing to another."
Indeed, it is through “recognizing our concrete existence as metaphors, as mythic enactments” that we are able to enter the myths that permit us to understand our relation to the Gods, because in myth is where the Gods are. So if, as Hillman claims, metaphor refers to the Gods in us, then “myths are the traditional narratives of the interaction of Gods and humans, a dramatic account ‘of deeds of the daimones’” (RV, p. 157).
Myth ensouls and stories repressed instinctual impulses. Hillman argued that the soul craves the constant activity of “seeing through” … of taking something “as it is.” Working into ever deeper layers of hidden meaning in context, hidden layers draw us in. From an archetypal perspective, human existence is mythic existence.
Soul is the bottomline dimension of death, darkness, and weakness. This is the deeper sense of meaningfulness — peripheral, inner, underworld, soul-perspective or night-perspective emerging as self-arising chthonic images. The chthonic fertilizes the soil of the dark unconscious mind — the depth and darkness that anchor our being in primordial ground.
“Seeing through,” then, is the term Hillman uses when describing the metaphorical method of archetypal psychology, seeing through to an image. Seeing through daimon eyes is a form of realization, concentrated self-awareness, beyond the egoism of one-dimensional self-understanding. We are “returned to the Gods” by "seeing through" to the myth operating in the background.
Our metaphor is one of seeing through our daimon eyes. The paradox of “seeing through” is that Hillman’s archetypal psychology, which on the face of it appears postmodern, lays bare the Greek mythos from ancient times as it shines through the “here” and “now” presence of our everyday lives. More than synonymous, the vision is co-extensive in the flow state.
An archetypal approach to creativity and to a creative life is one that recognizes that we always act in concert with powers beyond our direct control. Over two thousand years ago Plato spoke of a kind of "divine madness" that swept over the great poets.
In the twentieth century, C.G. Jung insisted that creative individuals continued to be driven by their personal daimon, a type of guiding spirit. Some of the world's greatest artists, writers, psychologists, scientists and spiritual elders have insisted upon the existence of forces that unconsciously guide and direct us.
Action therapies may be curative of the child in us who has not learned to speak or the animal who cannot, or a spirit daimon that is beyond words because it is beyond soul. Dialogical gnosis, participatory knowledge, builds the relationship and engagement.
Ritual enlivens the daimon in the same way, as a factor unknown in itself, but transparent to the whole, to transcendence. The Ritual Field of mythic sensibility, the field of myth is emotional -- emergent, resonant, challenging -- inviting ritual enactment to animate and embody it.
Thus, we recognize and develop our own style of mythic consciousness, stepping into joining with others, daring to live our larger lives within the field of historic life. With invocation, we call back with an invitation to Presence to those who carry our calling.
Invisible guests: The development of imaginal dialogues, by Mary Watkins describes the dialogues we carry on silently—"with our reflection in the mirror...with a figure from a dream or movie, with our dog...with critics, with our mothers, with our god(s)..."
They are not an incidental aspect of mental life but central phenomena, laden with both cognitive and emotional significance. Imaginative life deserves analysis based on appreciation of its centrality and generative nature. Dialogue is a fundamental—perhaps the primary—form in which we think.
Operating "inwardly" or "outwardly," psyche is an exquisitely dialogical process. In both Jungian and archetypal work the bridging of conscious and unconscious occurs through dialogue, as in the practice of active imagination. Such bridging activates what Jung called the transcendent function. Hillman uses the language of "soul" for that space that opens up through dialogue.
"It is about the process of developing the metaphoric quality of the image into the ontological ground. It is not analytical nor interpretive, but ideational and phenomenological, rather than ideological or belief-based. It is a way of seeing through beliefs learned by rote. We stay with the image and engage it directly, relating rather than amplifying it or replacing it with a concept or single meaning, Hillman said.
"If one does not become the eccentric, unique, one-of-a-kind person he or she was meant to be, then a violation of some large purpose of the cosmos has occurred. Individuation is not self-absorption, narcissism or self-interest. On the contrary, individuation is a humbling task to serve what our deepest nature asks of us. For some it will be a path which brings public recognition, for others suffering and public calumny, for others still, private epiphanies never seen by anyone else."
~ James Hollis
Daimonic Imagination
Personifying carries us into myth. Hillman argued that the soul craves the constant activity of "seeing through"...of taking something "as it is." Working into ever deeper layers of hidden meaning in context, hidden layers draw us in.
We can begin by watching ourselves, dramatically seeing through psyche's eyes the living presences of direct encounter with Mystery. It is looking THROUGH the mind rather than WITH or FROM the mind. Engagement with archetypal material as image is esoteric, initiatory, gnostic, revelatory, and numinous.
Images surround us, clamoring for attention, for us to attend to a moment that resonates or illuminates our experience. Thomas Moore plainly states, "the idea is to see every fragment of life and every dream as myth and poetry." Every artform and oracle partakes of this process.
Psyche is rooted in imagination and heart when we tend and cultivate soulful lives. Our daimon eyes are an archetypal perspective, perspective. The gods embody ways the world reveals itself. We live in an animated world.
Hillman defines the “archetypal” as “productive.” In his view, profundity is linked to fecundity. An archetypal image gives birth to multiple meanings and interpretations, poetry, spirit, language, and body. This is an aesthetic: non-literal, metaphorical, poetic, imaginal approach. The dream image comes from the imagination, not from the outer world of the senses.
This field uses metaphors derived to elucidate deep structures in the creative imagination. Creative processes are not random. Imagination embodies along lines that become apparent when we ponder the frequently incomprehensible images of magic, alchemy, dreams, and imagination.
"If one does not become the eccentric, unique, one-of-a-kind person he or she was meant to be, then a violation of some large purpose of the cosmos has occurred. Individuation is not self-absorption, narcissism or self-interest. On the contrary, individuation is a humbling task to serve what our deepest nature asks of us. For some it will be a path which brings public recognition, for others suffering and public calumny, for others still, private epiphanies never seen by anyone else."
~ James Hollis
Sacred Encounters
"Poets [and artists] are visionaries and dreamers, not because they are prone to reveries or capricious and erratic fancy, but precisely because they do not lose themselves in the act of vision," suggests Roberts Avens. "The artist is the carrier of the mythopoetic project. The one who from the intersection of conscious intent and unconscious patterning, makes the myth of the age--mythopoesis," according to James Hollis.
James Hillman says, "Man is half-angel because he can speak. The more we distrust speech in therapy or the capacity of speech to be therapeutic, the closer we are to an absorption into the fantasy of the archetypal subhuman, and the sooner the archetypal barbarian strides into the communication ruins of a culture that refused eloquence as a mirror of its soul.” ~Revisioning Psychology, pp 29-30.
Soul Figure
The muse, daimon, or genius, is the unconscious mind, a truly autonomous power, presence, and intelligence from the ego’s viewpoint. The daimon points to Being and indicates invisible and ungraspable Being itself. What is divine is manifest in the abyssal space of Being itself.
Such an ordeal tests us to our very foundations, reflected in the trope of 'wrestling with the Angel' as a primal force of nature. The daimonic refers to the power of nature rather than the superego, and is beyond good and evil. It matters that we were born with a genius, a guiding spirit, a daimon that may know more about our destiny than we do.
One young writer described her uncertainty: "I’m struggling with this book and feel the weight on me, put on me by myself. My daimon, messenger or alien guest as I like to call it, is not happy. He wants more, better. Dig into the well of Being. I can’t. "Inspire me," I tell him. But it doesn’t come as a sweet whisper. It is like energy which can create or destroy.
I remember once touching an old lamp and sometimes I would get zapped by it. On one occasion, I touched it and felt glued to it. I felt energy rush through my body. It took several seconds to realize what was happening and I concentrated on the buzzing flow through my body. I told myself to let go, but I guess it formed a circuit and I couldn’t pull away. I kept telling myself to pull away, but I felt at one with the current. It took strong will power to remove my hand and it was only after I became aware of it being an invading energy.
My daimon is at times like this unwanted current zapping me, wanting “to do,” to create. Maybe when it is a beneficial circuit and producing in unison, we’re both happy, but when I wrestle and avoid it, it is uncomfortable like being a haywire radio you have to struggle to get back in tune or not have any negative repercussions, or just frustration of not knowing how to capture an inner/outer voice or vision the way you hope to. Then you try again, put your inner antenna out and hope to catch fragments of a haunting song humming through your being and soon you are singing it too."
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—the passions, the blood—but also “outside” the self—in wind, rain, fire, animals. The daimonic call becomes demonic when one becomes possessed, mistaking the timeless, immortal qualities of the daimon as one’s own.
To be human is to have a daimon. an inner voice between mortal and divine. The daimonic call is a call to transcendence, to fully become whom you were meant to be. The daimonic call (constituted by character, fate, truth, necessity, calling) is the divine spark that compels us.
All that is destructive to others, and ultimately, destructive to the self, arises from an unwillingness to recognize human limitations. Feeling as though one must literally live up to all the daimon’s expectations, one becomes absorbed in the daimon’s “boundless vision and manic impulsion” (Hillman, p. 241).
The daimonic myth concerns vital archetypal experience. They give signs, point to and show significance. The daimon is that divine, mediating spiritual power that impeles our actions and determines our destiny. It is inborn and immortal, embodying all innate talents, tendencies (both positive and negative), and natural abilities.
"Daimon" itself is derived from daiomai, with the meaning of 'to divide' or 'to lacerate'; daimon referred to something indeterminate, invisible, incorporeal, and unknown; ambiguous, not evil. One side of the liminal entity is creativity, the other anger and rage. Constructiveness and destructiveness share a single source in human potential. Daemonic passions are paradoxical.
Homer believed ailments were both caused and cured by daimons. Socrates thought the daimones to be gods or the children of gods. The glory of the daimonic is in catharsis, rebirth, and humble resurrection. The daimonic has been, and continues to be, a great source of creativity, inspiration, and fascination in all forms of art.
For Heraclitus, daimon and destiny are the same – what we deal out to ourselves. On the basis of Hesiod’s myth, great and powerful figures were honored after death as a daimon. They guide, admonish, and illumine. The genius is never absent. The genius is linked to us by a bond of soul-substance. The Anima Mundi and her Daimon are archetypal powers.
The daimonic calling demands dignity. It manifests not only as a divine presence (guardian angel) that guides, calls, cajoles, urges, but can also command, demand, invade, and possess. The base, primitive fear and acting out, is essentially the fear of not living up to the daimon’s impossible standards. When in touch with this fear, there is a rush to literalize, to concretize, who or what is to blame, characteristic of all psychopathology.
The outcast, the loner, the reject, is not alone; he or she is in direct contact with the daimon, withdrawing from the human into an invisible private existence. There, the loner endeavors to create a world fashioned upon a dignity and splendor concealed but envisioned.
The demonic presence in human existence is the result of a confused and confusing relationship to the daimonic. Such incidents will continue until we find, within possibilities disclosed by our social-historical index, the appropriate relationship between the individual’s existential finitude and the daimon’s potential, between the transcendent calling and the person being called. (Brent Potter)
Therapeutics
Rollo May introduced the daimonic to psychology as a concept designed to rival the terms 'devil' and 'demonic'. He (1969) says the daimonic “is any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person” (p. 65). This affirms the naturalness, the innateness, of the daimonic. The daimon is something very human and to be human is to have a daimon.
May writes that the daimonic is "any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person... The daimonic can be either creative or destructive, but it is normally both... The daimonic is obviously not an entity but refers to a fundamental, archetypal function of human experience -- an existential reality". The daimonic is seen as an essentially undifferentiated, impersonal, primal force of nature which arises from the ground of being rather than the self as such.
The demands of the daimonic force upon the individual can be unorthodox, frightening, and overwhelming. Its obligation is to protect the complete maturation of the individual and the unification of opposing forces within the Self. It is a warning voice which watches over us and checks our actions.
The inner urge can come in the form of a sudden journey (either intentional or serendipitous), a psychological illness, symptoms, or simply neurotic and off-center behavior. Jung writes, "The daimon throws us down, makes us traitors to our ideals and cherished convictions — traitors to the selves we thought we were."
The daimonic belongs to that dimension of experience (art, archetype, myth, and dream). Rational language can never tell more than a small part of the story. The daimonic is the enemy of reason, but we need a reason to manage its power and its duality.
The daimonic will not accept clock-time or schedules. The daimonic will never take a rational “no” for an answer. The walk with the daimon is a life-long pursuit. “One never finishes this battle once and for all,” wrote Rollo May.
What Socrates called, “a kind of voice,” the daimon can be driven by political unrest, injustice, by the power of nature, that voice from nature. It can be driven by the void, existential depression. By music. By dance. But the daimon is always there, if not seen. It is waiting to touch us with its power whether at first light or while wearing an emerald mask. It can be compelled by difficult circumstances.
There are two kinds of memory, the memory of the organism and the memory of the soul. The first is possessed by all creatures. The second, is obtained by Recovery. When this union takes place, we no longer need an initiator.
In The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character & Calling, Hillman (1996) offers the 'acorn theory' as an alternative to explaining human life in terms of genetic determinism or as a sheer accident. The idea for the acorn theory came from Plato’s "Myth of Er" in The Republic.
"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." (Hillman, The Soul's Code (p. 23)
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).
He explains that, according to (Plotinus 205-270 ACE), "we elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belong to its necessity. This suggests that the circumstances, including my body and my parents whom I may curse, are my soul;'s own choice -- and I do not understand this because I have forgotten."
He adds, "so that we do not forget, Plato tells the myth, and in the very last passage, says that by preserving the myth we may better preserve ourselves and prosper. In other words, the myth has a redemptive psychological function, and a psychology derived from it can inspire a life founded on it.
"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." (Hillman, The Soul's Code (p. 23)
“A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may also possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim. The daimon does not go away." (The Soul’s Code, Hillman)
“Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. You may remember this “something” as a signal moment in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have. This is who I am.” (The Soul’s Code)
Prior to birth, people chose the body, parents, place, and circumstances most suited to the soul. We are summoned into the world with a calling. From this, Hillman concludes: (1) the daimonic call is a fundamental fact of human existence; (2) people should strive to align life with the call, and (3) come to understand that accidents, illnesses, and all maladies are in the service of fulfilling the call.
It is important that we hear the double sense of the Plotinus fragment: one’s character is one’s daimon. For the ancient Greeks your character is “given” to you in some sense—who you are is not completely within your control. “Your” actions reveal “your” character but are also something given to you, 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—the passions, the blood—but also “outside” the self—in wind, rain, fire, animals.
"You can't make something out of nothing, not even with will-power. And what is will-power?To have will-power means that you have a lot of drive. Creativeness is drive! A creative calling is like a daimonion, which, in some instances, can ruin a person's entire life." (C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 164-167)
The Angel is a personified soul-image in the tradition of the alchemical Anima Mundi, the Shekinah or the eastern Gurus. It is the magickal version of daimon or muse, in its most exalted aspect, present in angels and devils. Hillman speaks further on personifying in reference to the Anima or World Soul, which is his personified equivalent of the Holy Guardian Angel.
"She teaches personifying, and the very first lesson of her teaching is the reality of her independent personality over and against the habitual modes of experiencing with which we are so identified that they are called ego, I. The second lesson is love; she comes to life through love and insists on it, just as Psyche in the old tale is paired forever with Eros.
"Perhaps the loving comes first. Perhaps only through love is it possible to recognize the person of the soul. And this connection between love and psyche means a love for everything psychological, every symptom or habit, finding place for it within the heart of imagination, finding a mythical person who is its supportive ground.
"...Whether we conceive of this interior person as Anima or as an Angel, a Daemon, a Genius, or a paredros, or one of the personified souls in the traditions of ancient China and Egypt, this figure is indispensable to the notion of human personality. Some traditions, in fact have asserted that an individual without his soul figure is not a human being. Such a one has lost soul." (Ibid, p. 43-44).
Jung said, "A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon." “The daimon throws us down, makes us traitors to our ideals and cherished convictions—traitors to the selves we thought we were.” Our symptoms are aspects of the wound and our genius. The daimon is at the core of creativity, the higher source of inspiration and enlightenment.
Pressure is inseparable from the creative process. This stress is built out of a polarity in opposition that is elemental to the human condition. The natural process of pressure builds up until creative energy bursts forward, and the much-beloved high of “the flow” is found in which the work is largely made.
Yet this pushing and pulling, this tension of “waiting” until the daimon arrives — from a psychological perspective — is beyond good and evil. It is at the heart of scientific law. Polar opposites are at the heart of our psychological construct. In psychological terms, the daimon is not sacred alone, but also contains the opposite of sacred: the profane. From the push of both comes the creative spark which ignites flow, allowing the work to be made.
This is co-creation. Nothing ever arrives fully formed. Sometimes, when the daimon leaves, only the clay remains. It is up to the creative to discover the artistic means to carve and shape it — whether the clay be in the form of music, dance, painting or writing.
Creative energy, the “flow”, can only come from pent-up tension being liberated. This is the intolerable phase of the creative process. We become edgy, nervous, and “ready to explode.” The problem is they believe something is wrong with them. There is another way — a productive way — of reaching the daimon. But first, we must look at the challenge.
For inexperienced or uninformed creatives, this pressure is often unfathomable. Jung called it the “torment of creation.” The psychic pain, the dreadful pressure is not understood. Creatives don’t know its source and yet it is somehow attached to their gift.
They often look for release from the stress so they can experience the flow. For exceptional creative people, the pressure might be even more intense. Awareness helps to reframe the monster as the muse. It is recalibrating perspective and accepting the tension as part of the gift. Aristotle suggested that happiness was to walk hand-in-hand with the daimon. Not to be consumed by it.
We can create a line of demarcation. Often, writers with a keen sense of awareness will have a special place or time to meet their muse. It’s important to bring order to the process of inspiration. This can be a good idea for it gives creatives some control over what Jung called “the towering life force.”
Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love, has has spent her life “in devotion to creativity”. In her Ted Talk, she called it “showing up. It’s a relationship, it’s a conversation, and all [the daimon] wants is to be treated with respect and dignity — and it will return ten thousand times over.”
As Carl Jung stated, daimonic inspiration is akin to nature for “nature is not only harmonious, but she is also dreadfully contradictory and chaotic.” In both Roman and Greek cultures, the daimon is both your friend and a trickster. The daimon contains both light and shadow. You must respect it but you must never fall completely under its spell.
The reason so many people fall to a blackout punch to the daimon is they don’t comprehend is power and its danger. It’s vital to moderate the daimon’s presence in your life by making a physical entrance and a physical exit to your artistic workplace. To live within the daimon is to blur reality and self-assessment. The need for measured reason with the daimon is blown away by the passion of the muse.
https://medium.com/better-humans/this-is-how-to-train-your-daimon-for-the-most-out-of-life-701773f22c58
https://existential-therapy.com/review-of-anger-madness-and-the-daimonic-by-stephen-a-diamond/
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Anger_Madness_and_the_Daimonic/NgB0yim87cQC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Anger,+Madness,+and+the+Daimonic+by+Stephen+A.+Diamond&printsec=frontcover
Unlike the Greeks with daimon, the Romans called the source of inspiration Genius. In Roman culture, every man was born with Genius, every woman with Juno.
The genius was very much like the daimon. It was a spirit that allowed a human to know their divine nature. So, the daimon was tied to each man and woman, and was tied to the divine within oneself and outside of oneself.
Genius, (Latin: “begetter”, ) in classical Roman times, an attendant spirit of a person or place. As "genius" (from the Latin genere) means to generate, to beget, so the daimonic is the voice of the generative process in the individual.
In early Rome, The genius and iuno were probably the male and female forms of the family’s, or clan’s, power of continuing itself by reproduction. The genius was often conceived as appearing in the form of a snake. Through Greek ideas concerning a guardian spirit, or daimon, the genius lost its original meaning and came to be a sort of personification of the individual’s natural desires and appetites.
Then the genius came to be thought of as a sort of guardian angel, a higher self; and, as the Greek daimon was sometimes rationalized into the individual’s character or temper. Horace said he is a god who is born and dies with each one of us. This individual genius was worshiped by each individual, especially on their birthday.
Worship of the daimons became an underground mainstream in ancient Greek religion: They were understood to exist deep within the human psyche or spirit, where they made themselves known through their influence upon human thoughts, emotions, attitudes, and actions.
Genius has now come to mean creative power in thinking or the arts. We still give that reverence, and speak of one's creative daimon Muse for which we are a conduit. Creativity is a 'gift' and a Mystery which must be served. A conscious, working knowledge of the intertwined daimon and the genius in religion, psychology, and philosophy is indispensable.
A reasonably clear perception of self appears to be one prerequisite to advanced emotional development. Gifted people need accurate feedback about their abilities, strengths, weaknesses, and the acceptability of their personality characteristics. Gaining a "reasonably clear perception of self" may also involve sorting out destructive pathology versus giftedness related intensity, excitability, divergent, aberrant thinking and other issues that can get mislabeled.
Educational consultant Annemarie Roeper, Ed.D. notes "Gifted people see life in the most brilliant colors and are capable of the greatest joy and the greatest desperation. They try to build all this into a functioning Self. They try to live in their crowded inner world and look for ways to make this possible. They sometimes build inner walls to protect themselves and then find themselves lonely in less than splendid isolation.
"They often crave and need the help and support of other people. They may need help to access themselves as well as the world outside. Many gifted people are driven by a desire to explore their Self just as they need to explore the world outside."
Stephen Diamond claims that the goal for psychotherapy with artists and other creative individuals 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." "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 and invigorate our creativity."
Rollo May said, "the therapist’s task is to awaken and confront the demons, not put them to sleep.” He 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.
Carl Jung describes this process of unfolding relationship in terms of the alchemical form of meditation. "What I call coming to terms with the unconscious the alchemists called "meditation."
