The material products and ideas of human imagination that have vanished over the centuries are innumerable, yet some conceptions are repeatedly rediscovered (albeit in slightly different or “updated” forms). Some do not die at all.
Two ancient ideas that also have refused to die and continuously reinvent themselves are the daimon and the world-soul.
In our culture, when we encounter the word “daimon” or “the daimonic,” I don’t have to explain what immediately springs to mind—despite the ancient Greek word having an entirely different meaning than our current association. For some people, the substitution of a few vowels makes no difference when it comes to something that serious….We use the words “demon” and “daimon” in both literal and metaphorical ways, but many of us have no idea of the history of their use and what they once signified.
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Daimon is a Greek word that originally approximated the concept “spirit that attends” to a person or a thing. The Greeks and Romans anthropomorphized them as nymphs and satyrs, robed winged beings and fauns and other magical creatures. They inhabited special places—lakes, glens, caves—and quite often, if temporarily, human minds. If anything out of the ordinary occurred it could be explained by invoking their presence: a strange light in the sky was a daimon, or the daimon in the guise of a god’s chariot. They could also physically manifest themselves as animals imbued with a strange aura, or disembodied voices. Levantine and Arabian peninsular culture had their jinn in a variety of forms; the Celtic cultures had their “little people” of fairy and pixy lore; the Northern cultures, the kobolds; the Yorubans the Orishas. Every ancient tradition held a place for these “paranormal” entities.
Daimons also signified a means for communication between the gods and humans, like a form of spiritual transmission inherent in the “world-soul.” The idea of the world-soul had many variations, but its most robust expression was in the philosophy of the Neo-Platonist Plotinus (d. 270 CE), in which it was a reflection of the “Oneness” from which all that exists has emerged. It is a concept that lingers on in our culture: conjectures like biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s “morphic field” or Lynn Margulis’s and James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, or in physicist David Bohm's implicate order (which, at the least, would provide a quantum framework of such a "holo-field," yet to be discovered, connecting everything in the universe).
That this cosmos is just illusory hiding Oneness seems counterintuitive and absurd. For Plotinus, directly apprehending the One required a sort of meta-conscious realization of the simultaneity and isomorphism between thought and objects, between our sensations and mind and all the phenomena “external” to it—a super-consciousness that is the real one of which our linear, time-bound egos are only a small part. The One was precedent, and emanated the many ephemeral beings of the world-soul. Each separate emanation was bound to the others within it.
An individual being had its own soul (psyche in Greek, anima in Latin), which was in charge of its small division from the entirety and granted it its destiny as a finite entity linked in with the destinies of all others. The emanations of the One were thus a collection of “demi-gods,” yet we in our mortal, individual existences partook in the “splendor of the One” by way of our personal intermediary—our daimon—whose intimacy with us we could choose to acknowledge, or whose existence we could deny at our peril.
In other words, our personal destinies are bound to that of everything and everyone else’s, and that of the world-soul itself, by way of the daimonic realm.
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The use of prepositions to infer a location in space or to intimate an incorporeal “place” or “landscape” are an unfortunate but unavoidable pitfall in discussing these abstractions, for in most conceptions, the world-soul lurks beyond or behind our cosmos; qua an eternal Oneness, our ideas of past, present, and future are mutable or non-existent for it and for us when we are in contact with it. We value light, clarity, boundaries. We have enshrined mental systems of categorization, definitions, and the processes of logical thought. The daimonic realm is not the opposite of these qualities so much as perpendicular to them. Our everyday realities are reflected back to us from the world-soul’s daimonic realm as functions—as symbols. Symbols are not fixed in meaning but can serve as signifiers of many things simultaneously, or at differing times. Flux reigns in our perception of the world-soul and the realm of the daimonic; daimonic forms are subservient to their role or function in communicating with us, you might say. The world-soul lacks the differentiations our conscious minds have—and continue to—create from the emanated world.
Every ancient tradition recognized that the world was animated being. To name a thing was only a few steps away from being able to divinize it. The ancient Greeks and Romans were able to deify any aspect of their reality because their cosmos had no distinction between “materiality” as we know it and spirit/soul.
We may find this view odd, looking as we still do through the lens of mind/body dualism, but this continuum notion of the cosmos held through the Thomist “Great Chain of Being” and on through the Renaissance, until Newton’s and Descartes’s paradigm of mechanism and extension took shape in the 17th Century and fossilized into materialism in the 19th.
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Many traditional cultures believe that every person is born with a double: a companion that is not identical with our “presence.” This idea parallels that of the classical daimon. This double is bound with the world-soul, thus it can traffic with the souls of everything other than we—animals, rocks, trees, plants, places, other people, and even the gods. It travels in dreams. It can travel in imagination. It can be used as an intermediary to the gods to communicate one’s wishes, or to flatter or appease them. It can also receive impressions from other places or other times. If the channels were cleared, the daimon could transmit prophecy. This is where the famous Muse of the poets appears: the ancients (and others throughout history, such as the German and English Romantics) recognized that the world-soul transmitted “messages” to the rest of us through the poet. A poet could embody the world-spirit (zeitgeist) through words and images, and also give guidance to humans by their communication with the daimon or Muse.
For the earliest societies, the shaman, oracle, myth-singer and bard were the traditional forms of daimonic people. They performed a social office, but it was tough going for the poet or musician or oracle who literally “lost their mind” for a while as the daimonic “conduit” fully opened. Many would physically alter their states of consciousness, like the Delphic oracle when she sat upon a throne above the volcanic fissure in her cave, huffing the fumes to bring on a ranting delirium.
