daimon on jabel

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 06:08:34 -0400

I made the same resolution a few weeks ago. I’m getting better at trusting that inner voice.

PSA: I will post nothing further about AGI/machine learning. I will read nothing further on the topic (and am purging my RSS feed accordingly). I have other and better things on my mind and heart.

Alan Jacobs https://social.ayjay.org/2026/10/13/psa-i-will-post-nothing.html

Voice of the daimon

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 09:03:22 -0400

If it is true–and I believe it is–that we all have a daimon, guardian angel, inner voice, Self, whatever you want to call it, then it follows that one of the primary ways that inner reality manifests itself is as intuition. If, as Hillman says, the daimon accompanies you in order to keep you on the path of your calling, then intuition can be navigation.

In mainstream therapeutic culture, the feeling I get when I don’t want to engage in certain conversations–or the feeling that comes afterward when I ignore that reluctance and engage anyway–is described as conflict avoidance. It is a very tidy explanation. My behavior is interpreted as an unhelpful, even harmful, repression of my own voice or feelings.

What if, instead, what we call conflict avoidance is my daimon telling me, “not your circus, not your monkeys”? What if that intuition is guiding me away from the wrong path? What if the sense of relief I feel when I disengage with those conversations is the satisfaction of working at my proper task?

Make room for the daimons

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 06:21:12 -0400

Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality:

To make room for the daimons is to set a distance between us and them. This enables us to reflect, and reflect on, them; or, perhaps more accurately, allows them to reflect themselves through us. Reflection is “an act of becoming conscious.” If we become conscious of the daimons, and remain mindful of them, we avoid becoming possessed by them. For we are always vulnerable to neurotic fixations and compulsions when unconscious daimons drive us to act out, against our will, their fixed mythic patterns. Of course there is no way we can break entirely free of the compelling power of the daimons, any more than we can sever ourselves with impunity from our own souls; but we can collaborate with them, through reflection and imagination, so that their compulsion begins to resemble what we think of as an artist’s vocation. In this case, a dialogue is opened between us and our daimon, as if it were (as it often is) a Muse, so that there is struggle and passion, but also negotiation and inspirational exchange. We are no longer compelled to act out the daimonic pattern in a literal sense; rather, we are enabled to body it forth in imaginative acts—works of art, for example, or artifacts, or even ideas and hypotheses. All these, to a greater or lesser extent, contain and define the daimonic exuberance that might otherwise overwhelm us. Work of art are, in this respect, daimonic shrines, like the statues of the ancients which were wrought in order, magically, to draw down and contain a daimon or god.

This accords with some recent thoughts on co-creation.

The gods have become symptoms

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 06:27:08 -0400

Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality:

Too much of our recent history has been soul-slaughter, imagining the past as merely primitive and, muscle-bound with technology, bulldozing the sacred places, hunting the daimonic animals with high-velocity rifles, dispatching the jets to shoot down the UFOs, violating the moon-goddess with phallic rockets, and so on. Having severed all connection with the gods and daimons, we reckon we are getting away with it. But we aren’t. The victory over the daimons is hollow; we simply make a hell of our world. And, as we drive out the daimons before us, they creep back in from behind, from within. We compel them to seize and possess and madden us. If we want to know our own fate, we would do well, perhaps, to look at the fate of Heracles. He neglected his wife, his soul, who, in order to rekindle his attention, sent him a shirt soaked in what she had been told was a love potion. But the potion was a poison that coursed over his body, corroding his too-solid flesh. The more he tore at the shirt, the more he tore himself to pieces. He was glad to find death on a burning pyre. (His wife killed herself out of remorse.)

This is a warning of what happens to spirit when it becomes divorced from its soul pairing, when it ceases to find its reflection in soul — and loses it. It becomes the solitary heroic rational ego which deludes itself into believing that there is no soul. It creates a correspondingly delusional world for itself which, deprived of its connection with a personal and personified counterpart, opens onto the soul’s depths, as abysmal as deep space and as impersonal as the subatomic realm.

Our mental health crisis

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 06:49:15 -0400

Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality:

Modern depth psychology came about because the daimons would no longer be ignored. They made themselves felt in neurotic symptoms, in obsessions and psychoses. Freud and his followers documented the complexes which cried out from within us with alien voices; Jung followed their call into the depths, beyond the personal, beyond even the human, to the world of archetypal psychological principles in which he saw the gods returning in a new guise. Freud could not follow him down. He feared the daimons of the unconscious, demonized them, warning Jung that he must set up a bulwark “against the black tide of mud” of “occultism.” But Jung dared to make his own journey into the collective unconscious and found there something altogether different, something — as we will see — unimaginable. Other schools of psychology became increasingly materialistic and reductive, treating the daimons as if they were purely physiological. Soul was reduced to mind, and mind to brain. The daimons were not so much demonized as medicalized. “The gods have become diseases,” Jung was fond of lamenting.