Ruland says of this: "Meditation: The name of an Internal Talk of one person with another who is invisible as in the invocation of the Deity, or communion with one's self, or with one's good angel." When meditation is concerned with the objective products of the unconscious that reach consciousness spontaneously, it unites the conscious with contents that proceed not from a conscious causal chain but from an essentially unconscious process.
Jung also confessed, "There was a daimon in me, and in the end its presence proved decisive. It overpowered me, and if I was at times ruthless it was because I was in the grip of the daimon." "When the daimon is at work, one is always too close and too far. Only when it is silent can one achieve moderation.'
He described his Daimon as a guiding spirit that propelled him from psychological discovery to discovery, enthralling him in a never-ending thirst for truth. Any creative person or artist is familiar with this urge—and we’re all too familiar with cautionary tales of artists who let their Daimons get the better of them. “A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his Daimon,” reckoned Jung.
We cannot know what the unconscious psyche is, otherwise it would be conscious. We can only conjecture its existence, though there are good enough grounds for this. Part of the unconscious content is projected, but the projection as such is not recognized.
Meditation or critical introspection of the object are needed in order to establish the existence of projections. If the individual is to take stock of himself it is essential that his projections should be recognized. This is one of the most important phases in the wearisome process of self-knowledge.
Amor Fati
The ancient Greeks believed that our character or genius was a daimon who oversaw our experiences with mortality -- our fate -- our personal yet transcendent god. Every person had their spirit or guardian angel. Through the daimon we find hope in an inevitably doomed existence...and perhaps taste our immortality.
Every person has their "seed-self", "guiding force", or acorn of character from birth. Our spirits grow from this seed that is our daimon. The inspirational spirit guides us toward the fulfillment of our potential and shows us our vulnerabilities and dream or imaginal life.
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.
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 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.
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 understanding of the beauty, compassion, and the foundation of wisdom. It is 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 as destiny" is “self-directed biological transformation,” but under the daimon, not the ego. The disruptive and transformative reality of the individuation process manifests the uncanny otherness of the unconscious.
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.
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."
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.
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 daimon will assert itself in love, giving rise to obsessions and torments of romantic agony. It can appear in love triangles, difficult relationships, and partnerships. The daimon explains the impossible marriages, quick conceptions, and sudden desertions.
The daimon will assert itself in love, giving rise to obsessions and torments of romantic agony. 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.
One of the reasons people silence the “voice of vocation” is due to the perceived risks of following it – one must sacrifice short-term comfort, status, and wealth, and engage in work where the outcome is uncertain.
Yet to repress this inner calling is destructive, and often leads to the formation of what may be called a silent rage: “the absence, the anger, and the paralysis on the couch are all symptoms of the soul in search of a lost call to something other and beyond.” (Hillman). The individual who loses touch with their daimon becomes an empty shell of the person that could have been:
“Present in body and absent in spirit, he lies back on the couch, shamed by his own daimon for the potentials in his soul that will not be subdued. He feels himself inwardly subversive, imagining in his passivity extremes of aggression and desire that must be suppressed. Solution: more work, more money, more drink, more weight, more things.” (The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, Hillman)
To ensure we don’t decline into such a lifestyle it is essential to tune into the call of fate which emanates from within, and learn to glimpse the inner workings of the daimon – using its signals and signs to help us live a more purposeful existence.
We can do this by looking back on our life and searching for a pattern amidst the apparently chaotic path our life has followed, as well as by attending to the inner voice and yearnings, often subtle, which seem to impel us toward a given direction.
"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).
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.”
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.
“A very interesting thing is our… interpretation of the word ‘demon’… it refers to the dynamic of life, your daimon is the dynamic of your life, and we are so against the dynamic of life in our tradition that we have turned it into a devil. The word ‘demon’ has negative meaning in our tradition.” — Joseph Campbell
"We’re in a time when each person needs to embrace their own genius not by the standards of the authorities of the past, but by the felt sense of each person’s intelligence splashing its paint on the canvas of human discourse and innovation." (astrologer Nate Speare)
Liminal Presence
Our psychological history is mixed together with our archetypal needs. Liberating the Angel is the ethic of depth psychology, the essence of genius, the telos of magic, and magic of art.
The Greeks believed the Daimon was the soul communicating with the body, the timeless and formless interacting with our time-bound, finite forms. The Daimon still walks invisibly in our footsteps, as faithful a companion as Mephisto.
James Hillman often spoke of “seeing through” the literal to discover the imaginal underpinnings, a way of seeing, a way of imaging. He listens to the saying of the soul, and it speaks in his writing through him. A self-revelatory imaginal force generates imagery and a way of "seeing through" events from the literal to the concealed metaphor or overlooked presence.
We cannot disengage from mythologizing and philosophizing at the same time -- psychologizing, seeing through in the mind's eye. Memory is apt to become mytho-poetic, to exaggerate closeness of coincidence, or to add romantic details, etc.
This is soul-making, the act of noticing, tending, and actively creating with the act of reflecting upon -- to acquire a certain sense of awareness and understanding of what we created. This is a fluctuating process which drives humanity to richer experience.
Rather than explain, it complicates; rather than define, it confirms the enigma, only possible when critical work leads to spatial relations being “unhinged” from the concept of time.
Looking or seeing through events and things to their imaginal image is not a method, but a way of living, engaging intuitive intelligence. Subjective perspectives deepen vision, reflection, rhetoric, values, and ideas. Presence presents with paradoxical tendencies and shifting contours. Ficino suggested the art of magic "consists in comparing one thing to another."
Indeed, it is through “recognizing our concrete existence as metaphors, as mythic enactments” that we are able to enter the myths that permit us to understand our relation to the Gods, because in myth is where the Gods are. So if, as Hillman claims, metaphor refers to the Gods in us, then “myths are the traditional narratives of the interaction of Gods and humans, a dramatic account ‘of deeds of the daimones’” (RV, p. 157).
Myth ensouls and stories repressed instinctual impulses. Hillman argued that the soul craves the constant activity of “seeing through” … of taking something “as it is.” Working into ever deeper layers of hidden meaning in context, hidden layers draw us in. From an archetypal perspective, human existence is mythic existence.
Soul is the bottomline dimension of death, darkness, and weakness. This is the deeper sense of meaningfulness — peripheral, inner, underworld, soul-perspective or night-perspective emerging as self-arising chthonic images. The chthonic fertilizes the soil of the dark unconscious mind — the depth and darkness that anchor our being in primordial ground.
“Seeing through,” then, is the term Hillman uses when describing the metaphorical method of archetypal psychology, seeing through to an image. Seeing through daimon eyes is a form of realization, concentrated self-awareness, beyond the egoism of one-dimensional self-understanding. We are “returned to the Gods” by "seeing through" to the myth operating in the background.
Our metaphor is one of seeing through our daimon eyes. The paradox of “seeing through” is that Hillman’s archetypal psychology, which on the face of it appears postmodern, lays bare the Greek mythos from ancient times as it shines through the “here” and “now” presence of our everyday lives. More than synonymous, the vision is co-extensive in the flow state.
An archetypal approach to creativity and to a creative life is one that recognizes that we always act in concert with powers beyond our direct control. Over two thousand years ago Plato spoke of a kind of "divine madness" that swept over the great poets.
In the twentieth century, C.G. Jung insisted that creative individuals continued to be driven by their personal daimon, a type of guiding spirit. Some of the world's greatest artists, writers, psychologists, scientists and spiritual elders have insisted upon the existence of forces that unconsciously guide and direct us.
Action therapies may be curative of the child in us who has not learned to speak or the animal who cannot, or a spirit daimon that is beyond words because it is beyond soul. Dialogical gnosis, participatory knowledge, builds the relationship and engagement.
Ritual enlivens the daimon in the same way, as a factor unknown in itself, but transparent to the whole, to transcendence. The Ritual Field of mythic sensibility, the field of myth is emotional -- emergent, resonant, challenging -- inviting ritual enactment to animate and embody it.
Thus, we recognize and develop our own style of mythic consciousness, stepping into joining with others, daring to live our larger lives within the field of historic life. With invocation, we call back with an invitation to Presence to those who carry our calling.
Invisible guests: The development of imaginal dialogues, by Mary Watkins describes the dialogues we carry on silently—"with our reflection in the mirror...with a figure from a dream or movie, with our dog...with critics, with our mothers, with our god(s)..."
They are not an incidental aspect of mental life but central phenomena, laden with both cognitive and emotional significance. Imaginative life deserves analysis based on appreciation of its centrality and generative nature. Dialogue is a fundamental—perhaps the primary—form in which we think.
Operating "inwardly" or "outwardly," psyche is an exquisitely dialogical process. In both Jungian and archetypal work the bridging of conscious and unconscious occurs through dialogue, as in the practice of active imagination. Such bridging activates what Jung called the transcendent function. Hillman uses the language of "soul" for that space that opens up through dialogue.
"It is about the process of developing the metaphoric quality of the image into the ontological ground. It is not analytical nor interpretive, but ideational and phenomenological, rather than ideological or belief-based. It is a way of seeing through beliefs learned by rote. We stay with the image and engage it directly, relating rather than amplifying it or replacing it with a concept or single meaning, Hillman said.
"If one does not become the eccentric, unique, one-of-a-kind person he or she was meant to be, then a violation of some large purpose of the cosmos has occurred. Individuation is not self-absorption, narcissism or self-interest. On the contrary, individuation is a humbling task to serve what our deepest nature asks of us. For some it will be a path which brings public recognition, for others suffering and public calumny, for others still, private epiphanies never seen by anyone else."
~ James Hollis
Daimonic Imagination
Personifying carries us into myth. Hillman argued that the soul craves the constant activity of "seeing through"...of taking something "as it is." Working into ever deeper layers of hidden meaning in context, hidden layers draw us in.
We can begin by watching ourselves, dramatically seeing through psyche's eyes the living presences of direct encounter with Mystery. It is looking THROUGH the mind rather than WITH or FROM the mind. Engagement with archetypal material as image is esoteric, initiatory, gnostic, revelatory, and numinous.
Images surround us, clamoring for attention, for us to attend to a moment that resonates or illuminates our experience. Thomas Moore plainly states, "the idea is to see every fragment of life and every dream as myth and poetry." Every artform and oracle partakes of this process.
Psyche is rooted in imagination and heart when we tend and cultivate soulful lives. Our daimon eyes are an archetypal perspective, perspective. The gods embody ways the world reveals itself. We live in an animated world.
Hillman defines the “archetypal” as “productive.” In his view, profundity is linked to fecundity. An archetypal image gives birth to multiple meanings and interpretations, poetry, spirit, language, and body. This is an aesthetic: non-literal, metaphorical, poetic, imaginal approach. The dream image comes from the imagination, not from the outer world of the senses.
This field uses metaphors derived to elucidate deep structures in the creative imagination. Creative processes are not random. Imagination embodies along lines that become apparent when we ponder the frequently incomprehensible images of magic, alchemy, dreams, and imagination.
"If one does not become the eccentric, unique, one-of-a-kind person he or she was meant to be, then a violation of some large purpose of the cosmos has occurred. Individuation is not self-absorption, narcissism or self-interest. On the contrary, individuation is a humbling task to serve what our deepest nature asks of us. For some it will be a path which brings public recognition, for others suffering and public calumny, for others still, private epiphanies never seen by anyone else."
~ James Hollis
Sacred Encounters
"Poets [and artists] are visionaries and dreamers, not because they are prone to reveries or capricious and erratic fancy, but precisely because they do not lose themselves in the act of vision," suggests Roberts Avens. "The artist is the carrier of the mythopoetic project. The one who from the intersection of conscious intent and unconscious patterning, makes the myth of the age--mythopoesis," according to James Hollis.
James Hillman says, "Man is half-angel because he can speak. The more we distrust speech in therapy or the capacity of speech to be therapeutic, the closer we are to an absorption into the fantasy of the archetypal subhuman, and the sooner the archetypal barbarian strides into the communication ruins of a culture that refused eloquence as a mirror of its soul.” ~Revisioning Psychology, pp 29-30.
Soul Figure
The muse, daimon, or genius, is the unconscious mind, a truly autonomous power, presence, and intelligence from the ego’s viewpoint. The daimon points to Being and indicates invisible and ungraspable Being itself. What is divine is manifest in the abyssal space of Being itself.
Such an ordeal tests us to our very foundations, reflected in the trope of 'wrestling with the Angel' as a primal force of nature. The daimonic refers to the power of nature rather than the superego, and is beyond good and evil. It matters that we were born with a genius, a guiding spirit, a daimon that may know more about our destiny than we do.
One young writer described her uncertainty: "I’m struggling with this book and feel the weight on me, put on me by myself. My daimon, messenger or alien guest as I like to call it, is not happy. He wants more, better. Dig into the well of Being. I can’t. "Inspire me," I tell him. But it doesn’t come as a sweet whisper. It is like energy which can create or destroy.
I remember once touching an old lamp and sometimes I would get zapped by it. On one occasion, I touched it and felt glued to it. I felt energy rush through my body. It took several seconds to realize what was happening and I concentrated on the buzzing flow through my body. I told myself to let go, but I guess it formed a circuit and I couldn’t pull away. I kept telling myself to pull away, but I felt at one with the current. It took strong will power to remove my hand and it was only after I became aware of it being an invading energy.
My daimon is at times like this unwanted current zapping me, wanting “to do,” to create. Maybe when it is a beneficial circuit and producing in unison, we’re both happy, but when I wrestle and avoid it, it is uncomfortable like being a haywire radio you have to struggle to get back in tune or not have any negative repercussions, or just frustration of not knowing how to capture an inner/outer voice or vision the way you hope to. Then you try again, put your inner antenna out and hope to catch fragments of a haunting song humming through your being and soon you are singing it too."
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—the passions, the blood—but also “outside” the self—in wind, rain, fire, animals. The daimonic call becomes demonic when one becomes possessed, mistaking the timeless, immortal qualities of the daimon as one’s own.
To be human is to have a daimon. an inner voice between mortal and divine. The daimonic call is a call to transcendence, to fully become whom you were meant to be. The daimonic call (constituted by character, fate, truth, necessity, calling) is the divine spark that compels us.
All that is destructive to others, and ultimately, destructive to the self, arises from an unwillingness to recognize human limitations. Feeling as though one must literally live up to all the daimon’s expectations, one becomes absorbed in the daimon’s “boundless vision and manic impulsion” (Hillman, p. 241).
The daimonic myth concerns vital archetypal experience. They give signs, point to and show significance. The daimon is that divine, mediating spiritual power that impeles our actions and determines our destiny. It is inborn and immortal, embodying all innate talents, tendencies (both positive and negative), and natural abilities.
"Daimon" itself is derived from daiomai, with the meaning of 'to divide' or 'to lacerate'; daimon referred to something indeterminate, invisible, incorporeal, and unknown; ambiguous, not evil. One side of the liminal entity is creativity, the other anger and rage. Constructiveness and destructiveness share a single source in human potential. Daemonic passions are paradoxical.
Homer believed ailments were both caused and cured by daimons. Socrates thought the daimones to be gods or the children of gods. The glory of the daimonic is in catharsis, rebirth, and humble resurrection. The daimonic has been, and continues to be, a great source of creativity, inspiration, and fascination in all forms of art.
For Heraclitus, daimon and destiny are the same – what we deal out to ourselves. On the basis of Hesiod’s myth, great and powerful figures were honored after death as a daimon. They guide, admonish, and illumine. The genius is never absent. The genius is linked to us by a bond of soul-substance. The Anima Mundi and her Daimon are archetypal powers.
The daimonic calling demands dignity. It manifests not only as a divine presence (guardian angel) that guides, calls, cajoles, urges, but can also command, demand, invade, and possess. The base, primitive fear and acting out, is essentially the fear of not living up to the daimon’s impossible standards. When in touch with this fear, there is a rush to literalize, to concretize, who or what is to blame, characteristic of all psychopathology.
The outcast, the loner, the reject, is not alone; he or she is in direct contact with the daimon, withdrawing from the human into an invisible private existence. There, the loner endeavors to create a world fashioned upon a dignity and splendor concealed but envisioned.
The demonic presence in human existence is the result of a confused and confusing relationship to the daimonic. Such incidents will continue until we find, within possibilities disclosed by our social-historical index, the appropriate relationship between the individual’s existential finitude and the daimon’s potential, between the transcendent calling and the person being called. (Brent Potter)
Therapeutics
Rollo May introduced the daimonic to psychology as a concept designed to rival the terms 'devil' and 'demonic'. He (1969) says the daimonic “is any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person” (p. 65). This affirms the naturalness, the innateness, of the daimonic. The daimon is something very human and to be human is to have a daimon.
May writes that the daimonic is "any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person... The daimonic can be either creative or destructive, but it is normally both... The daimonic is obviously not an entity but refers to a fundamental, archetypal function of human experience -- an existential reality". The daimonic is seen as an essentially undifferentiated, impersonal, primal force of nature which arises from the ground of being rather than the self as such.
The demands of the daimonic force upon the individual can be unorthodox, frightening, and overwhelming. Its obligation is to protect the complete maturation of the individual and the unification of opposing forces within the Self. It is a warning voice which watches over us and checks our actions.
The inner urge can come in the form of a sudden journey (either intentional or serendipitous), a psychological illness, symptoms, or simply neurotic and off-center behavior. Jung writes, "The daimon throws us down, makes us traitors to our ideals and cherished convictions — traitors to the selves we thought we were."
The daimonic belongs to that dimension of experience (art, archetype, myth, and dream). Rational language can never tell more than a small part of the story. The daimonic is the enemy of reason, but we need a reason to manage its power and its duality.
The daimonic will not accept clock-time or schedules. The daimonic will never take a rational “no” for an answer. The walk with the daimon is a life-long pursuit. “One never finishes this battle once and for all,” wrote Rollo May.
What Socrates called, “a kind of voice,” the daimon can be driven by political unrest, injustice, by the power of nature, that voice from nature. It can be driven by the void, existential depression. By music. By dance. But the daimon is always there, if not seen. It is waiting to touch us with its power whether at first light or while wearing an emerald mask. It can be compelled by difficult circumstances.
There are two kinds of memory, the memory of the organism and the memory of the soul. The first is possessed by all creatures. The second, is obtained by Recovery. When this union takes place, we no longer need an initiator.
In The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character & Calling, Hillman (1996) offers the 'acorn theory' as an alternative to explaining human life in terms of genetic determinism or as a sheer accident. The idea for the acorn theory came from Plato’s "Myth of Er" in The Republic.
"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." (Hillman, The Soul's Code (p. 23)
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).
He explains that, according to (Plotinus 205-270 ACE), "we elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belong to its necessity. This suggests that the circumstances, including my body and my parents whom I may curse, are my soul;'s own choice -- and I do not understand this because I have forgotten."
He adds, "so that we do not forget, Plato tells the myth, and in the very last passage, says that by preserving the myth we may better preserve ourselves and prosper. In other words, the myth has a redemptive psychological function, and a psychology derived from it can inspire a life founded on it.
"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." (Hillman, The Soul's Code (p. 23)
“A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may also possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim. The daimon does not go away." (The Soul’s Code, Hillman)
“Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. You may remember this “something” as a signal moment in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have. This is who I am.” (The Soul’s Code)
Prior to birth, people chose the body, parents, place, and circumstances most suited to the soul. We are summoned into the world with a calling. From this, Hillman concludes: (1) the daimonic call is a fundamental fact of human existence; (2) people should strive to align life with the call, and (3) come to understand that accidents, illnesses, and all maladies are in the service of fulfilling the call.
It is important that we hear the double sense of the Plotinus fragment: one’s character is one’s daimon. For the ancient Greeks your character is “given” to you in some sense—who you are is not completely within your control. “Your” actions reveal “your” character but are also something given to you, 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—the passions, the blood—but also “outside” the self—in wind, rain, fire, animals.
"You can't make something out of nothing, not even with will-power. And what is will-power?To have will-power means that you have a lot of drive. Creativeness is drive! A creative calling is like a daimonion, which, in some instances, can ruin a person's entire life." (C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 164-167)
The Angel is a personified soul-image in the tradition of the alchemical Anima Mundi, the Shekinah or the eastern Gurus. It is the magickal version of daimon or muse, in its most exalted aspect, present in angels and devils. Hillman speaks further on personifying in reference to the Anima or World Soul, which is his personified equivalent of the Holy Guardian Angel.
"She teaches personifying, and the very first lesson of her teaching is the reality of her independent personality over and against the habitual modes of experiencing with which we are so identified that they are called ego, I. The second lesson is love; she comes to life through love and insists on it, just as Psyche in the old tale is paired forever with Eros.
"Perhaps the loving comes first. Perhaps only through love is it possible to recognize the person of the soul. And this connection between love and psyche means a love for everything psychological, every symptom or habit, finding place for it within the heart of imagination, finding a mythical person who is its supportive ground.
"...Whether we conceive of this interior person as Anima or as an Angel, a Daemon, a Genius, or a paredros, or one of the personified souls in the traditions of ancient China and Egypt, this figure is indispensable to the notion of human personality. Some traditions, in fact have asserted that an individual without his soul figure is not a human being. Such a one has lost soul." (Ibid, p. 43-44).
Jung said, "A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon." “The daimon throws us down, makes us traitors to our ideals and cherished convictions—traitors to the selves we thought we were.” Our symptoms are aspects of the wound and our genius. The daimon is at the core of creativity, the higher source of inspiration and enlightenment.
Pressure is inseparable from the creative process. This stress is built out of a polarity in opposition that is elemental to the human condition. The natural process of pressure builds up until creative energy bursts forward, and the much-beloved high of “the flow” is found in which the work is largely made.