It is contemporary examples of this latter function that this essay will address—and the people today who, knowing or unknowing, are in near constant contact with the world-soul by way of their daimon—and idea entirely proscribed under our epistemological autocracies.
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The ancient Greek word “daimon” translates into Latin as genius, but in the present context I will avoid that word, because it’s laden with the qualities of skill, ultra-competency, focused ends, and public recognition. Geniuses produce works that are recognized as almost superhuman in the depth of their communicative and multivarious richness. The definition of the word has shrunk only to mean these kinds of extraordinary people. It has also been overused as to’ve become almost meaningless, so let’s apply it not only to those normally called geniuses in their fields (like mathematician John von Neumann or Ludwig van Beethoven or Michael Jordan or Steve Jobs) but also to the people for whom the proper vocations through which they could have utilized their gifts were missed, because our society labeled them as deviant early on; people who may not have found an appropriate medium through which to demonstrate their daimonia—their genius—in a form tangible to us all.
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Here’s a list of qualities that I believe, when exhibited together, gives someone a “daimonic personality.” Briefly, it is a disposition, a tendency, or a talent to see beyond the given, immediate reality to something new, using imagination—something which has yet to exist in our emanated world.
Here are common traits that signal a daimonic person:
-A fluidity of mood often overtakes them—or a sudden disconnect between their mood, thoughts, and their immediate surroundings. The kaleidoscope of emotions and associated spontaneous inner images or “visions” that appear to them will often compromise their immediate attention. It may even entirely obscure their perception of their surroundings, disorienting them momentarily; what is occurring in their minds blanks out conversation and may even visually overlay their surroundings (this can be very annoying or alarming to people close to them!) Subsequently, they may suffer a slippage of reference with regard to what people are saying to them; they are spacey. As a result of this inner interference, the daimonic individual may learn to become hyper-vigilant to the manner in which their surroundings affect their mental and emotional equilibrium, and how their behavior affects the people in their lives.
-At other times, they may intuit others’ feelings and thoughts to an uncanny degree, when overt cues are barely visible in their friends’ body language or facial expression. They are hypersensitive towards both themselves and others. They may be called deeply empathetic or even “telepathic.” This is also very confusing to their friends, alternating as it does with the episodes of “space-outs.”
-As noted, exceptionally vivid images, music, or fantasies enter their mind, often entirely unwilled. If they have artistic talent, this may compel them to record them, and often subverts the plans they have laid for the day. An irresistible motivation drives them to carry these visions into a tangible form, to either their completion or abandonment—dropping them to be finished another time, as if the vision had a life of its own. Their creative activities can give the impression of undermining their commitments to loved ones. They can also become morose or angered when “real life” interrupts particularly intense phases of their work. They may have multiple and conflicting commitments connected to the realization of their artistic visions. This compulsion keeps pulling them about and re-contextualizing the concerns of their everyday life; previous goals can suddenly seem uninteresting or petty as their attention becomes intensely focused upon the immediate task. Eating is foregone when they’re in the zone and (if it’s a long spell, even washing). There’s no time for everyday activities when the “messenger” inside is speaking.
-The aforementioned fluid state of mind that allows them access to these visions may come to interfere with their relationships. The outer world may seem an extension of the inner landscape their imagination creates. Everything may become emotionally inflated: Friends’ advice may become equated to the level of a deity’s judgment. They can obsessively invest certain individuals they know with strong emotion, psychic energy or fantasy (many times it is individuals they barely know, or people they’ve seen at a distance to whom they are attracted like a magnet). Often these people become objects of inspiration for creating their works—like a physical externalization of their Muse, or their own soul (as Jung would say).
-These visions are often so powerful that they emotionally drain the person. The “double vision” with which the daimonic person is imbued can greatly interfere with their attention span during a conversation. Often, they may exhibit “delusions of reference” (as psychologists call one of the characteristics of schizophrenia) or have mistaken impressions to a mild degree, because the latent possibilities for metaphor and analogy inherent in language are instead for the daimonic person a fluid force. They may notice only a person’s inflection and ignore the content of the words being spoken, or focus on the former in a “musical” fashion, or hear phrases of speech in isolation as poetry.
-They often need significant amounts of down-time to process experiences, because their imagination situates memories in “superposition” with one another, or confuse their recent experiences with past unrelated ones, or even with the imaginary.
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This is not an exhaustive list, but only indicative. The qualities a daimonic personality exhibits appear to be gross maladaptation to our profit-driven and competition-mad culture. You might even venture that psychology has developed its classificatory schemes over the past century to isolate and cordon them off—to keep these people who are driven to entertain these dreamy distractions from screwing up the orderly working of society (despite the fact that many of the technological marvels around us originated in the “daydreams” of such persons).
I wouldn’t want to make the above list into a checklist assuring a psychological label, but here’s what our society says: they’ve got straight-up ADHD—and possibly something more serious. So they might want to get that checked out, right? Here’s a prescription.
End of story?
No.
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The daimonic talent involves seeing beyond the given of any immediate reality to something that originates in imagination—something yet to exist. It is thus, metaphorically, in this sense, when the work is successfully completed, a form of time-travel. Artists and scientists and inventors experience the future when they imagine a work in their mind—then bring it into physical embodiment, whether the medium is light, equations, marble, engineering, sound, paint, etc.
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Profoundly daimonic people, those who are what we call visionaries, are driven to create and express their inner states through any medium at hand. But we are all in touch with the daimonic (I will explain how at length). It is a matter of connecting with what our purpose in this life is—and that the unfolding of our lives conforms not to the dreams of what we believe our destinies to be, but to that of another: what in ancient philosophy was called the world-soul.