daemon

More distantly, “acorn” comes from the Sanskrit via the Greek ago, agein and their various forms and derivatives, which mean basically to push, to direct toward, to lead or guide. (A chief in Homer is an agos.) The imperative age, agete means: move, get going, go. From this same ancient stem derive your “agenda” and your “agony,” the ordinary exper

Archetypal psychologist James Hillman writes of the link between the characters, which he calls our pathologies, and our compulsions, which he calls Ananke, the goddess of necessity. When we feel as if we are claimed by a foreign power, held hostage by a character that causes us to act in irrational, unfamiliar ways, we are caught in the circle of

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

It would be foolish of us to aspire to be flawless in the thousands of encounters we pass through each day. Flawlessness is for tyrants and the mythical dead. As living humans, our hands are always stained. We mess up, we clean up, and mostly are blissfully ignorant of the damage or good we have done.

As envisioned by May, the daimonic includes and incorporates Jung’s concepts of the shadow and Self, as well as the archetypes of anima and animus. While Jung differentiates the shadow from the Self, and the personal shadow from the collective and archetypal shadow, May makes no such distinctions. This recalls a recent caution by Marie-Louise von F

The daimon then becomes the source of human ethics, and the happy life—what the Greeks called eudaimonia—is the life that is good for the daimon. Not only does it bless us with its calling, we bless it with our style of following.