Yet this pushing and pulling, this tension of “waiting” until the daimon arrives — from a psychological perspective — is beyond good and evil. It is at the heart of scientific law. Polar opposites are at the heart of our psychological construct. In psychological terms, the daimon is not sacred alone, but also contains the opposite of sacred: the profane. From the push of both comes the creative spark which ignites flow, allowing the work to be made.
This is co-creation. Nothing ever arrives fully formed. Sometimes, when the daimon leaves, only the clay remains. It is up to the creative to discover the artistic means to carve and shape it — whether the clay be in the form of music, dance, painting or writing.
Creative energy, the “flow”, can only come from pent-up tension being liberated. This is the intolerable phase of the creative process. We become edgy, nervous, and “ready to explode.” The problem is they believe something is wrong with them. There is another way — a productive way — of reaching the daimon. But first, we must look at the challenge.
For inexperienced or uninformed creatives, this pressure is often unfathomable. Jung called it the “torment of creation.” The psychic pain, the dreadful pressure is not understood. Creatives don’t know its source and yet it is somehow attached to their gift.
They often look for release from the stress so they can experience the flow. For exceptional creative people, the pressure might be even more intense. Awareness helps to reframe the monster as the muse. It is recalibrating perspective and accepting the tension as part of the gift. Aristotle suggested that happiness was to walk hand-in-hand with the daimon. Not to be consumed by it.
We can create a line of demarcation. Often, writers with a keen sense of awareness will have a special place or time to meet their muse. It’s important to bring order to the process of inspiration. This can be a good idea for it gives creatives some control over what Jung called “the towering life force.”
Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love, has has spent her life “in devotion to creativity”. In her Ted Talk, she called it “showing up. It’s a relationship, it’s a conversation, and all [the daimon] wants is to be treated with respect and dignity — and it will return ten thousand times over.”
As Carl Jung stated, daimonic inspiration is akin to nature for “nature is not only harmonious, but she is also dreadfully contradictory and chaotic.” In both Roman and Greek cultures, the daimon is both your friend and a trickster. The daimon contains both light and shadow. You must respect it but you must never fall completely under its spell.
The reason so many people fall to a blackout punch to the daimon is they don’t comprehend is power and its danger. It’s vital to moderate the daimon’s presence in your life by making a physical entrance and a physical exit to your artistic workplace. To live within the daimon is to blur reality and self-assessment. The need for measured reason with the daimon is blown away by the passion of the muse.
https://medium.com/better-humans/this-is-how-to-train-your-daimon-for-the-most-out-of-life-701773f22c58
https://existential-therapy.com/review-of-anger-madness-and-the-daimonic-by-stephen-a-diamond/
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Anger_Madness_and_the_Daimonic/NgB0yim87cQC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Anger,+Madness,+and+the+Daimonic+by+Stephen+A.+Diamond&printsec=frontcover
Unlike the Greeks with daimon, the Romans called the source of inspiration Genius. In Roman culture, every man was born with Genius, every woman with Juno.
The genius was very much like the daimon. It was a spirit that allowed a human to know their divine nature. So, the daimon was tied to each man and woman, and was tied to the divine within oneself and outside of oneself.
Genius, (Latin: “begetter”, ) in classical Roman times, an attendant spirit of a person or place. As "genius" (from the Latin genere) means to generate, to beget, so the daimonic is the voice of the generative process in the individual.
In early Rome, The genius and iuno were probably the male and female forms of the family’s, or clan’s, power of continuing itself by reproduction. The genius was often conceived as appearing in the form of a snake. Through Greek ideas concerning a guardian spirit, or daimon, the genius lost its original meaning and came to be a sort of personification of the individual’s natural desires and appetites.
Then the genius came to be thought of as a sort of guardian angel, a higher self; and, as the Greek daimon was sometimes rationalized into the individual’s character or temper. Horace said he is a god who is born and dies with each one of us. This individual genius was worshiped by each individual, especially on their birthday.
Worship of the daimons became an underground mainstream in ancient Greek religion: They were understood to exist deep within the human psyche or spirit, where they made themselves known through their influence upon human thoughts, emotions, attitudes, and actions.
Genius has now come to mean creative power in thinking or the arts. We still give that reverence, and speak of one's creative daimon Muse for which we are a conduit. Creativity is a 'gift' and a Mystery which must be served. A conscious, working knowledge of the intertwined daimon and the genius in religion, psychology, and philosophy is indispensable.
A reasonably clear perception of self appears to be one prerequisite to advanced emotional development. Gifted people need accurate feedback about their abilities, strengths, weaknesses, and the acceptability of their personality characteristics. Gaining a "reasonably clear perception of self" may also involve sorting out destructive pathology versus giftedness related intensity, excitability, divergent, aberrant thinking and other issues that can get mislabeled.
Educational consultant Annemarie Roeper, Ed.D. notes "Gifted people see life in the most brilliant colors and are capable of the greatest joy and the greatest desperation. They try to build all this into a functioning Self. They try to live in their crowded inner world and look for ways to make this possible. They sometimes build inner walls to protect themselves and then find themselves lonely in less than splendid isolation.
"They often crave and need the help and support of other people. They may need help to access themselves as well as the world outside. Many gifted people are driven by a desire to explore their Self just as they need to explore the world outside."
Stephen Diamond claims that the goal for psychotherapy with artists and other creative individuals 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." "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 and invigorate our creativity."
Rollo May said, "the therapist’s task is to awaken and confront the demons, not put them to sleep.” He 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.
Carl Jung describes this process of unfolding relationship in terms of the alchemical form of meditation. "What I call coming to terms with the unconscious the alchemists called "meditation."
Ruland says of this: "Meditation: The name of an Internal Talk of one person with another who is invisible as in the invocation of the Deity, or communion with one's self, or with one's good angel." When meditation is concerned with the objective products of the unconscious that reach consciousness spontaneously, it unites the conscious with contents that proceed not from a conscious causal chain but from an essentially unconscious process.
Jung also confessed, "There was a daimon in me, and in the end its presence proved decisive. It overpowered me, and if I was at times ruthless it was because I was in the grip of the daimon." "When the daimon is at work, one is always too close and too far. Only when it is silent can one achieve moderation.'
He described his Daimon as a guiding spirit that propelled him from psychological discovery to discovery, enthralling him in a never-ending thirst for truth. Any creative person or artist is familiar with this urge—and we’re all too familiar with cautionary tales of artists who let their Daimons get the better of them. “A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his Daimon,” reckoned Jung.
We cannot know what the unconscious psyche is, otherwise it would be conscious. We can only conjecture its existence, though there are good enough grounds for this. Part of the unconscious content is projected, but the projection as such is not recognized.
Meditation or critical introspection of the object are needed in order to establish the existence of projections. If the individual is to take stock of himself it is essential that his projections should be recognized. This is one of the most important phases in the wearisome process of self-knowledge.
Amor Fati
The ancient Greeks believed that our character or genius was a daimon who oversaw our experiences with mortality -- our fate -- our personal yet transcendent god. Every person had their spirit or guardian angel. Through the daimon we find hope in an inevitably doomed existence...and perhaps taste our immortality.
Every person has their "seed-self", "guiding force", or acorn of character from birth. Our spirits grow from this seed that is our daimon. The inspirational spirit guides us toward the fulfillment of our potential and shows us our vulnerabilities and dream or imaginal life.
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.
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 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.
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 understanding of the beauty, compassion, and the foundation of wisdom. It is 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 as destiny" is “self-directed biological transformation,” but under the daimon, not the ego. The disruptive and transformative reality of the individuation process manifests the uncanny otherness of the unconscious.
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.
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."
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.
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 daimon will assert itself in love, giving rise to obsessions and torments of romantic agony. It can appear in love triangles, difficult relationships, and partnerships. The daimon explains the impossible marriages, quick conceptions, and sudden desertions.
The daimon will assert itself in love, giving rise to obsessions and torments of romantic agony. 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.
One of the reasons people silence the “voice of vocation” is due to the perceived risks of following it – one must sacrifice short-term comfort, status, and wealth, and engage in work where the outcome is uncertain.
Yet to repress this inner calling is destructive, and often leads to the formation of what may be called a silent rage: “the absence, the anger, and the paralysis on the couch are all symptoms of the soul in search of a lost call to something other and beyond.” (Hillman). The individual who loses touch with their daimon becomes an empty shell of the person that could have been:
“Present in body and absent in spirit, he lies back on the couch, shamed by his own daimon for the potentials in his soul that will not be subdued. He feels himself inwardly subversive, imagining in his passivity extremes of aggression and desire that must be suppressed. Solution: more work, more money, more drink, more weight, more things.” (The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, Hillman)
To ensure we don’t decline into such a lifestyle it is essential to tune into the call of fate which emanates from within, and learn to glimpse the inner workings of the daimon – using its signals and signs to help us live a more purposeful existence.
We can do this by looking back on our life and searching for a pattern amidst the apparently chaotic path our life has followed, as well as by attending to the inner voice and yearnings, often subtle, which seem to impel us toward a given direction.
"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).
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.”
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.
“...you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.” ―James Hillman, The Soul's Code)
Angels are Mirrors of the Abyss
Angel, Daimon, & Genius in Psychological Soul
Iona Miller, (c) 2021
"All esoteric teachings seek to apprehend the unseen happenings in the psyche, and all claim supreme authority for themselves. What is true of primitive lore is true in even higher degree of the ruling world religions. They contain a revealed knowledge that was originally hidden, and they set forth the secrets of the soul in glorious images." -C.G. Jung
The term Holy Guardian Angel (HGA) originates in the Catholic Church where a morning prayer is recited which reads, "Holy Guardian Angel whom God has appointed to be my guardian, direct and govern me during this day. Amen."
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.
"The daimon of sexuality approaches our soul as a serpent. She is half human soul and is called thought-desire. The daimon of spirituality descends into our soul as the white bird. He is half human soul and is called desire-thought.' (Jung, Liber Novus, Page 354).
The angel may well be mistaken for a demon, but should not be confused with a ‘daemon’ or ‘daimon’.[3] The etymology of ‘genius’ finds its roots in this concept, an inhabiting spirit, gift or exceptional talent. That noted, the angel is distinct from a daemon.
There is a version of your infinite identity that is transcendent. It is what you are as an angelic being. An archetype all of your own. It carries your essential and divine identity, a subtle but, psychologically, very important difference.
The metaphor is that we wrestle with the Angel. Jung recognized this angel in the deepest recess of our psyche. It is bound up with our deepest wound. The wound will find a challenging behavioral expression, excessive affective responses, bursts of tears at inappropriate moments.
It is as willing to play in the muck, cultivate devils as friends, and bring tears to your eyes with its sublime beauty and vision. The shadow characteristic of our psychology that causes us shame, a sense of inadequacy, heartache, guilt, regret, anger, recrimination and distress, is, simultaneously, our greatest gift. That which ails us, is also nostrum remedium, our remedy.[5]
A destiny spirit or guardian angel 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.
Way of the Daemon
The image of the Angel, Daimon, or Genius has persisted over aeons, suggesting its patterning role in the psyche. The angel equates with Daimon in Greek; Daemon or Genius in Roman.
The irreplaceable soul companion is the source of our character and fate. Hillman notes, "calling can refer not only to ways of doing — meaning work — but also to ways of being.
It is found in philosophy, psychology, Theosophy, Freemasonry, Hermetics, Kabbala, and neo-Platonic theurgy. There is no single authoritative voice. The essence of it means we carry our fate within us. Our fulfillment is expressing and living out the true self, also called self-actualization and self-realization.
When we allow daimons to be re-animated in our lives we hear their voices once more in our thoughts as cosmic entities existing outside space and time. This manifestation of genius moves the individual and the collective soul of society, shaking up the world and transforming it in various ways on all planes.
Plato’s concept of “soul” is an eternal life-principle. These patterns then act as mediators between the divine intellect and human senses, and are given visible or audible form as universal or cultural-specific archetypal images.
They can become visible as events in the world. The ultimate destiny of the daimonic soul is to become absorbed into the pure radiant light of the divine realm, but on the way it may assume a variety of coverings or vehicles, from the gross and quasi-material (i.e. misty) to the luminous.
The daimons accompany, changing all the time; “personages” become “places”, now discovered inside our own psyche as “processes”. Angela Voss “A Methodology of the Imagination”. The daimonic imagination has moved us on again, from “personages, places and processes” into encounter with living powers, the poet’s archetypal reservoirs of enthusiasm.
In theurgy we activate the “learning of the imagination” in different disciplines of visionary practice. We cannot enter the disciplines without the magic circle that keeps us bound to the work—only then, and to the measure that our relationship with the work has deepened, do we become free to play, in growing “intimacy and
dialogue” with our subject.
When evoking the “reality” of a dimension beyond the sensory, esoteric philosophy speaks metaphorically. The ability to grasp the meaning of a poetic or symbolic image is an essential process in the soul’s cognitive journey beyond discursive thinking, an inner sense of its noetic significance and its lived reality.
We are involved in Psyche’s tasks, for as Hillman points out, “psychology” should be about Psyche. Eros is her daimon, her love. Psyche’s initiatory tale for all souls is about passionate love, bitter separation, and eventual re-joining with the beloved.
This Way begins with such basics as the invocation of the personal Daimon. Quasi-autonomous and paradoxical, they can also ‘possess’
us as they create our desires, neuroses, and habitual patterns of behavior -- uncanny feelings, awe, and paranormal events (altered states, psychoid phenomena, synchronicity, healing, moving lights, and their identification with alien or non-material intelligent beings).
Intellectual intuition (in neoplatonic terminology) and the creative imagination which conveys it through form and image, engaging the knower in a symbolic mode of understanding which is participatory
in that it reveals something about the nature of his or her own soul, and opens into realms which the critical reason can only characterize as paradoxical, para-normal or downright impossible. (Voss)
We conjecture what mode of vision is required for humans
to “see” them accurately enough to gain some deeper insight into their provenance and purpose. In both scientific and science-fiction paradigms, there is an in-built assumption that such a “reality” has an external, verifiable existence independent from the observer’s own visionary frequency.
This literal approach denies the supremely important idea, long recognized in traditions of esoteric wisdom, that there are echelons of deepening modes of perception available to humans which far exceed the limits of either sense perception or critical reasoning, and which move towards a closing of the subjective-objective epistemological divide. It also denies a sense of the sacred as an epistemological category with its own distinct modes of expression—always understood as gateways to higher (or deeper) consciousness. (A. Voss)
Each question is a daimon; some quiet and helpful, others
noisy and challenging, some ephemeral, others to fall in love with for a lifetime. The daimon is the discursive, descriptive voice of soul. Invoking these daimons into our language is a “person-ifying” mode of consciousness, switching us from objects to subjects, from “things” to relations. It is a “method or way of re-animating” to practice. The daimon is our cosmic self-initiator.
“Images of the Self appear spontaneously throughout the entire transformative process. It appears in all symbols from the highest to the lowest. At the beginning of the great work it appears in animal forms, such as snakes, birds, fish, horses, or beetles. It shows through the plant forms of flowers and tree symbolism. It progresses through metaphors of sexual union into human and mandala forms.” (Miller, The Modern Alchemist: A Guide to Personal Transformation)
In The Magical Revival, Kenneth Grant says, “These twin aspects of the Holy Guardian Angel - the good and evil daemons appear terrible by turns.” We alternate through these light and dark passages as we undergo our passages, framing our beginnings and endings into a living Art. Crowley acknowledged Aiwass as a being identical with his daemon, his genius or Holy Guardian Angel. Individual genius was a mandate and goal.
"The Holy Guardian angel...is not, let me say with emphasis, a mere abstraction from yourself; and that is why I have insisted rather heavily that the term 'Higher Self' implies a 'damnable heresy and dangerous delusion' ... If it were not so, there would be no point in the Sacred Magick of Abramelin the Mage. Remember this above all else; they are objective, not subjective, or I should not waste good Magick on them."
--Aleister Crowley, from Magick Without Tears
Whatever we term it, the Self, or Atman, or Universal Mind is considered the basis of conscious life in the perennial philosophy. This tenet has been adopted by Jungian psychology, and is embraced in magick under the form of the Holy Guardian Angel.
When our finite mind merges with Universal Mind, it experiences a higher level of Reality, which transcends the limitations of the realm of cause and effect. What is Real is not subject to change; it is Absolute, timeless because it is beyond time. Self is the essential nature of all individuals, and is eternal and immutable. We can only comprehend the Self while merged in the Self.
The Self has been described as pure Awareness, or Eternal Knowledge, and is characterized as the pure, Clear Light of the Void. It is neither active nor passive, but embodies the paradox of pure existence. Individual consciousness is related to it as a bubble or wave is related to the depths of the ocean. True knowledge of the Self comes to the soul independent of the sense organs in mystical meditation.
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.
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.
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."
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.
"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).
In more recent times James Hillman used the daimon to account for the urge we all feel to discover and align our life with a personal calling, unique to our individuality and interests, and which we can passionately devote our life to.
Hillman conceived the daimon as a psychological complex or force existing in everyone, whose function is to help us find our personal calling, and provide us with the motivation to follow it.
One of the reasons people silence the “voice of vocation” is due to the perceived risks of following it – one must sacrifice short-term comfort, status, and wealth, and engage in work where the outcome is uncertain. Yet to repress this inner calling is destructive, and often leads to the formation of what may be called a silent rage: “the absence, the anger, and the paralysis on the couch are all symptoms of the soul in search of a lost call to something other and beyond.” (Hillman). The individual who loses touch with their daimon becomes an empty shell of the person that could have been:
“Present in body and absent in spirit, he lies back on the couch, shamed by his own daimon for the potentials in his soul that will not be subdued. He feels himself inwardly subversive, imagining in his passivity extremes of aggression and desire that must be suppressed. Solution: more work, more money, more drink, more weight, more things.” (The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman)
To ensure we don’t decline into such a lifestyle it is essential to tune into the call of fate which emanates from within, and learn to glimpse the inner workings of the daimon – using its signals and signs to help us live a more purposeful existence. This can be accomplished by looking back on our life and searching for a pattern amidst the apparently chaotic path our life has followed, as well as by attending to the inner voice and yearnings , often subtle, which seem to impel us toward a given direction.
“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.””(The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman)
Yet even if we find our personal calling we have the freedom to choose to follow it or ignore it. If we choose to ignore it we can be sure our “inner voice” won’t go away. It will be there whether we are aware of its presence or not, pushing us in the direction of our destiny until our final hours:
“A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may also possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim. The daimon does not go away.” (The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman)
The term Holy Guardian Angel (HGA) originates in the Catholic Church where a morning prayer is recited which reads, "Holy Guardian Angel whom God has appointed to be my guardian, direct and govern me during this day. Amen."
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.
"The daimon of sexuality approaches our soul as a serpent. She is half human soul and is called thought-desire. The daimon of spirituality descends into our soul as the white bird. He is half human soul and is called desire-thought.' (Jung, Liber Novus, Page 354).
The angel may well be mistaken for a demon, but should not be confused with a ‘daemon’ or ‘daimon’.[3] The etymology of ‘genius’ finds its roots in this concept, an inhabiting spirit, gift or exceptional talent. That noted, the angel is distinct from a daemon.
There is a version of your infinite identity that is transcendent. It is what you are as an angelic being. An archetype all of your own. It carries your essential and divine identity, a subtle but, psychologically, very important difference.
The metaphor is that we wrestle with the Angel. Jung recognized this angel in the deepest recess of our psyche. It is bound up with our deepest wound. The wound will find a challenging behavioral expression, excessive affective responses, bursts of tears at inappropriate moments.
It is as willing to play in the muck, cultivate devils as friends, and bring tears to your eyes with its sublime beauty and vision. The shadow characteristic of our psychology that causes us shame, a sense of inadequacy, heartache, guilt, regret, anger, recrimination and distress, is, simultaneously, our greatest gift. That which ails us, is also nostrum remedium, our remedy.[5]
A destiny spirit or guardian angel 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.
Way of the Daemon
The image of the Angel, Daimon, or Genius has persisted over aeons, suggesting its patterning role in the psyche. The angel equates with Daimon in Greek; Daemon or Genius in Roman.
The irreplaceable soul companion is the source of our character and fate. Hillman notes, "calling can refer not only to ways of doing — meaning work — but also to ways of being.
It is found in philosophy, psychology, Theosophy, Freemasonry, Hermetics, Kabbala, and neo-Platonic theurgy. There is no single authoritative voice. The essence of it means we carry our fate within us. Our fulfillment is expressing and living out the true self, also called self-actualization and self-realization.
When we allow daimons to be re-animated in our lives we hear their voices once more in our thoughts as cosmic entities existing outside space and time. This manifestation of genius moves the individual and the collective soul of society, shaking up the world and transforming it in various ways on all planes.
Plato’s concept of “soul” is an eternal life-principle. These patterns then act as mediators between the divine intellect and human senses, and are given visible or audible form as universal or cultural-specific archetypal images.
They can become visible as events in the world. The ultimate destiny of the daimonic soul is to become absorbed into the pure radiant light of the divine realm, but on the way it may assume a variety of coverings or vehicles, from the gross and quasi-material (i.e. misty) to the luminous.
The daimons accompany, changing all the time; “personages” become “places”, now discovered inside our own psyche as “processes”. Angela Voss “A Methodology of the Imagination”. The daimonic imagination has moved us on again, from “personages, places and processes” into encounter with living powers, the poet’s archetypal reservoirs of enthusiasm.
In theurgy we activate the “learning of the imagination” in different disciplines of visionary practice. We cannot enter the disciplines without the magic circle that keeps us bound to the work—only then, and to the measure that our relationship with the work has deepened, do we become free to play, in growing “intimacy and
dialogue” with our subject.
When evoking the “reality” of a dimension beyond the sensory, esoteric philosophy speaks metaphorically. The ability to grasp the meaning of a poetic or symbolic image is an essential process in the soul’s cognitive journey beyond discursive thinking, an inner sense of its noetic significance and its lived reality.