Why do we rarely hear of sightings of the elder folk here in the United States? The next time you see one of those poor souls taken up by the latest online obsession or some young person so bound by anxiety they can’t leave the house or a successful entrepreneur eating uppers just to keep going one more day or an older man so consumed with anger his kids can’t stand to be around him—perhaps that’s a sighting. Whatever is repressed returns as symptom.

C.S. Lewis on the longaevi

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 09:01:58 -0400

Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality:

In his book The Discarded Image, C. S. Lewis tries to depict the universe as it was seen through the eyes of a medieval person. He describes their view of the heavens, with its precise system of crystalline spheres towering like a great cathedral, vast but finite, into space. And he is just about to describe their view of Earth and its inhabitants who occupy the lower end of the Great Chain of Being, which stretches down from God and the angels, to man, animals, vegetables, and even stones, when he finds himself obliged to pause and consider an anomalous class of beings. They are not only strange to him, as a literary historian and Christian apologist, but they are also at odds with the cosmology he is outlining - a world even more precise and orderly than our own worldview. Following the Roman writer Martianus Capella, he calls these beings longaevi (presumably “long-lived ones”) - “dancing companies” of which “haunt woods, glades, and groves, and lakes, and springs and brooks; whose names are Pans, Fauns, … Satyrs, Silvans, Nymphs.” They are, of course, our daimons.

“In a sense,” says Lewis, “their unimportance is their importance. They are marginal fugitive creatures. They are perhaps the only creatures to whom the Model [i.e. the medieval cosmos] does not assign, as it were, an official status.” And this is as true of our own model of the cosmos as it was then. It is the nature of the daimons to be always unofficial, constituting a stumbling block to the orderly structures by which we envisage Creation. To his credit, Lewis does not disapprove of them. “Herein lies their imaginative value,” he says. “They introduce a welcome hint of wildness and uncertainty into the universe that is in danger of being a little too self-explanatory, too luminous.” Lewis’s private attempt to reconcile the daimons with a Christian cosmos took the form of his famous Narnia books for children of all ages.

… The process of demonization [i.e., the reduction of daimons to demons] took on new impetus with the Reformation. The Protestants were in no mood to accommodate the daimons; nor were their Catholic counterparts, the new breed of narrow counter-reformationists. Both sides quoted the early Christian Fathers, who had identified the pagan gods with devils, to support their own identification of fairies with demons. By 1584, Reginald Scot could complain loudly in his Discoverie of Witchcraft (vii, xv) that “our mothers' maids have so terrified us with … spirits, witches, urchins, elves, hags, fairies, satyrs, pans, faunes, … dwarfs, giants, nymphs, Incubus, Robin Good Fellow, … and other such bugs.” Here we see the fear and exasperation of a mind which has ceased to discriminate between daimons and is merely oppressed, lumping them all together in a demonic body. With the accession of James I to the throne in 1603, together with the rise of Puritanism, the demonization of fairies was all but complete in educated circles.

… What really did for the fairies, however, was their association with witches. … The history of witchcraft in Europe is extremely complex. (I will touch on the subject later on.) It’s enough to say here that, as the sixteenth century drew to a close, it became increasingly hag-ridden. Daimons, and fairies in particular, were implicated in the hysteria, phobia, and paranoia which surrounded witchcraft and the persecution of its alleged practitioners. This was also a period, of course, which saw the rise of empiricism which led eventually to the modern, essentially scientific, view of the world. On the face of it, this view could be seen as responsible for the ensuing decay of daimonic beliefs. But I am inclined to agree with C. S. Lewis when he says: “One might have expected the High Fairies to have been expelled by science; I think they were actually expelled by a darkening of superstition.”

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 09:24:21 -0400

Three things that (synchronistically?) fell into my world this week:

Atsuko Watanabe, in The Abundance of Less by Andy Couturier:

“Most people spend their time relating entirely to things that are made solely for the purpose of keeping the economy spinning, of making money for someone, such as television and television shows, and eating food that’s not good for them. And to get that money, everyone throws away their own time that was free before, even if the work they do is not useful. Everyone around them thinks it’s natural and normal. Even though they’re incredibly busy on the physical, body level, moving around all the time, they are empty on the level of spirit.”

“So why do they do it, do you think?”

“Because they don’t stop to consider, Why is it that I as a human am alive?”

James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, explaining an idea in Plato’s Republic:

The soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we are born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live on earth. This soul-companion, the daimon, guides us here; in the process of arrival, however, we forget all that took place and believe we come empty into this world. The daimon remembers what is in your image and belongs to your pattern, and therefore your daimon is the carrier of your destiny.

As explained by the greatest of later Platonists, Plotinus, we elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belong to its necessity. This suggests that the circumstances, including my body and my parents whom I may curse, are my soul’s own choice–and I do not understand this because I have forgotten.

So that we do not forget, Plato tells the myth and, in the very last passage, says that by preserving the myth we may better preserve ourselves and prosper. In other words, the myth has a redemptive psychological function, and a psychology derived from it can inspire a life founded on it.

Charles Eisenstein’s brief film, “The Fall”.