daimon

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 Romantics, like Keats, said the call came from the heart, and Michelangelo’s intuitive eye saw an image in the heart of the person he was sculpting. The Neoplatonists referred to an

Organic images of growth follow the favorite symbol for human life, the tree, but I am turning that tree upside down. My model of growth has its roots in heaven and imagines a gradual descent downward toward human affairs. This is the Tree of the Kabbalah in the Jewish and also Christian mystical tradition.

In my estimation, Jung’s concept of the shadow and, in particular, May’s less familiar model of the daimonic, have paved the way toward a more progressive psychology of evil. Because the daimonic stands in contrast to Peck’s premise of the demonic, it is worthwhile to examine May’s model in more detail.

Of all psychology’s sins, the most mortal is its neglect of beauty. There is, after all, something quite beautiful about a life. But you would not think so from reading psychology books.

Being under the influence of a daimon was to be in a certain state. Just as we distinguish the states of trance and gnosis from the state of the normal waking mind, so the ancient Greeks used the word daimon to indicate a specific state of being that was different from normal everyday consciousness.

Someone once said to me, ‘It is in the nature of our holy daimon to, from the day of our birth, constantly pray down to us. We can meet it halfway, though, by starting to pray upwards to it.’ We can still hear the echo of Plato’s thoughts in this analogy, Plato who described humans as ‘plants of heaven on earth.’13 The intricate connection of the h

Plato makes it clear that this light which helps us see, or these ideas which help us remember, come from the immortal part of our soul; all other parts of it vanish at our death. Both metaphors illustrate how the nous surpasses both the material and human realms.

Socrates always used a particular Greek word to denote this supporting inner agency: he called it his daimonion, never his daimon. The difference lies in the gender of the noun. Socrates chose a neuter gender, indicating that he viewed it as a daimonic something or even a divine sign, and not necessarily a conscious entity in itself.29 We can only

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. The study and therapy of the psyche in our society ignore this factor, which other cultures regard as the k

Let me put in a nutshell what we may so far cautiously attribute to the acorn theory. It claims 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.