We are involved in Psyche’s tasks, for as Hillman points out, “psychology” should be about Psyche. Eros is her daimon, her love. Psyche’s initiatory tale for all souls is about passionate love, bitter separation, and eventual re-joining with the beloved.
This Way begins with such basics as the invocation of the personal Daimon. Quasi-autonomous and paradoxical, they can also ‘possess’
us as they create our desires, neuroses, and habitual patterns of behavior -- uncanny feelings, awe, and paranormal events (altered states, psychoid phenomena, synchronicity, healing, moving lights, and their identification with alien or non-material intelligent beings).
Intellectual intuition (in neoplatonic terminology) and the creative imagination which conveys it through form and image, engaging the knower in a symbolic mode of understanding which is participatory
in that it reveals something about the nature of his or her own soul, and opens into realms which the critical reason can only characterize as paradoxical, para-normal or downright impossible. (Voss)
We conjecture what mode of vision is required for humans
to “see” them accurately enough to gain some deeper insight into their provenance and purpose. In both scientific and science-fiction paradigms, there is an in-built assumption that such a “reality” has an external, verifiable existence independent from the observer’s own visionary frequency.
This literal approach denies the supremely important idea, long recognized in traditions of esoteric wisdom, that there are echelons of deepening modes of perception available to humans which far exceed the limits of either sense perception or critical reasoning, and which move towards a closing of the subjective-objective epistemological divide. It also denies a sense of the sacred as an epistemological category with its own distinct modes of expression—always understood as gateways to higher (or deeper) consciousness. (A. Voss)
Each question is a daimon; some quiet and helpful, others
noisy and challenging, some ephemeral, others to fall in love with for a lifetime. The daimon is the discursive, descriptive voice of soul. Invoking these daimons into our language is a “person-ifying” mode of consciousness, switching us from objects to subjects, from “things” to relations. It is a “method or way of re-animating” to practice. The daimon is our cosmic self-initiator.
“Images of the Self appear spontaneously throughout the entire transformative process. It appears in all symbols from the highest to the lowest. At the beginning of the great work it appears in animal forms, such as snakes, birds, fish, horses, or beetles. It shows through the plant forms of flowers and tree symbolism. It progresses through metaphors of sexual union into human and mandala forms.” (Miller, The Modern Alchemist: A Guide to Personal Transformation)
In The Magical Revival, Kenneth Grant says, “These twin aspects of the Holy Guardian Angel - the good and evil daemons appear terrible by turns.” We alternate through these light and dark passages as we undergo our passages, framing our beginnings and endings into a living Art. Crowley acknowledged Aiwass as a being identical with his daemon, his genius or Holy Guardian Angel. Individual genius was a mandate and goal.
"The Holy Guardian angel...is not, let me say with emphasis, a mere abstraction from yourself; and that is why I have insisted rather heavily that the term 'Higher Self' implies a 'damnable heresy and dangerous delusion' ... If it were not so, there would be no point in the Sacred Magick of Abramelin the Mage. Remember this above all else; they are objective, not subjective, or I should not waste good Magick on them."
--Aleister Crowley, from Magick Without Tears
Whatever we term it, the Self, or Atman, or Universal Mind is considered the basis of conscious life in the perennial philosophy. This tenet has been adopted by Jungian psychology, and is embraced in magick under the form of the Holy Guardian Angel.
When our finite mind merges with Universal Mind, it experiences a higher level of Reality, which transcends the limitations of the realm of cause and effect. What is Real is not subject to change; it is Absolute, timeless because it is beyond time. Self is the essential nature of all individuals, and is eternal and immutable. We can only comprehend the Self while merged in the Self.
The Self has been described as pure Awareness, or Eternal Knowledge, and is characterized as the pure, Clear Light of the Void. It is neither active nor passive, but embodies the paradox of pure existence. Individual consciousness is related to it as a bubble or wave is related to the depths of the ocean. True knowledge of the Self comes to the soul independent of the sense organs in mystical meditation.
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.
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.
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."
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.
"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).
In more recent times James Hillman used the daimon to account for the urge we all feel to discover and align our life with a personal calling, unique to our individuality and interests, and which we can passionately devote our life to.
Hillman conceived the daimon as a psychological complex or force existing in everyone, whose function is to help us find our personal calling, and provide us with the motivation to follow it.
One of the reasons people silence the “voice of vocation” is due to the perceived risks of following it – one must sacrifice short-term comfort, status, and wealth, and engage in work where the outcome is uncertain. Yet to repress this inner calling is destructive, and often leads to the formation of what may be called a silent rage: “the absence, the anger, and the paralysis on the couch are all symptoms of the soul in search of a lost call to something other and beyond.” (Hillman). The individual who loses touch with their daimon becomes an empty shell of the person that could have been:
“Present in body and absent in spirit, he lies back on the couch, shamed by his own daimon for the potentials in his soul that will not be subdued. He feels himself inwardly subversive, imagining in his passivity extremes of aggression and desire that must be suppressed. Solution: more work, more money, more drink, more weight, more things.” (The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman)
To ensure we don’t decline into such a lifestyle it is essential to tune into the call of fate which emanates from within, and learn to glimpse the inner workings of the daimon – using its signals and signs to help us live a more purposeful existence. This can be accomplished by looking back on our life and searching for a pattern amidst the apparently chaotic path our life has followed, as well as by attending to the inner voice and yearnings , often subtle, which seem to impel us toward a given direction.
“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.””(The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman)
Yet even if we find our personal calling we have the freedom to choose to follow it or ignore it. If we choose to ignore it we can be sure our “inner voice” won’t go away. It will be there whether we are aware of its presence or not, pushing us in the direction of our destiny until our final hours:
“A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may also possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim. The daimon does not go away.” (The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman)
""The daimon in ancient Greece was thought to be the cause of all ailments in Homer's time (9th century BCE), the daimones were also believed to heal and confer health, happiness, and harmony. The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Empedocles (fifth century BCE) describes psyche or soul in this context, and identifies daimon with self. Heraclitus writes that "man's character is his daimon".
According to psychologist Stephen A. Diamond, "[t]he daimon was that divine, mediating spiritual power that impelled one's actions and determined one's destiny. It was," he continues, "inborn and immortal, embodying all innate talents, tendencies (both positive and negative), and natural abilities".1
Plato (427-347 BCE) asserts that "[a]s regards the supreme form of soul in us, we must conceive that the god has conferred it upon each ... as a guiding [daimon] — that which [...] lifts us from earth toward our celestial affinity, like a plant whose roots are not in the earth, but in the heavens".2
The concept of daimon as one's personal companion and guide emerged along these lines in the fifth century. Perhaps the best known case in point is Socrates, who credited his daimon as the source of his philosophical inspiration.
The Romans absorbed and put their own spin on a great many ideas from ancient Greece. Rollo May tells us that the daimonic was translated into Latin as genii. Genii [...] is a concept in Roman religion from which our word "genius" comes and which originally meant a tutelary deity, an incorporeal spirit presiding over the destiny of a person, and later became a peculiar mental talent.
As "genius" (its root being the Latin genere) means to generate, to beget, so the daimonic is the voice of the generative process in the individual. The daimonic is [that] unique pattern of sensibilities and powers which constitutes the individual as a self in relation to [the] world.3
That last line is especially interesting. Think of "the individual as a self", characterized by a "unique pattern of sensibilities and powers". We might interpret this pattern as an ordered process.
For example, Jungian analyst Jean Shinoda Bolen describes archetypal patterns that constellate in an individual, resulting in a personality which, given the presence of a healthy ego, operates like a committee with ego as chair.4 In her model, the story and character of a particular archetype may be recognized by the ego as self-descriptive. That archetype may evince the quality of the daimon or genius.
The daimon can be thought of in other ways. For instance, Otto Rank writes of "will" as "a positive guiding organization and integration of self" that permits the individual to inhibit and control instinctual drives.5 Jung recognizes that self could contain many subselves and describes the presence of a "transcendent function" that could bring together elements at variance with one another.6
Note that, as Hesiod (8th century BCE) writes, the daimones "mantle themselves in [...] mist".12 As the ordinating principle of self, the daimon or genius cannot be defined or delineated. It inheres in psychodynamics, manifests in action, and also presents in dreams. It can be experienced in the act of doing. "Doing", says Bolen, "is becoming".13
Some believe that it is important to understand the nature of one's own daimon/genius. "If you have a genius for building houses or putting automobile engines together," writes Pastoral counselor and Jungian analyst John A. Sanford, "you pursue a very different course in life than if you have a genius for art or psychotherapy."14
Sanford asserts that the cooperation of the ego is required if the daimon/genius is to operate successfully. From the perspective of ego psychology, that makes sense. Yet this divine aspect of personality may be perceived to operate through the ego, whether the ego is aware of it or not. When we speak of one's "calling", in that context, we do not simply refer to one's profession but rather, to the fundamental character, orientation and activity of the ego, in which the daimon/genius is immanent. The concept is useful because it helps us appreciate the complexities of self-expression in terms of the personal and the transcendent.
http://www.dagankenaz.com/daimon.php
According to psychologist Stephen A. Diamond, "[t]he daimon was that divine, mediating spiritual power that impelled one's actions and determined one's destiny. It was," he continues, "inborn and immortal, embodying all innate talents, tendencies (both positive and negative), and natural abilities".1
Plato (427-347 BCE) asserts that "[a]s regards the supreme form of soul in us, we must conceive that the god has conferred it upon each ... as a guiding [daimon] — that which [...] lifts us from earth toward our celestial affinity, like a plant whose roots are not in the earth, but in the heavens".2
The concept of daimon as one's personal companion and guide emerged along these lines in the fifth century. Perhaps the best known case in point is Socrates, who credited his daimon as the source of his philosophical inspiration.
The Romans absorbed and put their own spin on a great many ideas from ancient Greece. Rollo May tells us that the daimonic was translated into Latin as genii. Genii [...] is a concept in Roman religion from which our word "genius" comes and which originally meant a tutelary deity, an incorporeal spirit presiding over the destiny of a person, and later became a peculiar mental talent.
As "genius" (its root being the Latin genere) means to generate, to beget, so the daimonic is the voice of the generative process in the individual. The daimonic is [that] unique pattern of sensibilities and powers which constitutes the individual as a self in relation to [the] world.3
That last line is especially interesting. Think of "the individual as a self", characterized by a "unique pattern of sensibilities and powers". We might interpret this pattern as an ordered process.
For example, Jungian analyst Jean Shinoda Bolen describes archetypal patterns that constellate in an individual, resulting in a personality which, given the presence of a healthy ego, operates like a committee with ego as chair.4 In her model, the story and character of a particular archetype may be recognized by the ego as self-descriptive. That archetype may evince the quality of the daimon or genius.
The daimon can be thought of in other ways. For instance, Otto Rank writes of "will" as "a positive guiding organization and integration of self" that permits the individual to inhibit and control instinctual drives.5 Jung recognizes that self could contain many subselves and describes the presence of a "transcendent function" that could bring together elements at variance with one another.6
Note that, as Hesiod (8th century BCE) writes, the daimones "mantle themselves in [...] mist".12 As the ordinating principle of self, the daimon or genius cannot be defined or delineated. It inheres in psychodynamics, manifests in action, and also presents in dreams. It can be experienced in the act of doing. "Doing", says Bolen, "is becoming".13
Some believe that it is important to understand the nature of one's own daimon/genius. "If you have a genius for building houses or putting automobile engines together," writes Pastoral counselor and Jungian analyst John A. Sanford, "you pursue a very different course in life than if you have a genius for art or psychotherapy."14
Sanford asserts that the cooperation of the ego is required if the daimon/genius is to operate successfully. From the perspective of ego psychology, that makes sense. Yet this divine aspect of personality may be perceived to operate through the ego, whether the ego is aware of it or not. When we speak of one's "calling", in that context, we do not simply refer to one's profession but rather, to the fundamental character, orientation and activity of the ego, in which the daimon/genius is immanent. The concept is useful because it helps us appreciate the complexities of self-expression in terms of the personal and the transcendent.
http://www.dagankenaz.com/daimon.php
Winged Daimon, Corinthian Plate
Historical Beliefs
Guardian angels derive from Neoplatonism's personal daimons and before that Zoroastrianism, the origin of magic in the 4th millennium BC. Pliny the Elder names Zoroaster as the inventor of magic (Natural History). Zoroaster has also been described as a sorcerer-astrologer – the creator of both magic and astrology.
Plutarch describes: "Others call the better of these a god and his rival a daemon, as, for example, Zoroaster the Magus, who lived, so they record, five thousand years before the siege of Troy."
A daimon existed within a person from their birth. Plato in Cratylus speculates that the word daimōn (δαίμων "deity") is synonymous to daēmōn (δαήμων "knowing or wise"), an authority of a remote and revelatory wisdom. in the Phaedo (107d) and the Laws (713c-d) the daimon is seen more as a separate entity or guide to the afterlife, a superior being or guardian spirit.
Plato, in his Myth of Er, said our soul chooses a purpose for us to fulfill on earth. Prior to birth we pass through the forget the fate our soul had chosen for us. But our daimon, a spiritual companion, acts as a “carrier of our destiny” and ensures we fulfill the fate our soul had chosen before birth. Heraclitus, prior to Plato, stated that “a man’s daimon is his fate”, as a sort of force or indwelling law which determines the course of one’s life - our vocation.
In Plato's Apology of Socrates, Socrates claimed to have a daimonion (literally, a "divine something") that frequently warned him—in the form of a "voice"—against mistakes but never told him what to do. For Proclus, daimones are the intermediary beings located between the celestial objects and the terrestrial inhabitants.
In the Hellenistic ruler cult that began with Alexander the Great, it was not the ruler, but his guiding daemon that was venerated. In the Archaic or early Classical period, the daimon had been democratized and internalized for each person.
Empedocles, the fifth-century BCE pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, employed this term in describing the psyche or soul; he identified daimon with self. The daimon was that divine, mediating spiritual power that impelled one’s actions and determined one’s destiny.
It was inborn and immortal, embodying all innate talents, tendencies (both positive and negative), and natural abilities, a sort of fateful companion. It served to guide, motivate, and inspire, as one possessed of such good spirits. It echoes the Roman notion of Genius, the personal Daimon or Daemon, and the transpersonal Jungian Self. Destiny is the goal.
Daemon is Latin for the Ancient Greek daimon (δαίμων: "god", "godlike", "power", "fate"), which originally referred to a lesser deity or guiding spirit of ancient Greek religion and mythology and of later Hellenistic religion and philosophy. The word is derived from Proto-Indo-European daimon "provider, divider (of fortunes or destinies)," from the root da- "to divide".
The concept goes back to the Zoroastrian Arda Fravaš ('Holy Guardian Angels'). The idea of a Holy Guardian Angel is central to the book The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra Melin the Mage by Abraham of Worms, a German Cabalist who wrote the book on ceremonial magick during the 15th century.
In Aleister Crowley's system, one of the two most important goals is to consciously connect with one’s Holy Guardian Angel, representative of one's truest divine nature: a process termed “Knowledge and Conversation.”
Crowley equated it with the Genius of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Augoeides of Iamblichus, the Atman of Hinduism, and the Daemon of the ancient Greeks. He borrowed the term from the Grimoire The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. Theurgists do divine things and divine work that endows a divine nature and the specific individuality of an angel, through initiatory death and rebirth.
"It should never be forgotten for a single moment that the central and essential work of the Magician is the attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. Once he has achieved this he must of course be left entirely in the hands of that Angel, who can be invariably and inevitably relied upon to lead him to the further great step—crossing of the Abyss and the attainment of the grade of Master of the Temple."
He further intimated that, "the Abramelin procedure was not the only way to achieve success in this endeavour: It is impossible to lay down precise rules by which a man may attain to the knowledge and conversation of His Holy Guardian Angel; for that is the particular secret of each one of us; a secret not to be told or even divined by any other, whatever his grade. It is the Holy of Holies, whereof each man is his own High Priest, and none knoweth the Name of his brother's God, or the Rite that invokes Him."
Crowley wanted a more accessible method, so, he wrote Liber Samekh, based on the Bornless Ritual, an example of how one may attain the Knowledge and Conversation with one’s Holy Guardian Angel. In his notes to this ritual, Crowley sums up the key to success: “INVOKE OFTEN.” He suggested his own daimon, Aiwass, was an extraterrestrial. He explained the general mystical process of the ritual:
"The Adept will be free to concentrate his deepest self, that part of him which unconsciously orders his true Will, upon the realization of his Holy Guardian Angel. The absence of his bodily, mental and astral consciousness is indeed cardinal to success, for it is their usurpation of his attention which has made him deaf to his Soul, and his preoccupation with their affairs that has prevented him from perceiving that Soul."
A tendency to mystify the emotional momentum of genius, daimon or HGA is counterbalanced by alchemical and plain talk descriptions of the Angel and its relationships in neo-Platonic, Jungian, and Archetypal Psychology. Now we seek the daimon in the poetic psyche.
Jung says you have to first connect with your own daemon, an entity or internal genius, an archetype that guides your unconscious; a form of our actually lived life as it is seen from the perspective of psychological soul.
In Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, Jung said he lived, wrote and developed analytical psychology as a consequence of being “in the grip of the daimon” that lived within him.
Jung’s insight is intimately bound up with its encountered the inner figure Philemon. It was the dialogical character of this encounter that left a permanent mark upon the psychological ideas that emerged from it: ‘It was [Philemon] who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche." The experiential, dialogical aspect of what occurred is precisely what makes the event crucial for him.
Jung sees‘ in all that happens the play of opposites’(ibid.). This is why the meeting with Philemon produces the ‘crucial insight’—it opened up for Jung the idea of ego and other in conversation: the interface of (subjective) conscious and (objective) unconscious. This, is the dynamic core of his psychology. It is from this insight that all his later work flows.
For Jung the objective psyche is the autonomous other with which the conscious ego must continuously and necessarily engage and re-engage. Jung explicitly states, ‘By psyche I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious’ (Jung 1921, para.797). Therefore, soul/psyche necessarily includes the oppositional, tension-filled, dialogical elements.
"the notion of "soul", of the "reality of soul”, dawned on him and became the inalienable insight within which he experienced and thought from then on. Jung had comprehended what "soul" means, and he had been "placed" into this concept, so that it became his arche, his standpoint. It had become the center and the circumference of his vision and reflection. (Giegerich2008a, p.42)
The “daimon” is the energy or being in the Universe that gives us our fate or allots human destiny, i.e. a god/goddess. The Romans took up the term, which became the source of our English derivative, “demon.” But note that, in the original meaning, and the sense in which Jung used it, “daimon” is not the negative thing we associate with “demons.”
Being well versed in the classics, Jung brought many ancient concepts into modern usage in psychology, to foster our understanding of the workings of the unconscious. The “daimon” became a central part of his thinking about vocation, motivation, creativity and the individual’s potential for achieving fulfillment in life.
As Jung used the term, “daimon” referred to something alien from the unconscious,[2] an “archetype” or “numinous imperative which from ancient times has been accorded a far higher authority than the human intellect.”[3] As an archetype, the “daimon” is universal, something experienced in all peoples and cultures. Among indigenous tribes, it shows up as a “primitive power concept.”[4] As “an autonomous psychic content,” the daimon is a “force as real as hunger and the fear of death.”[5] Because it is autonomous, it behaves within us like a god, making demands of us and acting with authority.
The poet and potter M.C. Richards describes the experience of the daimon well when she says, “There lives a creative being inside all of us and we must get out of its way for it will give us no peace unless we do.”[6] Beside Jung, multiple figures in history have acknowledged being in the grip of a daimon, e.g. the Greek philosopher Socrates, the German poet Goethe, and the French ruler Napoleon.[7]
When we say the daimon is “autonomous,” we mean that it is not under the control of the ego consciousness. It is superior to our ordinary consciousness, and can possess us without our conscious awareness. Its expression cannot be consciously willed, and the more our unconscious is split off from consciousness, the larger and more powerful the daimon is.[8]
The daimon shows up in life as certain feeling states, with a “release of affect.”[9] That is, we feel something, usually something powerful, something with numinosity—an energy that cannot be gainsaid. It can seem like we are being taken over, because the level of intensity and energy exceeds normal human limits. When we are in its “grip,” the daimon will make us feel like we are caught up in a force or process that is carrying us along. And so, it requires courage to deal with, because we don’t fully understand this force, or know where we are being carried, or what we are being led to undertake.[10] Nor do we often recognize this force as something that is our own.
In its benign aspect, the daimon is our “guardian angel” or “genius,” our better self or inner voice, our heart or “higher man”—the part of us that helps build our strength by leading us into challenging situations and giving us the guidance to get through them. The daimon fosters a dialogue between ego and unconsciousness which can heal us and make us whole. By challenging the whole of our being, the daimon forces us to enter the fray of life with every function or ability we have, and this fosters our wholeness.
It is the contact with our daimon that gives us a clear sense of our vocation. Jung also noted the close connection between the daimon and creativity: “The fight against the paralyzing grip of the unconscious calls forth man’s creative powers.”[14] Finally, the daimon pulls us out of conventions and social norms, because it operates in the archetypal (universal, timeless) realm.
https://jungiancenter.org/in-the-grip-of-the-daimon/
The imaginal realm mediates between those of matter and spirit. We used to speak of psyche or soul in aesthetic poetic high fantasy; now it is poetically revisioned metaphor, or even scifi tropes. Why?
to understand who we are as human beings in the cosmos.
“There is in each of us a longing to see beyond what our usual sight tells us. (Hillman/SC/108)” While Jung's aesthetic was the Great Work, Hillman's is Soulmaking.
