The daimon’s “reminders” work in many ways. 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 it is neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but cannot abide innocence. It can

You are born with a character; it is given; a gift, as the old stories say, from the guardians upon your birth.

The acorn theory proposes and I will bring evidence for the claim that you and I and every single person is born with a defining image. Individuality resides in a formal cause—to use old philosophical language going back to Aristotle. We each embody our own idea, in the language of Plato and Plotinus. And this form, this idea, this image does not

The unusual and little-used verb “to environ” means surround, enclose, envelop; literally, to form a ring around. “Environment,” the noun, means a set of circumstances (circum = around); the context, the physical conditions and external situations, that “surround” our persons and our lives.

“Ancestry” in our culture implies chromosomal connection; ancestors are those humans from whom I have inherited my body tissues. Biogenetics replaces the spirit world. In other societies an ancestor could be a tree, a bear, a salmon, a member of the dead, a spirit in a dream, a special spooky place. These may be addressed as “Ancestor” and an altar

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. This helps explain why Socrates’ daimon told him not to escape imprisonment and execution. His death belonged to the integrity of his image, to his innate form. A death—whether in the bullring, on the

The equations of math, the notations on a musical score, and the personifications of myth cross the limbo land between two worlds. They offer a seductive front that seems to present the unknown other side, a seduction that leads to the delusional conviction that math, music, and myths are the other side. We tend to believe that the real truth of

However, once the acorn is imagined archetypally, imagined as an archetypal idea, it is not confined by either the laws of nature or the processes of time. A narrow, naturalistic definition of “acorn” as the seed or fruit of the oak tree establishes only one level of its meaning, giving it only a literal, botanical place in the mind. This first

The other side is that you can’t be both mortal and an immortal star. You need two names because they reflect the two persons, an inherent duplicity operating between the acorn and its bearer.