Essence | Daimon | Genius

Vocation is a lovely word that carries the notion of an inner calling. At a certain point in your inner journey, your Core Wound does indeed call you out into the world.

We can’t know why the Daimon wants to pursue certain things and refuses to engage in others; its long view cannot be corralled into the pedestrian confines of human conceptual models and narratives. All we can do is trust the inner whispers, under moral oversight.

In more recent times, psychologist James Hillman spoke of the Daimon—in his so-called “acorn theory” of personality—variously as the Soul, Calling, or Vocation. The idea is that there lies within each person a latent blueprint of their unique character and destiny, much like an acorn embodies the potential to become a particular oak tree.

If you’re anything like me and have been trying to improve yourself, then you probably know this ideal version of yourself. Well, in Greek, this best version would be the inner daimon, an inner spirit or divine spark. For the Stoics and all other schools of ancient philosophy, the ultimate goal of life was eudaimonia, to become good (eu) with your

For the ancient Greeks the Eidolon was exactly as I use it in my first book – the lower, everyday ‘self’. By implication this means that there is a Higher Self that is a reflection of the gods. This being was called the ‘Daemon’ and I have continued to use this term to describe the part of us that knows that we have lived this life before.

This brings me to the fourth telltale sign of the Daimon’s presence: a sense of destiny, related to the feeling of duty and responsibility discussed above.

Referring to the medieval idea of the “daemonic,” Jung writes that “demons are nothing other than intruders from the unconscious, spontaneous irruptions of the unconscious complexes into the continuity of the conscious process. Complexes are comparable to demons which fitfully harass our thought and actions; hence in antiquity and the Middle Ages

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 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.