For Hillman, "soul" is about multiplicity and ambiguity, and about being polytheistic; it belongs to the night-world of dreams where the lines across the phenomenal field are not so clearly drawn. Soul pathologizes: "it gets us into trouble," as Moore writes, "it interferes with the smooth running of life, it obstructs attempts to understand, and it seems to make relationships impossible." While spirit seeks unity and harmony, soul is in the vales, the depths.
In his magnum opus, Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman writes of "soul":
"By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself. This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment -- and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground.
Soulmaking is revealed by psychic images to which a person is drawn and apprehends in a meaningful way. Soul–making is concerned essentially with the evocation of psychological faith in the reality of the soul. Psychological faith begins in the love of images and trust in the imagination.
James Hillman is a main proponent of the daimon in Archetypal Psychology. Hillman's imaginal soul-making suggests the daimon or soul-guide enables us throughout the necessities of our inherent unfolding, our fate. This angel exists in the mundus imaginalis, the world of the imagination, which is an intermediary realm between spirit and matter.
In Re-Visioning Psychology, James Hillman suggests, "it is not about my detection, but of the daimon's; it is not my destiny that cares about the Gods, but the way I take care of the psychic people entrusted to my assistance during my life. It's not life that matters, but the soul and the way life is used to take care of the soul." (PP. 297-298)
Hillman strongly links the daimon to our search for a calling. His “acorn theory” describes a personal intelligence that one is linked to at birth. “Let’s say the acorn is more concerned with the soul aspect of events, more alive to what’s good for it than to what you believe is good for you." Hillman calls this intelligence daimon, using the name given by Plato to a sort of guardian angel. It accompanied Socrates throughout his life, always nudging him down the path he should follow.
“Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. You may remember this “something” as a signal moment in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have. This is who I am.” -- Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling
“Each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny. As the force of fate, this image acts as a personal daimon, an accompanying guide who remembers your calling. Your soul’s lot comes from the (Hillman/SC/208) irrational principle.'
“Does your daimon want the path you have chosen? Is your soul really in it? (Hillman/SC/105)”
“The angel who reads a life as a total image…. (Hillman/SC/106)”
The soul seeks to fit it into its form. (Hillman/SC/204)”
“A person’s innate form incorporates the accidents. Character is fate. (Hillman/SC/204)”
“…instances of the daimon making use of haphazard occasions. (Hillman/SC/205)”
“The form not only integrates …[ an accident], but is fed by it. (Hillman/SC/205)”
“What the soul needs, it uses. It is amazing how practically wise it can be about misfortune and accidents. (Hillman/SC/206)”
“Wisdom in Greek was Sophia, as in our word “philosophy,” love of wisdom…. The daimon teaches this wisdom by constant appraisals of events that seem to pull you off course. This is also philosophy: the love of making little corrections, little integrations of what seems not to fit in. (Hillman/SC/206)”
“These accidental movements neither hinder nor advance the main project. Rather they reshape its form, as if the course and the boat itself were being restructured by the soul’s responses to the events of life. There is a craft of growing down; it’s the wisdom of watching things with an eye to their effects. (Hillman/SC/206)”
“The form is given with beginnings as the image of your lot, and it (Hillman/SC/206) shifts as we move. This form, for which we are using many interchangeable terms – image, daimon, calling, angel, heart, acorn, soul, pattern, character – stays true to form. (Hillman/SC/207)”
https://www.academia.edu/4789757/A_Trauma_Weakened_Ego_Goes_Seeking_a_Bodyguard
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” -- Hillman, Soul's Code. p.39
We breathe, expand, and let go, and something comes in from elsewhere. The daimon in the heart seems quietly pleased, preferring melancholy to desperation. It’s in touch." --Hillman, Soul's Code
What we can take from this practice is the primacy of the psyche for personification of the unconscious -- the multiple personifications or perspectives of psyche. We spontaneously personify psyche all the time, without effort since it is a psychological necessity. Personifying allows the image to work on us -- a potential way of knowing what is hidden in the heart. A grounded ego uses personification for growth.
Hillman strongly suggests the daemonic is a taskmaster, "to do these things or say these things or produce these things," he explains. "It's the slave driver. You spend your life making it, then it tortures you: 'What are you doing now? We want more. You didn't finish that.' " Charisma is a trait of genius and psychopath.
Hillman amplifies that view. "[T]he duende is the part that is connected to the earth, the blood, the party. It is this that Rilke refers to in his line that our role in life is to be decisively defeated by greater and greater beings. ...This is the struggle with the daimon .... While our culture has no words for this, other cultures have referred to it as "the ancestors" or "the spirits" that operate invisibly in our world. ... "the invisibles." What we do when we aren't aware of "the invisibles"? We buy insurance, and maybe even make a little money out of the catastrophe, instead of asking "Why did this happen now? What does is mean? What is my daimon's rag telling me?"" Hillman, Meade http://www.menweb.org/chardest.htm
The Daimon
Thomas Moore, in a Spirituality & Practice e-course on Fairy Tales, warned against being too literal about where the daimon is leading.
"I'd like to say something about finding the power (daimon) that will reveal to you the key to your life and identity. Jung wrote a great deal about individuation, becoming an individual through many trials and transformations. Hillman doesn't use this language, but once he commented on individuation, meaning that each person and thing in the world has to be seen in its individuality. He says that this revelation of the particular is especially the work of Aphrodite, showing how an individual is fully present and beautiful. We tend to search for identity, health and success. But a beautiful person is truly something to appreciate and aim for.
"I would add that we don't have to individuate in a way that sets us apart from others. We might individuate by being a good partner or member of a community or a fine human being. We certainly don't need to be free of neurosis to be a decent and creative human being. The quest for identity doesn't ever have to end. That satisfaction is not what it means to individuate. A daimonic life is not one in which we have reached the goal or have a chiseled identity. It's one where we respond well to invitations for deeper and more meaningful living. It's a process. As the great philosopher of soul Plotinus said, we are always sculpting our soul. The sculptor is forever making us an individual" (© Thomas Moore and Spirituality & Practice 2019).
In The Soul's Code, Hillman says, "The daimon's reminders work in many ways. The daimon motivates, protects, invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists compromising reasonableness and often forces deviance and oddity upon its keeper, especially when it is neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but 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 prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns."
Hillman used the daimon to account for the urge we all feel to discover and align our life with a personal calling, unique to our individuality and interests, and to which we can passionately devote our life.It is a psychological complex or force existing in everyone, that helps us find our personal calling, and provide us with the motivation to follow it. Many geniuses have spoken of a daimon, or inner voice, who accompanied them throughout life.
“Among his various possible beings each man always finds one which is his genuine and authentic being. The voice which calls him to that authentic being is what we call “vocation.” But the majority of men devote themselves to silencing that voice of the vocation and refusing to hear it. They manage to make a noise within themselves…to distract their own attention in order not to hear it; and they defraud themselves by substituting for their genuine selves a false course of life.” (Jose Ortega Y Gasset)
“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.” “A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may also possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim. The daimon does not go away.”
“Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. You may remember this “something” as a signal moment in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have. This is who I am.” (The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman)
“For centuries we have searched for the right term for this ‘call.’ The Romans named it your genius; the Greeks, your daimon; and the Christians your guardian angel. The concept of this individualized soul-image has a long, complicated history; its appearance in cultures is diverse and widespread and the names for it are legion. Only our contemporary psychology and psychiatry omit it from their textbooks.
“These many words and names do not tell us what ‘it’ is, but they do confirm that it is. They also point to its mysteriousness. We cannot know what exactly we are referring to because its nature remains shadowy, revealing itself mainly in hints, intuitions, whispers, and the sudden urges and oddities that disturb your life and that we continue to call symptoms.
“That the daimon has your interest at heart may be the part of the theory particularly hard to accept. That the heart has its reasons, yes; that there is an unconscious with its own intentions; that fate plays a hand in how things turn out—all this is acceptable, even conventional. ...We name what preserves us instinct, self-preservation, sixth sense, subliminal awareness (each of which, too, is invisible yet present). Once upon a time what took such good care of me was a guardian spirit, and I damn well knew to pay it appropriate attention."
“All this has nothing to do with belief and so it also has nothing to do with superstition. It’s merely a matter of not forgetting that the invisibles can go away, leaving you with nothing but human relationships to cover your back. As the old Greeks said of their gods: They ask for little, just that they not be forgotten. Myths keep their daimonic realm invisibly present.”
This is also philosophy: the love of making little corrections, little integrations of what seems not to fit in. “This idea of continual, moving adjustments is nothing new or strange. As far back as Aristotle the soul was conceived to be both the form and the motion of a body. The form is given with beginnings as the image of your lot, and it shifts as we move. This form, for which we are using many interchangeable terms—image, daimon, calling, angel, heart, acorn, soul, pattern, character—stays true to form.
“Remember Plato’s tale: The goddess Ananke, or Necessity, sits on her throne amid the Fates, her daughters, companions, and aides. But it is she, Ananke, who establishes that the soul has selected for its lot to be necessary—not an accident, not good or bad, not foreknown or guaranteed, simply necessary. What we live is necessary to be lived.
“The truer you are to your daimon, the closer you are to the death that belongs to your destiny. We expect the daimon to have prescience about death, calling on it before an airline flight or during a sudden attack of sickness. Is this my fate, and now? And when the demands of our calling seem undeniably necessary, again death appears: ‘If I do what I really must, it will kill me; and yet if I don’t, I’ll die.’ To be the calling or not to be, that still and again seems to be the question.
“Perhaps this intimacy between calling and fate is why we avoid the daimon and the theory that upholds its importance. We mostly invent, and prefer, theories that tie us tightly to parental powers, encumber us with sociological conditionings and genetic determinants; thereby we escape the fact that these deep influences on our fates don’t hold a candle to the power of death. Death is the only complete necessity, that archetypal Necessity who rules the pattern of the lifeline she spins with her daughters, the Fates. The length of that line and its irreversible one-way direction is part of one and the same pattern, and it could not be otherwise.”
The daimon’s transcendence places it outside time, which it enters only by growing down. This timelessness of the acorn and its push to make everything happen at once indicates possession by the daimon, daimon becoming demonic.
The appreciation of everything having its season, of giving time and having time and taking time, does not apply to manic inflation that brooks no interruptions. Loss of the daimon collapses democratic society into a crowd of shoppers wandering a mall of mazes in search of the exit. But there is no exit without the guide of an individual direction.”
Historical Beliefs
Guardian angels derive from Neoplatonism's personal daimons and before that Zoroastrianism, the origin of magic in the 4th millennium BC. Pliny the Elder names Zoroaster as the inventor of magic (Natural History). Zoroaster has also been described as a sorcerer-astrologer – the creator of both magic and astrology.
Plutarch describes: "Others call the better of these a god and his rival a daemon, as, for example, Zoroaster the Magus, who lived, so they record, five thousand years before the siege of Troy."
A daimon existed within a person from their birth. Plato in Cratylus speculates that the word daimōn (δαίμων "deity") is synonymous to daēmōn (δαήμων "knowing or wise"), an authority of a remote and revelatory wisdom. in the Phaedo (107d) and the Laws (713c-d) the daimon is seen more as a separate entity or guide to the afterlife, a superior being or guardian spirit.
Plato, in his Myth of Er, said our soul chooses a purpose for us to fulfill on earth. Prior to birth we pass through the forget the fate our soul had chosen for us. But our daimon, a spiritual companion, acts as a “carrier of our destiny” and ensures we fulfill the fate our soul had chosen before birth. Heraclitus, prior to Plato, stated that “a man’s daimon is his fate”, as a sort of force or indwelling law which determines the course of one’s life - our vocation.
In Plato's Apology of Socrates, Socrates claimed to have a daimonion (literally, a "divine something") that frequently warned him—in the form of a "voice"—against mistakes but never told him what to do. For Proclus, daimones are the intermediary beings located between the celestial objects and the terrestrial inhabitants.
In the Hellenistic ruler cult that began with Alexander the Great, it was not the ruler, but his guiding daemon that was venerated. In the Archaic or early Classical period, the daimon had been democratized and internalized for each person.
Empedocles, the fifth-century BCE pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, employed this term in describing the psyche or soul; he identified daimon with self. The daimon was that divine, mediating spiritual power that impelled one’s actions and determined one’s destiny.
It was inborn and immortal, embodying all innate talents, tendencies (both positive and negative), and natural abilities, a sort of fateful companion. It served to guide, motivate, and inspire, as one possessed of such good spirits. It echoes the Roman notion of Genius, the personal Daimon or Daemon, and the transpersonal Jungian Self. Destiny is the goal.
Daemon is Latin for the Ancient Greek daimon (δαίμων: "god", "godlike", "power", "fate"), which originally referred to a lesser deity or guiding spirit of ancient Greek religion and mythology and of later Hellenistic religion and philosophy. The word is derived from Proto-Indo-European daimon "provider, divider (of fortunes or destinies)," from the root da- "to divide".
The concept goes back to the Zoroastrian Arda Fravaš ('Holy Guardian Angels'). The idea of a Holy Guardian Angel is central to the book The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra Melin the Mage by Abraham of Worms, a German Cabalist who wrote the book on ceremonial magick during the 15th century.
In Aleister Crowley's system, one of the two most important goals is to consciously connect with one’s Holy Guardian Angel, representative of one's truest divine nature: a process termed “Knowledge and Conversation.”
Crowley equated it with the Genius of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Augoeides of Iamblichus, the Atman of Hinduism, and the Daemon of the ancient Greeks. He borrowed the term from the Grimoire The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. Theurgists do divine things and divine work that endows a divine nature and the specific individuality of an angel, through initiatory death and rebirth.
"It should never be forgotten for a single moment that the central and essential work of the Magician is the attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. Once he has achieved this he must of course be left entirely in the hands of that Angel, who can be invariably and inevitably relied upon to lead him to the further great step—crossing of the Abyss and the attainment of the grade of Master of the Temple."
He further intimated that, "the Abramelin procedure was not the only way to achieve success in this endeavour: It is impossible to lay down precise rules by which a man may attain to the knowledge and conversation of His Holy Guardian Angel; for that is the particular secret of each one of us; a secret not to be told or even divined by any other, whatever his grade. It is the Holy of Holies, whereof each man is his own High Priest, and none knoweth the Name of his brother's God, or the Rite that invokes Him."
Crowley wanted a more accessible method, so, he wrote Liber Samekh, based on the Bornless Ritual, an example of how one may attain the Knowledge and Conversation with one’s Holy Guardian Angel. In his notes to this ritual, Crowley sums up the key to success: “INVOKE OFTEN.” He suggested his own daimon, Aiwass, was an extraterrestrial. He explained the general mystical process of the ritual:
"The Adept will be free to concentrate his deepest self, that part of him which unconsciously orders his true Will, upon the realization of his Holy Guardian Angel. The absence of his bodily, mental and astral consciousness is indeed cardinal to success, for it is their usurpation of his attention which has made him deaf to his Soul, and his preoccupation with their affairs that has prevented him from perceiving that Soul."
A tendency to mystify the emotional momentum of genius, daimon or HGA is counterbalanced by alchemical and plain talk descriptions of the Angel and its relationships in neo-Platonic, Jungian, and Archetypal Psychology. Now we seek the daimon in the poetic psyche.
Jung says you have to first connect with your own daemon, an entity or internal genius, an archetype that guides your unconscious; a form of our actually lived life as it is seen from the perspective of psychological soul.
In Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, Jung said he lived, wrote and developed analytical psychology as a consequence of being “in the grip of the daimon” that lived within him.
Jung’s insight is intimately bound up with its encountered the inner figure Philemon. It was the dialogical character of this encounter that left a permanent mark upon the psychological ideas that emerged from it: ‘It was [Philemon] who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche." The experiential, dialogical aspect of what occurred is precisely what makes the event crucial for him.
Jung sees‘ in all that happens the play of opposites’(ibid.). This is why the meeting with Philemon produces the ‘crucial insight’—it opened up for Jung the idea of ego and other in conversation: the interface of (subjective) conscious and (objective) unconscious. This, is the dynamic core of his psychology. It is from this insight that all his later work flows.
For Jung the objective psyche is the autonomous other with which the conscious ego must continuously and necessarily engage and re-engage. Jung explicitly states, ‘By psyche I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious’ (Jung 1921, para.797). Therefore, soul/psyche necessarily includes the oppositional, tension-filled, dialogical elements.
"the notion of "soul", of the "reality of soul”, dawned on him and became the inalienable insight within which he experienced and thought from then on. Jung had comprehended what "soul" means, and he had been "placed" into this concept, so that it became his arche, his standpoint. It had become the center and the circumference of his vision and reflection. (Giegerich2008a, p.42)
The “daimon” is the energy or being in the Universe that gives us our fate or allots human destiny, i.e. a god/goddess. The Romans took up the term, which became the source of our English derivative, “demon.” But note that, in the original meaning, and the sense in which Jung used it, “daimon” is not the negative thing we associate with “demons.”
Being well versed in the classics, Jung brought many ancient concepts into modern usage in psychology, to foster our understanding of the workings of the unconscious. The “daimon” became a central part of his thinking about vocation, motivation, creativity and the individual’s potential for achieving fulfillment in life.
As Jung used the term, “daimon” referred to something alien from the unconscious,[2] an “archetype” or “numinous imperative which from ancient times has been accorded a far higher authority than the human intellect.”[3] As an archetype, the “daimon” is universal, something experienced in all peoples and cultures. Among indigenous tribes, it shows up as a “primitive power concept.”[4] As “an autonomous psychic content,” the daimon is a “force as real as hunger and the fear of death.”[5] Because it is autonomous, it behaves within us like a god, making demands of us and acting with authority.
The poet and potter M.C. Richards describes the experience of the daimon well when she says, “There lives a creative being inside all of us and we must get out of its way for it will give us no peace unless we do.”[6] Beside Jung, multiple figures in history have acknowledged being in the grip of a daimon, e.g. the Greek philosopher Socrates, the German poet Goethe, and the French ruler Napoleon.[7]
When we say the daimon is “autonomous,” we mean that it is not under the control of the ego consciousness. It is superior to our ordinary consciousness, and can possess us without our conscious awareness. Its expression cannot be consciously willed, and the more our unconscious is split off from consciousness, the larger and more powerful the daimon is.[8]
The daimon shows up in life as certain feeling states, with a “release of affect.”[9] That is, we feel something, usually something powerful, something with numinosity—an energy that cannot be gainsaid. It can seem like we are being taken over, because the level of intensity and energy exceeds normal human limits. When we are in its “grip,” the daimon will make us feel like we are caught up in a force or process that is carrying us along. And so, it requires courage to deal with, because we don’t fully understand this force, or know where we are being carried, or what we are being led to undertake.[10] Nor do we often recognize this force as something that is our own.
In its benign aspect, the daimon is our “guardian angel” or “genius,” our better self or inner voice, our heart or “higher man”—the part of us that helps build our strength by leading us into challenging situations and giving us the guidance to get through them. The daimon fosters a dialogue between ego and unconsciousness which can heal us and make us whole. By challenging the whole of our being, the daimon forces us to enter the fray of life with every function or ability we have, and this fosters our wholeness.
It is the contact with our daimon that gives us a clear sense of our vocation. Jung also noted the close connection between the daimon and creativity: “The fight against the paralyzing grip of the unconscious calls forth man’s creative powers.”[14] Finally, the daimon pulls us out of conventions and social norms, because it operates in the archetypal (universal, timeless) realm.
https://jungiancenter.org/in-the-grip-of-the-daimon/
The imaginal realm mediates between those of matter and spirit. We used to speak of psyche or soul in aesthetic poetic high fantasy; now it is poetically revisioned metaphor, or even scifi tropes. Why?
to understand who we are as human beings in the cosmos.
“There is in each of us a longing to see beyond what our usual sight tells us. (Hillman/SC/108)” While Jung's aesthetic was the Great Work, Hillman's is Soulmaking.
For Hillman, "soul" is about multiplicity and ambiguity, and about being polytheistic; it belongs to the night-world of dreams where the lines across the phenomenal field are not so clearly drawn. Soul pathologizes: "it gets us into trouble," as Moore writes, "it interferes with the smooth running of life, it obstructs attempts to understand, and it seems to make relationships impossible." While spirit seeks unity and harmony, soul is in the vales, the depths.
In his magnum opus, Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman writes of "soul":
"By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself. This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment -- and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground.
Soulmaking is revealed by psychic images to which a person is drawn and apprehends in a meaningful way. Soul–making is concerned essentially with the evocation of psychological faith in the reality of the soul. Psychological faith begins in the love of images and trust in the imagination.
James Hillman is a main proponent of the daimon in Archetypal Psychology. Hillman's imaginal soul-making suggests the daimon or soul-guide enables us throughout the necessities of our inherent unfolding, our fate. This angel exists in the mundus imaginalis, the world of the imagination, which is an intermediary realm between spirit and matter.
In Re-Visioning Psychology, James Hillman suggests, "it is not about my detection, but of the daimon's; it is not my destiny that cares about the Gods, but the way I take care of the psychic people entrusted to my assistance during my life. It's not life that matters, but the soul and the way life is used to take care of the soul." (PP. 297-298)
Hillman strongly links the daimon to our search for a calling. His “acorn theory” describes a personal intelligence that one is linked to at birth. “Let’s say the acorn is more concerned with the soul aspect of events, more alive to what’s good for it than to what you believe is good for you." Hillman calls this intelligence daimon, using the name given by Plato to a sort of guardian angel. It accompanied Socrates throughout his life, always nudging him down the path he should follow.
“Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. You may remember this “something” as a signal moment in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have. This is who I am.” -- Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling
“Each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny. As the force of fate, this image acts as a personal daimon, an accompanying guide who remembers your calling. Your soul’s lot comes from the (Hillman/SC/208) irrational principle.'
