It is September. Colourful leaves and straggling bees remind us the year is turning inward. On September 22, at 9:30 am PDT, the length of day and night will be equal. Some believe the moment of the Autumnal Equinox provides momentary peace in the endless gyres of the seasons. But it does not. Moments of balance are more likely to evoke the dissolution of the veil that separates our world from the Other and thus the distinction between ourselves and the Spirits that traffic this sphere unseen.
Ours is a numinous world. Even before the dawn of man, the spirits of nature were immanent in all things. With humanity came the first attempts to differentiate these energies. Through reverence and supplication to Nature, our forebears sought to bring their lives into alignment with the instinctual world. Despite a short, harsh life experience, these people likely lived and died in union with nature, never split from their native consciousness.
Millennia passed and the instinctual energy of the heart spilled into the mind as the epoch of rational thought arose. Humankind sought greater intercourse with the divinities that appeared to control their destiny. With leisure hours came the time to reflect upon the powerful tides of life, death and fate.
It was during this time that philosophers such as Heraclitus, Plato and Socrates spoke of the spirits that dwell not in the firmament or in the landscape, but alongside the human soul itself. These spirits, called "Daimons," are united with each human soul before birth and attend the soul throughout its mortal experience.
The Greeks considered daimons to be intermediaries between the divine and corporeal. Human soul and daimon exist together in the imaginal space we now call the "subtle body," the meeting place of psyche and soma. The Romans called these tutelary deities "genii" or "genius" and thought of them as the energy that guided the destiny or internal "pattern" of a person. The word "genius" later came to refer to a particular mental gift or an individual's lifetime calling that was tended by the genii.
With the shift from pagan polytheism to Christian monotheism came the disembodiment of the daimon. Hearing one's inner voice constituted madness or the work of the devil. "Daimons" became "demons" and an individual's pathway to the hereafter was no longer mediated by his or her own personal spirits but by earthborn members of a clergy bent on maintaining the politics of its religion.
With a transcendent God, daimonic energy was sublimated into a "Holy Spirit," an energy that could, on occasion, still "fill" an individual. The body was rejected as a passionate sensing organ and the chthonic, sensual energies that formerly facilitated ecstasy of mind and body were vilified. Each individual's rightful journey of descent into psychic dissolution, formerly accompanied by the daimon, was negated in favour of being born again into the light of heaven, without the attendant messiness of meaningful emotional and physical despair.
Today our turbulent world is awash in the disenfranchised daimonic energies that our bodies and minds no longer know how to welcome. Projected into the outer world these unlived passions and cycles of dissolution appear to us as solid reality - escalating violence, poverty and war. Introjected daimonic energy can foster chronic anxiety and depression, instead of rapture and connection. We dwell in an illusory world created by the shadows and brilliance that escape us.
The myth of the western hero is Apollonian individualism, the "I am," gained at great cost by rational thought via the suppression of instinct, the natural world and the feminine principle that tends toward unification. The daimon is caught in the mores of a society that insists that rational thought is the only lens through which the universe can be seen.
Until a new western or pancultural myth rises (perhaps one that envisions a unified field on which the masculine rational and feminine instinctual energies may both walk), the daimon shall find its own means of expression. Our culture's disturbing inability to be satiated -- by stimulation, possessions or food -- will never be corrected by medication, reality television or low carb diets. We seek to be filled, to be understood, by something we no longer feel or apprehend.
The true realm of the daimon is both physical and ethereal; it is this and that. Though you feel you have not encountered such an energy, it is likely you have. The daimon is found throughout world mythology and literature, such as Dante's Virgil. Folklore abounds with animated animal and bird helpers and mysterious old women or men who provide the protagonist with the enigmatic material needed to carry out their quest.
Interlopers, of shadow and flesh, and those who intercede on others' behalf carry the energy of the daimon. Spoken in the language of the imagination, the daimon's message arrives in synchronistic events, dreams and the strange unheard music that calls us away. When one walks in a landscape of peculiar or particular feel, one is noting the presence of the "genius loci," the spirit of the place. The melancholy souls of those of Irish descent, such as W.B. Yeats, are particularly tuned to the evanescent appearances of the daimon, given as they are to "second sight."
One need not be green or grey-eyed, young or ancient to hear the quiet murmurs of original destiny. Your "soul companion" will not be found through the Personal ads, all you can expect there is a projection of your ego's desire. Instead, apply within.
Whether you refer to it as a daimon, "guardian angel" or "guide," we each carry a presence that assists us in completing our calling. As writer Raghavan Iyer notes, to find the daimon, one must "hold the mind upon an abstract idea which is unbounded." Just for this moment, believe before you doubt that there is an energy that accompanies you, that you are entitled to it and that you innately know how to communicate with it, even though you cannot consciously articulate how you do it.
It is an illusion to believe that we are born alone and that we die alone. In the end, French scholar and mystic Henry Corbin believed that the daimon's journey leads us toward acceptance of a universal, holographic world vision, wherein all beings and the matter of both inner and outer worlds are subtly related.
The daimon expresses itself through the meaningful choices that you make, the events that constellate around you and the twists and turns that delineate the milestones of a lifetime. James Hillman writes that the daimon "cannot be encompassed by physical means -- only curious thought, devotional feeling, suggestive intuition and daring imagination..."
The season blows crisply toward Samhain. To live deeply, one must participate in mystery. The restless curiosity of leaves falling to the ground stirs a voice in your mind...do you choose to hear it?