“Does your daimon want the path you have chosen? Is your soul really in it? (Hillman/SC/105)”
“The angel who reads a life as a total image…. (Hillman/SC/106)”
The soul seeks to fit it into its form. (Hillman/SC/204)”
“A person’s innate form incorporates the accidents. Character is fate. (Hillman/SC/204)”
“…instances of the daimon making use of haphazard occasions. (Hillman/SC/205)”
“The form not only integrates …[ an accident], but is fed by it. (Hillman/SC/205)”
“What the soul needs, it uses. It is amazing how practically wise it can be about misfortune and accidents. (Hillman/SC/206)”
“Wisdom in Greek was Sophia, as in our word “philosophy,” love of wisdom…. The daimon teaches this wisdom by constant appraisals of events that seem to pull you off course. This is also philosophy: the love of making little corrections, little integrations of what seems not to fit in. (Hillman/SC/206)”
“These accidental movements neither hinder nor advance the main project. Rather they reshape its form, as if the course and the boat itself were being restructured by the soul’s responses to the events of life. There is a craft of growing down; it’s the wisdom of watching things with an eye to their effects. (Hillman/SC/206)”
“The form is given with beginnings as the image of your lot, and it (Hillman/SC/206) shifts as we move. This form, for which we are using many interchangeable terms – image, daimon, calling, angel, heart, acorn, soul, pattern, character – stays true to form. (Hillman/SC/207)”
https://www.academia.edu/4789757/A_Trauma_Weakened_Ego_Goes_Seeking_a_Bodyguard
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” -- Hillman, Soul's Code. p.39
We breathe, expand, and let go, and something comes in from elsewhere. The daimon in the heart seems quietly pleased, preferring melancholy to desperation. It’s in touch." --Hillman, Soul's Code
What we can take from this practice is the primacy of the psyche for personification of the unconscious -- the multiple personifications or perspectives of psyche. We spontaneously personify psyche all the time, without effort since it is a psychological necessity. Personifying allows the image to work on us -- a potential way of knowing what is hidden in the heart. A grounded ego uses personification for growth.
Hillman strongly suggests the daemonic is a taskmaster, "to do these things or say these things or produce these things," he explains. "It's the slave driver. You spend your life making it, then it tortures you: 'What are you doing now? We want more. You didn't finish that.' " Charisma is a trait of genius and psychopath.
Hillman amplifies that view. "[T]he duende is the part that is connected to the earth, the blood, the party. It is this that Rilke refers to in his line that our role in life is to be decisively defeated by greater and greater beings. ...This is the struggle with the daimon .... While our culture has no words for this, other cultures have referred to it as "the ancestors" or "the spirits" that operate invisibly in our world. ... "the invisibles." What we do when we aren't aware of "the invisibles"? We buy insurance, and maybe even make a little money out of the catastrophe, instead of asking "Why did this happen now? What does is mean? What is my daimon's rag telling me?"" Hillman, Meade http://www.menweb.org/chardest.htm
The Daimon
Thomas Moore, in a Spirituality & Practice e-course on Fairy Tales, warned against being too literal about where the daimon is leading.
"I'd like to say something about finding the power (daimon) that will reveal to you the key to your life and identity. Jung wrote a great deal about individuation, becoming an individual through many trials and transformations. Hillman doesn't use this language, but once he commented on individuation, meaning that each person and thing in the world has to be seen in its individuality. He says that this revelation of the particular is especially the work of Aphrodite, showing how an individual is fully present and beautiful. We tend to search for identity, health and success. But a beautiful person is truly something to appreciate and aim for.
"I would add that we don't have to individuate in a way that sets us apart from others. We might individuate by being a good partner or member of a community or a fine human being. We certainly don't need to be free of neurosis to be a decent and creative human being. The quest for identity doesn't ever have to end. That satisfaction is not what it means to individuate. A daimonic life is not one in which we have reached the goal or have a chiseled identity. It's one where we respond well to invitations for deeper and more meaningful living. It's a process. As the great philosopher of soul Plotinus said, we are always sculpting our soul. The sculptor is forever making us an individual" (© Thomas Moore and Spirituality & Practice 2019).
In The Soul's Code, Hillman says, "The daimon's reminders work in many ways. The daimon motivates, protects, invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists compromising reasonableness and often forces deviance and oddity upon its keeper, especially when it is neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but 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 prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns."
Hillman used the daimon to account for the urge we all feel to discover and align our life with a personal calling, unique to our individuality and interests, and to which we can passionately devote our life.It is a psychological complex or force existing in everyone, that helps us find our personal calling, and provide us with the motivation to follow it. Many geniuses have spoken of a daimon, or inner voice, who accompanied them throughout life.
“Among his various possible beings each man always finds one which is his genuine and authentic being. The voice which calls him to that authentic being is what we call “vocation.” But the majority of men devote themselves to silencing that voice of the vocation and refusing to hear it. They manage to make a noise within themselves…to distract their own attention in order not to hear it; and they defraud themselves by substituting for their genuine selves a false course of life.” (Jose Ortega Y Gasset)
“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.” “A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may also possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim. The daimon does not go away.”
“Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. You may remember this “something” as a signal moment in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have. This is who I am.” (The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman)
“For centuries we have searched for the right term for this ‘call.’ The Romans named it your genius; the Greeks, your daimon; and the Christians your guardian angel. The concept of this individualized soul-image has a long, complicated history; its appearance in cultures is diverse and widespread and the names for it are legion. Only our contemporary psychology and psychiatry omit it from their textbooks.
“These many words and names do not tell us what ‘it’ is, but they do confirm that it is. They also point to its mysteriousness. We cannot know what exactly we are referring to because its nature remains shadowy, revealing itself mainly in hints, intuitions, whispers, and the sudden urges and oddities that disturb your life and that we continue to call symptoms.
“That the daimon has your interest at heart may be the part of the theory particularly hard to accept. That the heart has its reasons, yes; that there is an unconscious with its own intentions; that fate plays a hand in how things turn out—all this is acceptable, even conventional. ...We name what preserves us instinct, self-preservation, sixth sense, subliminal awareness (each of which, too, is invisible yet present). Once upon a time what took such good care of me was a guardian spirit, and I damn well knew to pay it appropriate attention."
“All this has nothing to do with belief and so it also has nothing to do with superstition. It’s merely a matter of not forgetting that the invisibles can go away, leaving you with nothing but human relationships to cover your back. As the old Greeks said of their gods: They ask for little, just that they not be forgotten. Myths keep their daimonic realm invisibly present.”
This is also philosophy: the love of making little corrections, little integrations of what seems not to fit in. “This idea of continual, moving adjustments is nothing new or strange. As far back as Aristotle the soul was conceived to be both the form and the motion of a body. The form is given with beginnings as the image of your lot, and it shifts as we move. This form, for which we are using many interchangeable terms—image, daimon, calling, angel, heart, acorn, soul, pattern, character—stays true to form.
“Remember Plato’s tale: The goddess Ananke, or Necessity, sits on her throne amid the Fates, her daughters, companions, and aides. But it is she, Ananke, who establishes that the soul has selected for its lot to be necessary—not an accident, not good or bad, not foreknown or guaranteed, simply necessary. What we live is necessary to be lived.
“The truer you are to your daimon, the closer you are to the death that belongs to your destiny. We expect the daimon to have prescience about death, calling on it before an airline flight or during a sudden attack of sickness. Is this my fate, and now? And when the demands of our calling seem undeniably necessary, again death appears: ‘If I do what I really must, it will kill me; and yet if I don’t, I’ll die.’ To be the calling or not to be, that still and again seems to be the question.
“Perhaps this intimacy between calling and fate is why we avoid the daimon and the theory that upholds its importance. We mostly invent, and prefer, theories that tie us tightly to parental powers, encumber us with sociological conditionings and genetic determinants; thereby we escape the fact that these deep influences on our fates don’t hold a candle to the power of death. Death is the only complete necessity, that archetypal Necessity who rules the pattern of the lifeline she spins with her daughters, the Fates. The length of that line and its irreversible one-way direction is part of one and the same pattern, and it could not be otherwise.”
The daimon’s transcendence places it outside time, which it enters only by growing down. This timelessness of the acorn and its push to make everything happen at once indicates possession by the daimon, daimon becoming demonic.
The appreciation of everything having its season, of giving time and having time and taking time, does not apply to manic inflation that brooks no interruptions. Loss of the daimon collapses democratic society into a crowd of shoppers wandering a mall of mazes in search of the exit. But there is no exit without the guide of an individual direction.”
https://www.academia.edu/4789757/A_Trauma_Weakened_Ego_Goes_Seeking_a_Bodyguard
These primitive or archaic defenses against trauma “are personified as archetypal daimonic images.” “These ‘daimonic’Beings provide a container for the trauma victim’s annihilationanxiety and in this way serve as archetypal defences of the personal spirit.”
These primitive or archaic defenses against trauma “are personified as archetypal daimonic images.” “These ‘daimonic’Beings provide a container for the trauma victim’s annihilationanxiety and in this way serve as archetypal defences of the personal spirit.”
Corbin & Suhrawardi's Angelology by Roberts Avens 14 . pg/ 12
The Daimon is the Shape of the Soul
The wisdom of the sage is 'speculative,' knowledge. It transforms the being of the sage into a speculum, a polished mirror reflecting the light of the spiritual world.
“...you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.” (James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling)
Personifying is a spontaneous activity of soul, a way of knowing the invisible and hidden (Hillman). The mythic persons of imagination are real. We let them, the things and events themselves, tell us about themselves, the essence of what goes on in the image, a return of phenomena to their archai. 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.
The daimon conducts our "life review," and may show us past lives. 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.
Hillman said, "The gift of an image is a place to watch your soul." ..."It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it." ... The moment an angel enters a life it enters an environment. We are ecological from day one. ... Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us. ... We would like otherworldly visitations to come as distinct voices with clear instructions, but they may only give small signs in dreams, or as sudden hunches and insights that cannot be denied.
They feel more as if they emerged from inside and steer you from within like an inner guardian angel...And most amazing is it has never forgotten you, although you may have spent most of your life ignoring it. ... "Open your heart, your gaze, to the visitation of angels, even if the gifts they brings are not centeredness and balance but eccentricity and a wholly unfamiliar sense of pleasure called joy. ... To see the angel in the malady requires an eye for the invisible, a certain blinding of one eye and an opening of the other to elsewhere."
In 'The Battle for our Angel,' Paul Levy notes:
"To find our voice and speak IS to translate, which is to say that speaking is itself a primordial hermeneutic art – a potential form of expressive, creative and sacred Art with a capital “A.” It is significant that one of the key things that happens when we suffer an overwhelming trauma or experience abuse is that we become internally fragmented and dissociated such that we aren’t able to access our voice. In finding our voice, we are tapping into the magical, imaginative power of language to re-create ourselves and our world anew. Language is not merely a way of describing and communicating our ideas about the world, but rather, its nature is truly and essentially creative, as language is a tool for bringing the world into existence in the first place." ..."The more we connect with what could be called our “Angel of individuation,” the more we become who we are. In finding our voice, the voice that belongs to us and is uniquely our own, we are finding the voice that can articulate the lost speech. The figure of the Angel is the archetypal hermeneut whose speech is the lost poetry of Creation.”
The wisdom of the sage is 'speculative,' knowledge. It transforms the being of the sage into a speculum, a polished mirror reflecting the light of the spiritual world.
“...you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.” (James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling)
Personifying is a spontaneous activity of soul, a way of knowing the invisible and hidden (Hillman). The mythic persons of imagination are real. We let them, the things and events themselves, tell us about themselves, the essence of what goes on in the image, a return of phenomena to their archai. 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.
The daimon conducts our "life review," and may show us past lives. 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.
Hillman said, "The gift of an image is a place to watch your soul." ..."It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it." ... The moment an angel enters a life it enters an environment. We are ecological from day one. ... Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us. ... We would like otherworldly visitations to come as distinct voices with clear instructions, but they may only give small signs in dreams, or as sudden hunches and insights that cannot be denied.
They feel more as if they emerged from inside and steer you from within like an inner guardian angel...And most amazing is it has never forgotten you, although you may have spent most of your life ignoring it. ... "Open your heart, your gaze, to the visitation of angels, even if the gifts they brings are not centeredness and balance but eccentricity and a wholly unfamiliar sense of pleasure called joy. ... To see the angel in the malady requires an eye for the invisible, a certain blinding of one eye and an opening of the other to elsewhere."
In 'The Battle for our Angel,' Paul Levy notes:
"To find our voice and speak IS to translate, which is to say that speaking is itself a primordial hermeneutic art – a potential form of expressive, creative and sacred Art with a capital “A.” It is significant that one of the key things that happens when we suffer an overwhelming trauma or experience abuse is that we become internally fragmented and dissociated such that we aren’t able to access our voice. In finding our voice, we are tapping into the magical, imaginative power of language to re-create ourselves and our world anew. Language is not merely a way of describing and communicating our ideas about the world, but rather, its nature is truly and essentially creative, as language is a tool for bringing the world into existence in the first place." ..."The more we connect with what could be called our “Angel of individuation,” the more we become who we are. In finding our voice, the voice that belongs to us and is uniquely our own, we are finding the voice that can articulate the lost speech. The figure of the Angel is the archetypal hermeneut whose speech is the lost poetry of Creation.”
DaLuz
The New Gnosis: Heidegger, Hillman, and Angels
Avens, Roberts
Philosopher Avens writes about gnosis as exemplified in the works of Heidegger and James Hillman, rather than their thinking as such. By gnosis Avens means a kind of "knowledge or thinking that is inseparable from being" (p. 3).
Gnosis also has to do with cultivation of the soul which itself is a source of knowledge, with imagination or inner vision mediating between reason and belief/faith. Third, Avens quotes Henry Corbin, who wrote that gnosis is "knowledge that changes and transforms the knowing subject" (p. 4). At base, Avens says, gnosis "is a recollection, a remembering of a worldly soul and of an ensouled world" (p. 9). Gnosis, for Roberts Avens, is a perennial philosophy of the heart.
Accordingly, the first chapter, "Soul and World," is about overcoming dualism. As Avens puts it, "the whole of nature works through each thing, and each thing is a reflection of the whole" (p. 26). The second chapter is on phenomena, images, and angels. According to Heidegger's phenomenology, "we do not dictate reality, reality dictates us" (p. 29). The third chapter is on the "thought of the heart."
He quotes Jacob Needleman, who refers to that which must be awakened in human beings "that is both highly individual yet at the same time free from mere subjectivity, something both my own and yet free from ego" (p. 43). This is the capacity that exceptional human experience can engender, if encouraged.
Avens concludes that "we know the world because our personal soul is from the very outset related to the world soul" (p. 48). In a chapter on "Language, Poetry, Art," Avens discusses the overcoming of dualism in these disciplines. In Chapter V, "Play and Earth," he attempts to show that Being is grounded not in reason but in the mystery of play, which "is neither subjective or objective but belongs to itself" (p. 95).
The act of letting-be is described in the next chapter, "Releasement." Avens shows how Hillman's and Heidegger's gnosis "culminates in a therapeutic sort of injunction to pay attention to things (images) so as to let them be what they are" (p. 97). Releasement he defines as "a suspension of all teleological attitudes accompanied by openness to the mystery of the Play" (pp. 102-103). He concludes, in "While the Music Lasts," that Christianity may need "pagan polytheism as the condition of its own survival" (p. 129).
The New Gnosis: Heidegger, Hillman, and Angels
Avens, Roberts
Philosopher Avens writes about gnosis as exemplified in the works of Heidegger and James Hillman, rather than their thinking as such. By gnosis Avens means a kind of "knowledge or thinking that is inseparable from being" (p. 3).
Gnosis also has to do with cultivation of the soul which itself is a source of knowledge, with imagination or inner vision mediating between reason and belief/faith. Third, Avens quotes Henry Corbin, who wrote that gnosis is "knowledge that changes and transforms the knowing subject" (p. 4). At base, Avens says, gnosis "is a recollection, a remembering of a worldly soul and of an ensouled world" (p. 9). Gnosis, for Roberts Avens, is a perennial philosophy of the heart.
Accordingly, the first chapter, "Soul and World," is about overcoming dualism. As Avens puts it, "the whole of nature works through each thing, and each thing is a reflection of the whole" (p. 26). The second chapter is on phenomena, images, and angels. According to Heidegger's phenomenology, "we do not dictate reality, reality dictates us" (p. 29). The third chapter is on the "thought of the heart."
He quotes Jacob Needleman, who refers to that which must be awakened in human beings "that is both highly individual yet at the same time free from mere subjectivity, something both my own and yet free from ego" (p. 43). This is the capacity that exceptional human experience can engender, if encouraged.
Avens concludes that "we know the world because our personal soul is from the very outset related to the world soul" (p. 48). In a chapter on "Language, Poetry, Art," Avens discusses the overcoming of dualism in these disciplines. In Chapter V, "Play and Earth," he attempts to show that Being is grounded not in reason but in the mystery of play, which "is neither subjective or objective but belongs to itself" (p. 95).
The act of letting-be is described in the next chapter, "Releasement." Avens shows how Hillman's and Heidegger's gnosis "culminates in a therapeutic sort of injunction to pay attention to things (images) so as to let them be what they are" (p. 97). Releasement he defines as "a suspension of all teleological attitudes accompanied by openness to the mystery of the Play" (pp. 102-103). He concludes, in "While the Music Lasts," that Christianity may need "pagan polytheism as the condition of its own survival" (p. 129).
angelomorphosis
AN ARCHETYPAL PERSON
What the Soul Really Sees
Daimon, Genius, HGA, Self
Angels are Mirrors of the Abyss
The Retirement Ritual * Knowledge & Conversation
Soul-Making * Inner Guide Meditation
Here we see the origin of one of the central concepts of the individuation process, a symbolic attitude that does not reify or identify with reactions or fantasies but instead recognizes symbolic material as possible connecting story or myth that holds the tension between left- and right-hand choices (Spiegelman, 1996a, p. 126).
Ecstasy of Truth
The angel repeatedly informs us and our being. Ecstatic truth is beyond the factual like the truth of dreams, not captured by innermost reason but still resonating with ourselves...
"Corbin points out, this is ultimately a battle “for” our celestial guiding spirit in the form of our Angel. This is to say that we are not only battling “along with” the Angel against the darker forces that obscure the light of the world from shining, but are at the same time battling to ultimately re-claim and unite with our Angel, our true and perfect nature." (Levy)
"The more we connect with what could be called our “Angel of individuation,” the more we become who we are. In finding our voice, the voice that belongs to us and is uniquely our own, we are finding the voice that can articulate the lost speech. The figure of the Angel is the archetypal hermeneut whose speech is the lost poetry of Creation." (Levy)
"A divine figure, an Angel, meets with, struggles for, and transforms with an incarnate human soul. The conjunction, the “coupling,” produces the eternal individual.” [viii] Our Angel needs the response of and co-operation from our soul for it to fulfill its destiny. Only through the union of these two figures can the potentially eternal, greater personality within us be made actual."
"Our Angel announces its presence in and through events in our life, as if it expresses itself configuring events in the outside world. Meeting our Angelic guide marks the dawning of consciousness. For the soul, knowledge of itself IS consciousness of the Angel. The human soul itself is composed of the very light of consciousness which illumines and dispels darkness."
"Once the soul’s light is reflected back to it and recognized, it needs no outside source for reflection, as it then becomes the source of its own light. In these encounters with its Angel, the soul is not witness to an external, objective event that comes from outside of itself, but is itself reflected through and reciprocally affected by the visionary event; this is what is meant by these experiences being an “Event of the Soul.”' (Levy)
https://www.awakeninthedream.com/articles/the-battle-for-our-angel
Corbin writes, “The soul discovers itself to be the earthly counterpart of another being with which it forms a totality that is dual in structure.” Our earthly, terrestial manifestations are a lower level reflection of a higher-dimensional, intra/extra-terrestial counterpart. Uniting with our Angel completes our being, for without mingling and connecting with our celestial guiding spirit we are not fully human.
Angelomorphosis
The cosmic crypt of illusion, undergoes the alchemical process of angelomorphosis by uniting with our own heavenly celestial prototype-twin (syzygy). Adequate images must be experienced first hand for rapturous truth to present itself. The abode of the Angel of your being is within your heart. Our human spirit is alive and burning with passion. Union with the Angel is a continual creative exaltation -- energized enthusiasm.
Magic is actuation of the soul itself. Astral magic is a form of spiritualized natural philosophy that offered the human soul the promise of a soteriological angelomorphosis. This “angelomorphosis” describes the “individuation of the soul,” which occurs when, becoming aware of its alienation in this world, the soul frees itself from ...
This “angelomorphosis” describes the. “individuation of the soul,” which occurs by becoming aware of its alienation in this world. For Corbin, the "angel" is the "celestial Idea" of all human beings. The gnostic vision is the Angel, with whom we seek union or re-union was inherent in us from the very beginning; it is this that guides us and it is to this we seek to return, this angelomorphosis.
According to Corbin, the human soul is individuated not through the union with a physical body (as in Aristotle) but by becoming a perfectly polished mirror of its angel in a strictly one-to-one relation. We realize our virtual angelicity through a progressive illumination attained on earth; we are called, by right of our origin and if we consent, to an angelomorphosis (Robert Avens, The Subtle Realm: Corbin, Sufism, Swedenborg).
According to Henry Corbin, the human soul is individuated not through the union with a physical body (as in Aristotle) but by becoming a perfectly polished mirror of its angel in a strictly one-to-one relationship. We realize our virtual angelicity through a progressive illumination attained on earth; we are called, by right of our origin and if we consent, to an angelomorphosis (Robert Avens, The Subtle Realm: Corbin, Sufism, Swedenborg).
The Soul’s angel is analogous to Jung’s idea of the Self. Corbin sees the angel as another mode of being, existing in a very real realm that is intermediate between spirit and matter. Corbin’s writing is more theological; Jung is more psychological, but both have the same basic idea in mind, i.e. a transformation of human consciousness into that which a person is destined to be. Both, agree active imagination is the method to arrive there,
Only a metaphysics of the imaginal can attain to “the meeting-place of the two seas”. This mediating function of the active Imagination is essential for spiritual alchemy—that is to say, for the effectiveness of the alchemical operation viewed as a transmutation of the inner person (Temple and Contemplation, by Henry Corbin).
Daemonic Virtuality
The human soul cannot exist without the energetic influx of its angelic archetype. Its exhortation is 'Know Thyself.' Know Thyself means know thy Angel as our unique active creative solution. It is an event of, in, and for the soul. https://fdocuments.in/document/things-and-angels-avens.html
The invocation of the Angel is answered by its living Presence and engagement in relationship. Such knowledge is transformative. This creative circulation is known by those who know the Angel, the creative power of the heart. Hillman calls it 'imaginational intelligence"; Corbin calls it "real being," others might say self-realization.
The daimon is an imge of the archetypal imagination. Hillman said: "The gift of an image is a place to watch your soul." ..."It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it." ... The moment an angel enters a life it enters an environment. We are ecological from day one. ... Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us. ... We would like otherworldly visitations to come as distinct voices with clear instructions, but they may only give small signs in dreams, or as sudden hunches and insights that cannot be denied. They feel more as if they emerged from inside and steer you from within like an inner guardian angel...And most amazing is it has never forgotten you, although you may have spent most of your life ignoring it. ... Open your heart, your gaze, to the visitation of angels, even if the gifts they brings are not centeredness and balance but eccentricity and a wholly unfamiliar sense of pleasure called joy. ... To see the angel in the malady esquires an eye for the invisible, a certain blinding of one eye and an opening of the other to elsewhere."
It is what our soul sees in its actual field of vision, informed by myth and imagination in the dimension of its own being. Shifting our mode of perception shifts our ability to perceive the correspondence between visionary or illumined apperception and suprasensible imaginal reality. The delimited soul steps into the ubiquitous magical circle of visionary events, whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere -- a personified cosmos.
This process is depicted in the Tarot Arcana, 'Temperance' or 'Art', where the angel is blending an alchemical admixture of opposites. Just as we make our psychological descents, the angel descends from its Being in Tiphareth as your genius, your unique 'way of becoming' that tempers the soul.
On the Tree of Life, this is the immediate path, the middle path, to the self-realization of the heart-center Tiphareth, the union of macrocosm and microcosm. Being is spread over a cosmic field, the whole field of our caring and concern, a world of ensouled phenomena. It is a creative correlation of seeing and being. Such immortality of the soul is angelic virtuality.
As for the solutio or rebirth through water, it is about merger -- as if, instead of the drop merging in the cosmic ocean, the whole cosmos has entered the drop. A new universe coagulates that can now go forward and back. Matter needs spirit to be and spirit needs matter to become, to incarnate or coagulate.
Malkuth is the spiritualization of matter: spirit is materialized and matter is spiritualized. We must avoid making actual the metaphorical archetypal material from our imagination through an impulse toward literalization. We cannot separate our method of seeing from the object of inquiry.
The winged angel is androgynous. Temperance isn’t concerned only with blending polar or equal opposites. It is the active intelligence of transformative knowledge -- gnosis, presaging an authentic image of humanity through multiple states, including the corruptible, subtle, and divine bodies. Individuation unfolds by the natural desire that exists between the human soul and angelic Active Intelligence.
Temperance involves the art of intermingling or mixing these specifics, a process or means determined by the component parts. There is homogeneity between angels and human souls. Avicenna noted that we are not individuated by uniting with the body but becoming a perfectly-polished mirror of its Angel in a one-to-one relationship of engagement and expression. Our desire and intent is reflected back to the Source. The continuing recognition of a super-conscious presence releases the deeper mind.
Aesthetically, temperance (art) involves the mindful combination of disparate elements into a meaning, a surreal whole, not ordinarily available. Psychologically, it signifies the mindful integration of ego-consciousness and archetypal material from the unconscious. It points to individuation as the individual expression of a transpersonal presence. There are always dangers and ordeals.
Nichols writes, "when the unconscious steps into our outer world to borrow as its dream symbols the events, persons, and objects of our daily experience, it threatens the accustomed order of everyday life. In a similar confusing way, the rational ego mind can intrude into the image world of the unconscious, disturbing and disrupting its healing work.
When these two worlds get mixed up unconsciously, with no guardian angel to preside, our lives become muddled and confused, often with disastrous results. If we try to live on the outer side a drama that more properly belongs to the inner, the plot could end in tragedy … It is equally impractical, of course, to attempt to squeeze into our inner world events which properly belong in outer reality. ...Although some introspection is valuable, there comes a time when one must step into reality and initiate a real-life dialogue with the person in question (254–5).
The transmutation of the inner person via active imagination is very similar to what Jung posited with his idea of individuation, an experience of a larger and greater personality into which nature would like to change us.
Possibly delusional and idiosyncratic beliefs evolve into expressed but little understood beliefs, then into fully cognizable states of cognitive and affective parity. The emotions don't run away with the mind and the mind doesn't dissociate and distort or exploit the emotions.
The first is a feeling-oriented possession by the numinous, the second an imaginary attempt to communicate with it expressively, and the third a fully-cognizant stabilized steady state of balance and cooperation between the ego and numinous.
When climbing the "mystic mountain," balancing the mental and emotional energy opens a Middle Way, a transitional mode of consciousness referred to as Art or Temperance. This path leads directly to the core of "Creativity," which radiates integration and magnetically draws us toward individualized consciousness, self-actualization or fulfillment of our unique potential. Such genius has traditionally been called "divine".
If you cannot distinguish yourself from your creative genius, it makes an inflation which is a possession by the daimon -- all puffed up with transcendent energy. Genius is not something we ordinarily are, but occasionally it visits.
Corbin's main thrust is this:
"Man is called, by right of his origin and if he consents, to an angelomorphosis, his acceptance of which precisely regulates his aptitude for theophanic visions." (64)
Writing on Ibn Arabi, he says:
"...that which a human being regains in the mystical experience, is the "celestial pole" of his being, which is to say his "person" whereby and as which, the Divine Being from the very beginning in the origin of origins in the world of Mystery, manifested himself to himself, and made himself known to it in this Form [its own form, the form it was given to assume] which is equally the Form in which he knew himself in it. It is the Idea, or rather the "Angel" of his person whose present self is no more than the terrestrial pole."
And again:
"I am your own Daênâ", -which means: I am, in person, the faith that you professed and that which inspired it in you, she for whom you have answered and she who guided you, she who comforted you and she who now judges you, for I am, in person, the Image proposed to you from the birth of your being and the Image which finally you have yourself wished for ("I was beautiful, you have made me still more beautiful").
Corbin speaks of his Angel as "personal, unique to each soul, and is the Image to which the soul longs to unite."
He further breaks down this angelology. Rather than being a "metaphorical luxury" the Angel's significance is twofold, theophanic and soteriological ("salvific"). It can be thought about in several ways. There are angels who have remained in the celestial world, the intermediary between heaven and earth, and other angels who have fallen to Earth. The angels in the celestial world (the pleroma) are "angels in actu" and the angels who are on earth are the "angels in potentia".
Another way of looking at it is that this division may refer to a single being, an unus ambo. The Spirit is the person or Angel who has remained in heaven, the "celestial twin", while the soul is his companion who has fallen to Earth, to whose help he comes and with whom he will be reunited if he issues victorious from the cosmic battle between good and evil. (103)
The human lot is thus, quoting Nasir Khusraw, a transitory status, the "horizon" of which Corbin speaks. Man is a "not-yet": an angel (or demon) in potentia awaiting reunion with his celestial twin, the angel in actu. https://spiritualmutt.blogspot.com/2009/04/henry-corbin-and-angelology.html
The dynamic, intermediary zone between the visible and the invisible is a place of intense focus for the imagination of the visionary poet. Light is quarried and collected from this realm, changed to pure energy in paradise; turned into metaphorical gold in the lower world we inhabit. In the intermediary, visionary realm, every thought is a person, every person is accompanied by an angel. Thinking is angelomorphosis. Enlightenment is angelophany.
Writes Corbin, “The burgeoning and growth of the soul of the angelical or demoniacal virtuality is the measure of its ascent (mi’raj), or of its fall into the abyss. In the first case, as our author says: ‘Its thought becomes an Angel issuing from the original world; its word becomes a spirit issuing from that Angel; its action becomes a body issuing from this spirit.’” (Henry Corbin, Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis, trans. Ralph Mannheim (London: Keegan Paul International, 1973, p.53).
What the Soul Really Sees
Daimon, Genius, HGA, Self
Angels are Mirrors of the Abyss
The Retirement Ritual * Knowledge & Conversation
Soul-Making * Inner Guide Meditation
Here we see the origin of one of the central concepts of the individuation process, a symbolic attitude that does not reify or identify with reactions or fantasies but instead recognizes symbolic material as possible connecting story or myth that holds the tension between left- and right-hand choices (Spiegelman, 1996a, p. 126).
Ecstasy of Truth
The angel repeatedly informs us and our being. Ecstatic truth is beyond the factual like the truth of dreams, not captured by innermost reason but still resonating with ourselves...
"Corbin points out, this is ultimately a battle “for” our celestial guiding spirit in the form of our Angel. This is to say that we are not only battling “along with” the Angel against the darker forces that obscure the light of the world from shining, but are at the same time battling to ultimately re-claim and unite with our Angel, our true and perfect nature." (Levy)
"The more we connect with what could be called our “Angel of individuation,” the more we become who we are. In finding our voice, the voice that belongs to us and is uniquely our own, we are finding the voice that can articulate the lost speech. The figure of the Angel is the archetypal hermeneut whose speech is the lost poetry of Creation." (Levy)
"A divine figure, an Angel, meets with, struggles for, and transforms with an incarnate human soul. The conjunction, the “coupling,” produces the eternal individual.” [viii] Our Angel needs the response of and co-operation from our soul for it to fulfill its destiny. Only through the union of these two figures can the potentially eternal, greater personality within us be made actual."
"Our Angel announces its presence in and through events in our life, as if it expresses itself configuring events in the outside world. Meeting our Angelic guide marks the dawning of consciousness. For the soul, knowledge of itself IS consciousness of the Angel. The human soul itself is composed of the very light of consciousness which illumines and dispels darkness."
"Once the soul’s light is reflected back to it and recognized, it needs no outside source for reflection, as it then becomes the source of its own light. In these encounters with its Angel, the soul is not witness to an external, objective event that comes from outside of itself, but is itself reflected through and reciprocally affected by the visionary event; this is what is meant by these experiences being an “Event of the Soul.”' (Levy)
https://www.awakeninthedream.com/articles/the-battle-for-our-angel
Corbin writes, “The soul discovers itself to be the earthly counterpart of another being with which it forms a totality that is dual in structure.” Our earthly, terrestial manifestations are a lower level reflection of a higher-dimensional, intra/extra-terrestial counterpart. Uniting with our Angel completes our being, for without mingling and connecting with our celestial guiding spirit we are not fully human.
Angelomorphosis
The cosmic crypt of illusion, undergoes the alchemical process of angelomorphosis by uniting with our own heavenly celestial prototype-twin (syzygy). Adequate images must be experienced first hand for rapturous truth to present itself. The abode of the Angel of your being is within your heart. Our human spirit is alive and burning with passion. Union with the Angel is a continual creative exaltation -- energized enthusiasm.
Magic is actuation of the soul itself. Astral magic is a form of spiritualized natural philosophy that offered the human soul the promise of a soteriological angelomorphosis. This “angelomorphosis” describes the “individuation of the soul,” which occurs when, becoming aware of its alienation in this world, the soul frees itself from ...
This “angelomorphosis” describes the. “individuation of the soul,” which occurs by becoming aware of its alienation in this world. For Corbin, the "angel" is the "celestial Idea" of all human beings. The gnostic vision is the Angel, with whom we seek union or re-union was inherent in us from the very beginning; it is this that guides us and it is to this we seek to return, this angelomorphosis.
According to Corbin, the human soul is individuated not through the union with a physical body (as in Aristotle) but by becoming a perfectly polished mirror of its angel in a strictly one-to-one relation. We realize our virtual angelicity through a progressive illumination attained on earth; we are called, by right of our origin and if we consent, to an angelomorphosis (Robert Avens, The Subtle Realm: Corbin, Sufism, Swedenborg).
According to Henry Corbin, the human soul is individuated not through the union with a physical body (as in Aristotle) but by becoming a perfectly polished mirror of its angel in a strictly one-to-one relationship. We realize our virtual angelicity through a progressive illumination attained on earth; we are called, by right of our origin and if we consent, to an angelomorphosis (Robert Avens, The Subtle Realm: Corbin, Sufism, Swedenborg).
The Soul’s angel is analogous to Jung’s idea of the Self. Corbin sees the angel as another mode of being, existing in a very real realm that is intermediate between spirit and matter. Corbin’s writing is more theological; Jung is more psychological, but both have the same basic idea in mind, i.e. a transformation of human consciousness into that which a person is destined to be. Both, agree active imagination is the method to arrive there,
Only a metaphysics of the imaginal can attain to “the meeting-place of the two seas”. This mediating function of the active Imagination is essential for spiritual alchemy—that is to say, for the effectiveness of the alchemical operation viewed as a transmutation of the inner person (Temple and Contemplation, by Henry Corbin).
Daemonic Virtuality
The human soul cannot exist without the energetic influx of its angelic archetype. Its exhortation is 'Know Thyself.' Know Thyself means know thy Angel as our unique active creative solution. It is an event of, in, and for the soul. https://fdocuments.in/document/things-and-angels-avens.html
The invocation of the Angel is answered by its living Presence and engagement in relationship. Such knowledge is transformative. This creative circulation is known by those who know the Angel, the creative power of the heart. Hillman calls it 'imaginational intelligence"; Corbin calls it "real being," others might say self-realization.
The daimon is an imge of the archetypal imagination. Hillman said: "The gift of an image is a place to watch your soul." ..."It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it." ... The moment an angel enters a life it enters an environment. We are ecological from day one. ... Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us. ... We would like otherworldly visitations to come as distinct voices with clear instructions, but they may only give small signs in dreams, or as sudden hunches and insights that cannot be denied. They feel more as if they emerged from inside and steer you from within like an inner guardian angel...And most amazing is it has never forgotten you, although you may have spent most of your life ignoring it. ... Open your heart, your gaze, to the visitation of angels, even if the gifts they brings are not centeredness and balance but eccentricity and a wholly unfamiliar sense of pleasure called joy. ... To see the angel in the malady esquires an eye for the invisible, a certain blinding of one eye and an opening of the other to elsewhere."
It is what our soul sees in its actual field of vision, informed by myth and imagination in the dimension of its own being. Shifting our mode of perception shifts our ability to perceive the correspondence between visionary or illumined apperception and suprasensible imaginal reality. The delimited soul steps into the ubiquitous magical circle of visionary events, whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere -- a personified cosmos.
This process is depicted in the Tarot Arcana, 'Temperance' or 'Art', where the angel is blending an alchemical admixture of opposites. Just as we make our psychological descents, the angel descends from its Being in Tiphareth as your genius, your unique 'way of becoming' that tempers the soul.
On the Tree of Life, this is the immediate path, the middle path, to the self-realization of the heart-center Tiphareth, the union of macrocosm and microcosm. Being is spread over a cosmic field, the whole field of our caring and concern, a world of ensouled phenomena. It is a creative correlation of seeing and being. Such immortality of the soul is angelic virtuality.
As for the solutio or rebirth through water, it is about merger -- as if, instead of the drop merging in the cosmic ocean, the whole cosmos has entered the drop. A new universe coagulates that can now go forward and back. Matter needs spirit to be and spirit needs matter to become, to incarnate or coagulate.
Malkuth is the spiritualization of matter: spirit is materialized and matter is spiritualized. We must avoid making actual the metaphorical archetypal material from our imagination through an impulse toward literalization. We cannot separate our method of seeing from the object of inquiry.
The winged angel is androgynous. Temperance isn’t concerned only with blending polar or equal opposites. It is the active intelligence of transformative knowledge -- gnosis, presaging an authentic image of humanity through multiple states, including the corruptible, subtle, and divine bodies. Individuation unfolds by the natural desire that exists between the human soul and angelic Active Intelligence.
Temperance involves the art of intermingling or mixing these specifics, a process or means determined by the component parts. There is homogeneity between angels and human souls. Avicenna noted that we are not individuated by uniting with the body but becoming a perfectly-polished mirror of its Angel in a one-to-one relationship of engagement and expression. Our desire and intent is reflected back to the Source. The continuing recognition of a super-conscious presence releases the deeper mind.
Aesthetically, temperance (art) involves the mindful combination of disparate elements into a meaning, a surreal whole, not ordinarily available. Psychologically, it signifies the mindful integration of ego-consciousness and archetypal material from the unconscious. It points to individuation as the individual expression of a transpersonal presence. There are always dangers and ordeals.
Nichols writes, "when the unconscious steps into our outer world to borrow as its dream symbols the events, persons, and objects of our daily experience, it threatens the accustomed order of everyday life. In a similar confusing way, the rational ego mind can intrude into the image world of the unconscious, disturbing and disrupting its healing work.
When these two worlds get mixed up unconsciously, with no guardian angel to preside, our lives become muddled and confused, often with disastrous results. If we try to live on the outer side a drama that more properly belongs to the inner, the plot could end in tragedy … It is equally impractical, of course, to attempt to squeeze into our inner world events which properly belong in outer reality. ...Although some introspection is valuable, there comes a time when one must step into reality and initiate a real-life dialogue with the person in question (254–5).
The transmutation of the inner person via active imagination is very similar to what Jung posited with his idea of individuation, an experience of a larger and greater personality into which nature would like to change us.
Possibly delusional and idiosyncratic beliefs evolve into expressed but little understood beliefs, then into fully cognizable states of cognitive and affective parity. The emotions don't run away with the mind and the mind doesn't dissociate and distort or exploit the emotions.
The first is a feeling-oriented possession by the numinous, the second an imaginary attempt to communicate with it expressively, and the third a fully-cognizant stabilized steady state of balance and cooperation between the ego and numinous.
When climbing the "mystic mountain," balancing the mental and emotional energy opens a Middle Way, a transitional mode of consciousness referred to as Art or Temperance. This path leads directly to the core of "Creativity," which radiates integration and magnetically draws us toward individualized consciousness, self-actualization or fulfillment of our unique potential. Such genius has traditionally been called "divine".
If you cannot distinguish yourself from your creative genius, it makes an inflation which is a possession by the daimon -- all puffed up with transcendent energy. Genius is not something we ordinarily are, but occasionally it visits.
Corbin's main thrust is this:
"Man is called, by right of his origin and if he consents, to an angelomorphosis, his acceptance of which precisely regulates his aptitude for theophanic visions." (64)
Writing on Ibn Arabi, he says:
"...that which a human being regains in the mystical experience, is the "celestial pole" of his being, which is to say his "person" whereby and as which, the Divine Being from the very beginning in the origin of origins in the world of Mystery, manifested himself to himself, and made himself known to it in this Form [its own form, the form it was given to assume] which is equally the Form in which he knew himself in it. It is the Idea, or rather the "Angel" of his person whose present self is no more than the terrestrial pole."
And again:
"I am your own Daênâ", -which means: I am, in person, the faith that you professed and that which inspired it in you, she for whom you have answered and she who guided you, she who comforted you and she who now judges you, for I am, in person, the Image proposed to you from the birth of your being and the Image which finally you have yourself wished for ("I was beautiful, you have made me still more beautiful").
Corbin speaks of his Angel as "personal, unique to each soul, and is the Image to which the soul longs to unite."
He further breaks down this angelology. Rather than being a "metaphorical luxury" the Angel's significance is twofold, theophanic and soteriological ("salvific"). It can be thought about in several ways. There are angels who have remained in the celestial world, the intermediary between heaven and earth, and other angels who have fallen to Earth. The angels in the celestial world (the pleroma) are "angels in actu" and the angels who are on earth are the "angels in potentia".
Another way of looking at it is that this division may refer to a single being, an unus ambo. The Spirit is the person or Angel who has remained in heaven, the "celestial twin", while the soul is his companion who has fallen to Earth, to whose help he comes and with whom he will be reunited if he issues victorious from the cosmic battle between good and evil. (103)
The human lot is thus, quoting Nasir Khusraw, a transitory status, the "horizon" of which Corbin speaks. Man is a "not-yet": an angel (or demon) in potentia awaiting reunion with his celestial twin, the angel in actu. https://spiritualmutt.blogspot.com/2009/04/henry-corbin-and-angelology.html
The dynamic, intermediary zone between the visible and the invisible is a place of intense focus for the imagination of the visionary poet. Light is quarried and collected from this realm, changed to pure energy in paradise; turned into metaphorical gold in the lower world we inhabit. In the intermediary, visionary realm, every thought is a person, every person is accompanied by an angel. Thinking is angelomorphosis. Enlightenment is angelophany.
Writes Corbin, “The burgeoning and growth of the soul of the angelical or demoniacal virtuality is the measure of its ascent (mi’raj), or of its fall into the abyss. In the first case, as our author says: ‘Its thought becomes an Angel issuing from the original world; its word becomes a spirit issuing from that Angel; its action becomes a body issuing from this spirit.’” (Henry Corbin, Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis, trans. Ralph Mannheim (London: Keegan Paul International, 1973, p.53).
Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, Eranos 3:
Man and Time
Man and Time
future resurrection.
We re-articulate such beliefs as angelomorphosis through contemplative spirituality, negative theology, and the Imitatio Christi for subsequent generations of Platonically-inclined thinkers like Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola during the Renaissance.
"What is it we are questing for? It is the fulfillment of that which is potential in each of us. Questing for it is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself. There is nothing you can do that's more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way you will find, live, become a realization of your own personal myth." (Joseph Campbell)
According to Esther Harding in her book Women's Mysteries, the virgin goddess "does not reserve herself for the chosen man who must repay her by his devotion, nor is her instinct used to gain for herself the security of husband, home and family. She remains virgin, even while being the goddess of love. She is essentially one in herself. Her divine power does not depend on her relation to a husband-god, and thus her actions are not dependent on the need to conciliate such a one or accord with his qualities and attitudes. For she bears her divinity in her own right."
So the virgin's intact quality referred originally not to an unbroken hymen, but to an inner integrity. The mythic virgin followed no one, neither husband nor the collective at large, but only a directive exclusive to the laws of her own nature. The virgin is, in essence, whole-in-herself. Thus it is ironic, or rather erroneous, to put this original definition in the context of a sexual relationship, whereby wholeness of the inner integrity becomes translated as the wholeness of a part of the vagina. A displacement, a synecdochic sleight of hand, has effectively and for centuries controlled women's sexuality through the mechanism of shame.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge. Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.14
Invoking demons to swear fealty is essentially shadow work. All this grimoires are just basic shadow work, and can be done just as effectively with that approach. Such an act is also one of soul retrieval -- so that includes Abramelin, Picatrix, Triangle Book, and others like Dragon Rouge.
To confront a person with their shadow is to show them their own light. Once one has experienced a few times what it is like to stand judgingly between the opposites, one begins to understand what is meant by the self. Anyone who perceives his shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle. "Good and Evil in Analytical Psychology" (1959). (CW 10. Civilization in Transition. P.872)
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort.It is the imaginal realm of art, archetype, myth, and dream. Plato said everybody has a daemon from birth. So Knowledge & Conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel (K&C) is just developing that relationship with the half-human/half non-human.
Second Order teachings are an entirely unique synthesis of nearly every facet of Western occultism that manages to blend mythology, aspects of ancient occult teachings, alchemy, Gnosticism, Rosicrucian themes, Kabbalist teaching, esoteric Christian themes, and so forth, into a fully integrated and consistent whole. The synthetic coordination into a coherent and practical system demonstrates extraordinary creativity. Second Order ritual of the Adeptus Minor Grade, Golden Dawn.
James Hillman reminds us that, “Each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny. As the force of fate, this image acts as a personal daimon, an accompanying guide who remembers your calling. 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.”
“...you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.” ― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling
“Of course, a culture as manically and massively materialistic as ours creates materialistic behavior in its people, especially in those people who've been subjected to nothing but the destruction of imagination that this culture calls education, the destruction of autonomy it calls work, and the destruction of activity it calls entertainment.” ― James Hillman, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy & the World's Getting Worse
“Recognize the call as a prime fact of human existence; (b) align life with it; (c) find the common sense to realize that accidents, including the heartache and the natural shocks the flesh is heir to, belong to the pattern of the image, are necessary to it, and help fulfill it. A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may also possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim. The daimon does not go away.” ― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling
We can derive more understanding in this literature than the over-mystified magic that makes invoking the Angel seem unattainable and all spooked up. From the beginning, this was the fount..
“Despite this invisible caring, we prefer to imagine ourselves thrown naked into the world, utterly vulnerable and fundamentally alone. It is easier to accept the story of heroic self-made development than the story that you may well be loved by this guiding providence, that you are needed for what you bring, and that you are sometimes fortuitously helped by it in situations of distress. May I state this as a bare and familiar fact without quoting a guru, witnessing for Christ, or claiming the miracle of recovery? Why not keep within psychology proper what once was called providence—being invisibly watched and watched over?” ― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling
“Fear, like love, can become a call into consciousness; one meets the unconscious, the unknown, the numinous and uncontrollable by keeping in touch with fear, which elevates the blind instinctual panic of the sheep into the knowing, cunning, fearful awe of the shepherd.” ― James Hillman, Pan and the Nightmare
“Marie-Louise von Franz says that Western civilization has put a little gnomish man on the shoulder of every woman and that this gnome does nothing but tell the woman that she’s wrong, wrong, wrong. Thus a kind of artificial, oppressive Watcher has been installed. When I mention this image to women (especially writer women) they enthusiastically agree with von Franz: that’s their experience, an almost literal voice buzzing in their ear saying, “No, no, your work’s no good, it’s worthless, you’re wrong.” In von Franz’s construct (though she’d use different terms), women have to learn to ignore that gnome and recognize their real Watcher, whom civilization did not put there and whom civilization cannot take away.” ― James Hillman, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy
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. The daimon conducts our "life review," and may show us past lives. 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.
James Hillman Angel Quotations
https://www.quotetab.com/james-hillman-quotes-about-angel
https://www.academia.edu/12447765/Pseudo_Lactantius_Carmen_de_ave_phoenice_translation
Pseudo-Lactantius, "Carmen de ave phoenice": translation…
academia.edu…
4th century Gnostic text "The phoenix appears as a witness concerning the angels."
https://www.academia.edu/12447765/Pseudo_Lactantius_Carmen_de_ave_phoenice_translation
Pseudo-Lactantius, "Carmen de ave phoenice": translation…
academia.edu…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phoenix_(Old_English_poem)
The Phoenix (Old English poem) - Wikipedia…
en.wikipedia.org…
The New Gnosis: Heidegger, Hillman, and Angels Avens, Roberts Philosopher
Avens writes about gnosis as exemplified in the works of Heidegger and James Hillman, rather than their thinking as such. By gnosis Avens means a kind of "knowledge or thinking that is inseparable from being" (p. 3). Gnosis also has to do with cultivation of the soul which itself is a source of knowledge, with imagination or inner vision mediating between reason and belief/faith. Third, Avens quotes Henry Corbin, who wrote that gnosis is "knowledge that changes and transforms the knowing subject" (p. 4). At base, Avens says, gnosis "is a recollection, a remembering of a worldly soul and of an ensouled world" (p. 9). Accordingly, the first chapter, "Soul and World," is about overcoming dualism. As Avens puts it, "the whole of nature works through each thing, and each thing is a reflection of the whole" (p. 26). The second chapter is on phenomena, images, and angels. According to Heidegger's phenomenology, "we do not dictate reality, reality dictates us" (p. 29). The third chapter is on the "thought of the heart." He quotes Jacob Needleman, who refers to that which must be awakened in human beings "that is both highly individual yet at the same time free from mere subjectivity, something both my own and yet free from ego" (p. 43). This is the capacity that exceptional human experience can engender, if encouraged. Avens concludes that "we know the world because our personal soul is from the very outset related to the world soul" (p. 48). In a chapter on "Language, Poetry, Art," Avens discusses the overcoming of dualism in these disciplines. In Chapter V, "Play and Earth," he attempts to show that Being is grounded not in reason but in the mystery of play, which "is neither subjective or objective but belongs to itself" (p. 95). The act of letting-be is described in the next chapter, "Releasement." Avens shows how Hillman's and Heidegger's gnosis "culminates in a therapeutic sort of injunction to pay attention to things (images) so as to let them be what they are" (p. 97).
gold https://www.amiscorbin.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Avens_1988.pdf
www.amiscorbin.com…
amiscorbin.com…
https://www.amiscorbin.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Avens_1988.pdf
www.amiscorbin.com…
amiscorbin.com…
* The distinction between concrete and literal, so important to alchemy, is the essential distinction in ritual. The ritual of theater, of religion, of loving, and of play require concrete actions which are never what they literally seem to be. Ritual offers a primary mode of pathologizing, of deliteralizing events and seeing them as we "perform" them. As we go into a ritual, the soul of our actions "comes out"; or to ritualize a literal action, we "put soul into it."...Ritual brings together action idea into an enactment. --James Hillman/Re-Visioning Psychology
Remember, the purpose of ritual is an end in itself. This leaves no rationale behind lusting for results. There are pitfalls inherent in the practice of ritual. Jung spoke of boomerang effects. There can be many unforeseen and unforeseeable repercussions in a self-directed program. This is the value of guidance along the path by a qualified teacher. The teacher has been there, and knows the dangers of each step. Archetypes do not only manifest in benevolent ways. They are good/bad, and their activation in the psyche unleashes their dynamism. Every initiation has its ordeals: But she said: the Ordeals I write not: the rituals shall be half known and half concealed: the Law is for all. --A. Crowley/Liber Al vel Legis I:34 The ordeals are unknown to the aspirant, and repercussions cannot be anticipated.
These Ordeals are independent of the aspirant's or teacher's conscious care; they come from the Self. They are not, like traditional ordeals, formal, or identical for all candidates. The complexes afford a real test of the ethics and conduct, and compel the aspirant to discover his own nature. He has the opportunity to become more aware of himself by bringing his secret motivating forces to the surface. If any ritual is completely or openly given there would be dogma and that is not the purpose of Magick.
When a ritual is begun, there is a synergetic effect that often occurs in the inevitable ordeal. The secret part of the ritual is, in fact, this unique ordeal. The secret part of the ritual is, in fact, this unique ordeal. That is the concealed aspect of the action. The ordeal is the evoked form or stress and the "right action" is the movement toward knowing one's True Will.
According to Robert Grinnell, in Alchemy in a Modern Woman, women bear a particular relationship to the unconscious and ritual; this bears on her deepest significance. This distinction between feminine and masculine ways of experiencing the unconscious can best be seen in the different ways prima materia is represented. Whereas in a man's psychology the unconscious as prima materia is experienced as chaos, as violent and irrational processes of generation and destruction, in a woman it appears as a fascinating psychic background for sacred images and rituals expressive of her fundamental feminine conscience. Later, he goes on expanding on this feminine experience. Here we have both the problem and the deeper meaning of the "modern woman." For just as she produces an intensified polarity which seems very "modern" and raises to consciousness factors which seem "masculine" and which are left out of the dominant masculine view, so too she activates the unconscious rites linked to forgotten customs belonging to the primitive state of man whose aim was precisely to reconcile conflicting opposites. These rites are performed by men and women, but their content emanates from the divine sphere which is past, present, and future. These rites unite the instinctual pattern or pole of the constellated archetype to its divine, spiritual pole: the animal shadow of the archetype and its superhuman, divine aspect are linked together. A "reversal" occurs, in which the shadow of a latent consciousness at a psychoid level is extracted and "sublimated." The archetype in its archaic aspect is raised to a contemporary level.
The path of Individuation is the psychological equivalent of initiation. The goal of individuation is self-realization through increasing conscious relationship with the Self, archetype of wholeness. This Self includes both positive and negative traits of an individual which, in the beginning of analysis, are generally projected out, or attributed to, the environment.
As the ego continues its heroic journey through the labyrinthine psyche, it comes into confrontation with personifications of various archetypal characters. During the maturing process, these characters emerge from the undifferentiated mass of unconscious contents. Though their presence in the psyche was implied from the beginning, they begin to unfold in unique patterns in the life of the individual. One meets such intriguing archetypal figures (complexes) as the shadow, persona, hero, anima/animus, puer, wise old man, trickster, great mother, healer, divine child, self, etc.
When these figures, and their behavior patterns, remain unconscious, they are projected onto other people, as "my enemy," "my great love," "my wise teacher," etc. In time the analysand learns to distinguish these recurrent patterns from the personalities of the people with whom he is involved. Another way these patterns lay claim to an individual and exert their influence is through the identification of the ego with the archetype. Then we have cases of "I am the great lover," "I am the great teacher of wisdom," or "I am especially gifted and prodigious."
Using Tree of Life pathworking techniques as a mode of creative imagination, personified forms are encountered as gods or goddesses, and the aspirant comes to a conscious relationship with them, both internal and external. He learns to recognize them when he sees them. Most importantly, he has a framework for experiencing these internal personalities as distinct from his individuality; they are, after all, collective patterns which can manifest in anyone under the proper circumstances. This attempt leads to self-realization through the transcendent function, which is a symbol of the union of opposites.
In Magick, it is known as the Holy Guardian Angel. "We are not alone. We are not totally encased in our ego-selves. There is a companion, a comrade, a guardian angel, a greater self who is always with us. When looked at in this way, it is seen at once that individuation is more than behavior modifying oneself out of bad habits. Individuation is a religious endeavor. "(5)
Otto Rank attributed a high spiritual significance to this archetype, and considered it a fundamental of personality. ..a positive evaluation of the Double as the immortal soul leads to the buildup of the prototype of personality from the self; whereas the negative interpretation of the Double as a symbol of death is symptomatic of the disintegration of the modern personality type...Yet the double in its most primitive form, the shadow, represents both the living and the dead person. In animate man there dwells as a strange guest a more feeble Double--his other Self in the form of his Psyche--whose kingdom is the world of dreams. When the conscious Self sleeps, the Double works and watches. Such an image, reflecting the visible Self and constituting a second Self, is, with the Romans, the Genius; with the Persians, the Fravauli; with the Egyptians, the Ka...Originally conceived of as a guardian angel, assuring immortal survival to the self, the double eventually appears as precisely the opposite, a reminder of the individual's immortality, indeed, the announcer of death itself.
from here https://zero-point.tripod.com/holistic/sphere10.html
Sphere10: Malkuth, Sphere of Earth…
zero-point.tripod.com…
". . .it is tempting to speak, with Corbin, of visionary imagining as "magical". But if it is magical, it is not merely in Sarte's sense of escaping all causal explanation. Rather, it is a magical act in the spirit of what Paracelsus called "true imagination" (Imaginatio vera), which transmutes gross matter into subtle, immaterial bodies; or in the sense of the hermetic psychology of imagination to be found in Pico della Mirandola, Ficino, and Bruno, for all of whom images were talismanic presences of the demonic. (22)" Edward S. Casey, "Toward An Archetypal Imagination", Spring 1974; (Spring Pub., Dallas, 1974); p. 22.
me - The multiplicity of archetypal forms is contained or coordinated in the archetype of the Self. It shows an underlying unity in multiplicity. The archetype presides over the process of psychic transformation or the spiritual quest. Its common images are child, king, or sacrificed god. It has been personified in the Christ, Holy Guardian Angel, and the higher Self. Reality is contained in many symbols. One can relate them via a system of correspondences. Seeing the signs, hidden meanings, extracting the subjective value builds a structure. Then, we can read the message in the apparently formless flow of events.
me - Initiation into the Sphere of Yesod is designed to produce the conscious realization that one's true Identity resides in the Higher Self, known in Magick as the Holy Guardian Angel. The stage of magickal practice after Yesod is Path 25 (Trump XIV, ART) which is attempted Knowledge and Conversation with this entity which personifies one's True Will.
Guardian Angel by Rolf Jacobson. I am the bird that knocks at your window in the morning, and your companion whom you cannot know, the blossoms that light up the blind. I am the glaciers' crest above the forest, the dazzling one, and the brass voices from cathedral towers. The thought that suddenly comes over you at midday and fills you with singular happiness. I am the one you loved long ago. I walk along side you by day and look intently at you, and put my mouth on your heart but you don't know it. I am your third arm and your second shadow, the white one, whom you don't have the heart for, and who cannot ever forget you.
me- In the modes of "trance" and "art," man has an I-It relationship with the subconscious. Upon entering the mental dimension, however, the subconscious is spontaneously perceived in a personified form, making possible the I-Self dialogue, on a conscious level. In Magick, this phase is the Knowledge and Conversation with one's Holy Guardian Angel. In contact with this inner radiant form of the Self, one may put direct questions to it and receive direct answers, guiding life and the growth process. The Self of the I-Thou relationship is perceived as Divine Guidance. The Self is another name for the Absolute, which is seen at Tiphareth, though one cannot merge with it until Kether. Instead, the absolute is seen reflected in the manifestations of the physical world. The goal of the dialogue is to infuse the personal self with the infinite depth of the greater Self. this produces feelings of bliss and expansion in understanding and wisdom. According to most philosophical systems, the original purpose of the "I" or ego-consciousness is to know the universe. Ultimately,, the knower merges with the known in the realm of the Self. The Self is the ordering and unifying principle which guides the process of spiritual development. The dialogue cannot begin until the conscious I perceives the Self as a separate center, or essence of manifest reality.
Adeptus Minor corresponds to Tiphareth. This ceremony is the death and resurrection rite of the Sun. It is generally held that Tiphareth is the highest attainment in earthly life; it is certainly the highest recognized Grade, since whatever further progress an Adept may make is by his private work. Furthermore, the Grades 6=5 and 7=4 represent such a degree of spiritual attainment, and the sense of responsibility pertaining thereto is so great, that such Exalted Ones have no wish to be known and proclaimed. --Denning & Phillips/The Magickal Philosophy, Vol. III]
Whatever we term it, the Self, or Atman, or Universal Mind is considered the basis of conscious life in the perennial philosophy. This tenet has been adopted by Jungian psychology, and is embraced in magick under the form of the Holy Guardian Angel. When our finite mind merges with Universal Mind, it experiences a higher level of Reality, which transcends the limitations of the realm of cause and effect. What is Real is not subject to change; it is Absolute, timeless because it is beyond time. Self is the essential nature of all individuals, and is eternal and immutable. We can only comprehend the Self while merged in the Self. The Self has been described as pure Awareness, or Eternal Knowledge, and is characterized as the pure, Clear Light of the Void. It is neither active nor passive, but embodies the paradox of pure existence. Individual consciousness is related to it as a bubble or wave is related to the depths of the ocean. True knowledge of the Self comes to the soul independent of the sense organs in mystical meditation. Since the Self is pure awareness, it cannot be known objectively. It comes only through the self-validating experience of the soul merged in Unity with the Self.
The Self is known variously as the Logos, Word, Holy Spirit, or Shabd and symbolizes the immanence of God pervading the creation. Thus the plurality pf phenomena in the creation is an illusion concealing One Truth. The mystic ecstasy of Tiphareth on the Causal Plane (identity with Universal Mind), comes from the attainment of the state where the individual consciousness (atman) realizes it is nothing but Universal Mind (Brahman). This realization comes only through the practice of mystical meditation, not merely from embracing the philosophy of yoga. It is more than just a concept. -io
When the individual looses his identity in the Brahman he reaches Nirvikalp Samadhi, the highest Buddhist state which liberates one in this life. This state, known as True Knowledge, is actually the experience of the anomolous sphere Daath, but is the aspiration of the adept at Tiphareth. In other words, the adept's normal day-to-day consciousness resides in Tiphareth, but the destination of his daily meditation time is the mystic rapture of Daath, diving into the Light of the Void and merging in that Light...naked awareness.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/All_the_World_an_Icon/Ji3Yd3NJDlQC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=tom+cheetham+books&printsec=frontcover
All the World an Icon…
books.google.com…
nate speare "We’re in a time when each person needs to embrace their own genius not by the standards of the authorities of the past, but by the felt sense of each person’s intelligence splashing its paint on the canvas of human discourse and innovation. "
a happy accident find, p. 266 https://mythcosmologysacred.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/daimonic-imagination_hard_man_v1.pdf
T HE DAIMONIC M USE ( S ) OF A LEISTER C ROWLEY , TIMOTHY LEARY , AND ROBERT anton wilson
Becoming an Angel: the mundus imaginalis of
Henry Corbinand the Platonic path of self-knowledge Angela Voss
https://www.academia.edu/472446/Becoming_an_Angel_the_mundus_imaginalis_of_Henry_Corbin_and_the_Platonic_path_of_self_knowledge
"From Liber Tzaddi:
I reveal unto you a great mystery. Ye stand between the abyss of height and the abyss of depth. In either awaits you a Companion; and that Companion is Yourself. Ye can have no other Companion. Many have arisen, being wise. They have said "Seek out the glittering Image in the place ever golden, and unite yourselves with It." Many have arisen, being foolish. They have said, "Stoop down unto the darkly splendid world, and be wedded to that Blind Creature of the Slime." I who am beyond Wisdom and Folly, arise and say unto you: achieve both weddings! Unite yourselves with both! Beware, beware, I say, lest ye seek after the one and lose the other! My adepts stand upright; their head above the heavens, their feet below the hells. But since one is naturally attracted to the Angel, another to the Demon, let the first strengthen the lower link, the last attach more firmly to the higher. Thus shall equilibrium become perfect. I will aid my disciples; as fast as they acquire this "
Plato said everybody has a daemon from birth. so K&C is just engaging that relationship with the half-human/half non-human.
Known in the past as Gods and Goddesses, these forces are the inhabitants of the mythic realm. In Depth Psychology the archetype of personal growth and spiritual development is known as the Self. In Magick, it is called the inner self, or higher self. It is the transcendent function, the center of the transformative process of "coming to wholeness." All other archetypes are contained within it, as a series of unions of opposites.
The Self unites and harmonizes such opposites as masculine/feminine; good/bad; hero/adversary, etc. It also contains the patterns for experience of the cyclic nature of life's crisis points. Its contents include the quest for meaning and the cycle of death and rebirth. Containing everything, it represents the maximal potential of any individual.
The Self provides an inner model of oneself in an idealized future. It confers initiations of the highest value through self-organizing experiences, beyond our conscious understanding or manipulation. It is mode of transcending the mundane world. Therefore, Self is both transcendent and personal. This gives divine worth to each individual manifestation of human nature, and dignity to everyone's personal experience. Experience of the Self is validating. The archetypes, symbolized by the Self, shape and define human behavior, attitudes, thoughts, beliefs, emotions, and the very body itself. Depth psychology has employed the descriptors of the ancient metaphysical practice of alchemy.
Aleister Crowley advocated the use of lunar, solar, and seasonal nature-based rituals. As far back as 1914 he had written to C.S. Jones of the North American O.T.O. about a ritual of Isis that his Lodge had performed: