DAIMON
The Genius of Genealogy
by Iona Miller, 2016
The Genius of Genealogy
by Iona Miller, 2016
According to Henry Corbin, the human soul is individuated not through the union with a physical body (as in Aristotle) but by becoming a perfectly polished mirror of its angel in a strictly one-to-one relationship. We realize our virtual angelicity through a progressive illumination attained on earth; we are called, by right of our origin and if we consent, to an angelomorphosis (Robert Avens, The Subtle Realm: Corbin, Sufism, Swedenborg).
"Behind your apparently meaningless and unhappy fate a deeper drama is being performed, a divine play of the daimons whose meaning is the redemption of the anima by the spirit of love."
Recollections of the Soul, Marie-Louise von Franz, p.127
"The Daimon Psyche with the butterfly wings draws near to men as the principle of a love that has no trace of egoistic motives and whose goal signifies individuation, with a liberation from all rationalistic one-sidedness."
~Marie-Louise von Franz, Recollections of the Soul, p.133
"The daimon has an irresistible desire to reincarnate psychologically by us, to live our imaginal biographies. Maybe all our psychologies of desire are born from him and the relationship with him..." --Eldo Stellucci
"Behind your apparently meaningless and unhappy fate a deeper drama is being performed, a divine play of the daimons whose meaning is the redemption of the anima by the spirit of love."
Recollections of the Soul, Marie-Louise von Franz, p.127
"The Daimon Psyche with the butterfly wings draws near to men as the principle of a love that has no trace of egoistic motives and whose goal signifies individuation, with a liberation from all rationalistic one-sidedness."
~Marie-Louise von Franz, Recollections of the Soul, p.133
"The daimon has an irresistible desire to reincarnate psychologically by us, to live our imaginal biographies. Maybe all our psychologies of desire are born from him and the relationship with him..." --Eldo Stellucci
Augoeides is an obscure term meaning "luminous body" and thought to refer to the planets. Aleister Crowley considered the term to refer to the Holy Guardian Angel of Abramelin; the Atman of Hinduism the Daemon of the ancient Greeks.
Robert Lomas associates the term with the Higher Self or soul of the individual[1]
EtymologyIt appears that Porphyry used it and Thomas Taylor commented on it. The term is encountered in the literature of Neo-Platonic theurgy and was popularized in the 19th and 20th centuries by the Theosophists, Freemasons, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
To quote Thomas Taylor's comment on Porphyry:
We are afterwards sent through ample Elysium, and a few of us possess the joyful plains: till a long period, when the revolving orb of time has perfected its circulation, frees the soul from its concrete stains, and leaves the etherial sense pure, together with the fire (or splendour) of simple ether." For here he evidently conjoins the rational soul, or the etherial sense, with its splendid vehicle, or the fire of simple ether; since it is well known that this vehicle, according to Plato, is rendered by proper purgation 'augoeides', or luciform, and divine. It must here however be observed that souls in these meadows of asphodel, or summit of Pluto's empire, are in a falling state; or in other words through the secret influx of matter begin to desire a terrene situation. And this explains the reason why Hercules in the infernal regions is represented by Homer boasting of his terrene exploits and glorying in his pristine valour; why Achilles laments his situation in these abodes; and souls in general are engaged in pursuits similar to their employment on the earth: for all this is the natural consequence of a propensity to a mortal nature, and a desertion of the regions every way lucid and divine. Let the reader too observe, that, according to the arcana of the Platonic doctrine, the first and truest seat of the soul is in the intelligible world, where she lives entirely divested of body, and enjoys the ultimate felicity of her nature. And this is what Homer divinely insinuates when he says: "after this I saw the Herculean power, or image: but Hercules himself is with the immortal gods, delighting in celestial banquets, and enjoying the beautiful-footed Hebe." Since for the soul to dwell with the gods, entirely separated from its vehicle, is to abide in the intelligible world, and to exercise, as Plotinus expresses it, the more sacred contests of wisdom.
To quote H.P. Blavatsky:
The most substantial difference consisted in the location of the immortal or divine spirit of man. While the ancient Neoplatonists held that the Augoeides never descends hypostatically into the living man, but only more or less sheds its radiance on the inner man – the astral soul – the Kabalists of the Middle Ages maintained that the spirit, detaching itself from the ocean of light and spirit, entered into man's soul, where it remained through life imprisoned in the astral capsule. This difference was the result of the belief of Christian Kabalists, more or less, in the dead letter of the allegory of the fall of man.
Robert Lomas associates the term with the Higher Self or soul of the individual[1]
EtymologyIt appears that Porphyry used it and Thomas Taylor commented on it. The term is encountered in the literature of Neo-Platonic theurgy and was popularized in the 19th and 20th centuries by the Theosophists, Freemasons, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
To quote Thomas Taylor's comment on Porphyry:
We are afterwards sent through ample Elysium, and a few of us possess the joyful plains: till a long period, when the revolving orb of time has perfected its circulation, frees the soul from its concrete stains, and leaves the etherial sense pure, together with the fire (or splendour) of simple ether." For here he evidently conjoins the rational soul, or the etherial sense, with its splendid vehicle, or the fire of simple ether; since it is well known that this vehicle, according to Plato, is rendered by proper purgation 'augoeides', or luciform, and divine. It must here however be observed that souls in these meadows of asphodel, or summit of Pluto's empire, are in a falling state; or in other words through the secret influx of matter begin to desire a terrene situation. And this explains the reason why Hercules in the infernal regions is represented by Homer boasting of his terrene exploits and glorying in his pristine valour; why Achilles laments his situation in these abodes; and souls in general are engaged in pursuits similar to their employment on the earth: for all this is the natural consequence of a propensity to a mortal nature, and a desertion of the regions every way lucid and divine. Let the reader too observe, that, according to the arcana of the Platonic doctrine, the first and truest seat of the soul is in the intelligible world, where she lives entirely divested of body, and enjoys the ultimate felicity of her nature. And this is what Homer divinely insinuates when he says: "after this I saw the Herculean power, or image: but Hercules himself is with the immortal gods, delighting in celestial banquets, and enjoying the beautiful-footed Hebe." Since for the soul to dwell with the gods, entirely separated from its vehicle, is to abide in the intelligible world, and to exercise, as Plotinus expresses it, the more sacred contests of wisdom.
To quote H.P. Blavatsky:
The most substantial difference consisted in the location of the immortal or divine spirit of man. While the ancient Neoplatonists held that the Augoeides never descends hypostatically into the living man, but only more or less sheds its radiance on the inner man – the astral soul – the Kabalists of the Middle Ages maintained that the spirit, detaching itself from the ocean of light and spirit, entered into man's soul, where it remained through life imprisoned in the astral capsule. This difference was the result of the belief of Christian Kabalists, more or less, in the dead letter of the allegory of the fall of man.
It [myth] is something that happens to man, and men have mythical fates
just as much as the Greek heroes do. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 648.
Myth is not fiction: it consists of facts that are continually repeated and
can be observed over and over again. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 648.
ETHOS ANTHROPOI DAIMON
“A man’s character is his destiny.” But what does this mean? A host of alternative translations render “daimon” in that statement as “genius,” “fate,” “calling,” etc.
Genius and vocation are inborn characteristics of human nature; there is no authoritative voice, only multiple readings.
The essence of it means we carry our fate within us.
Our fulfillment is expressing and living out the true self, also called self-actualization and self-realization.
Plato and the Greeks called it "daimon," the Romans "genius," the Christians "guardian angel." Today we use the terms heart, spirit, and soul.
Picasso said, quoting Rimbaud "JE EST ' un autre" (I is another). But if " I " are another, how do I know this " other " that I live? This alterity was his madness, his daemon that in Spanish is called "duende". It's that madness that imposed the great artist his vision, possedendolo and allowing them to express the soul in his works. This is duende's says Federico Carcia Lorca's "Mystery and excitement", Is "the spirit of the earth". Duende he sounds dark and these are "the mystery, the roots that sink in the limo that we all know, that we all, but where it comes from what is substantial in the art"... " the duende hurts, and in the healing of this wound that never heals the unusual, the invented of human work. The Duende loves the edge, the wound and is close to the places where the shapes are melt in a desire to exceed their expressions visible ". The Duende we might even say he loves the edges of the wounds, it lives on the borders, and know deeply the wound...
“Present in body and absent in spirit, he lies back on the couch, shamed by his own daimon for the potentials in his soul that will not be subdued. He feels himself inwardly subversive, imagining in his passivity extremes of aggression and desire that must be suppressed. Solution: more work, more money, more drink, more weight, more things.” (The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman)
“For the daimon surprises. It crosses my intentions with its interventions, sometimes with a little twinge of hesitation, sometimes with a quick crush on someone or something. These surprises feel small and irrational; you can brush them aside; yet they also convey a sense of importance, which can make you say afterward: “Fate.””(The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling,
James Hillman)
Yet even if we find our personal calling we have the freedom to choose to follow it or ignore it. If we choose to ignore it we can be sure our “inner voice” won’t go away. It will be there whether we are aware of its presence or not, pushing us in the direction of our destiny until our final hours: “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 Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman)
It will be good for your humility if you can accept the gifts of your unconscious guide that dwells in yourself, and it is good for your pride to humiliate itself to such an extent that you can accept what you receive. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 459
just as much as the Greek heroes do. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 648.
Myth is not fiction: it consists of facts that are continually repeated and
can be observed over and over again. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 648.
ETHOS ANTHROPOI DAIMON
“A man’s character is his destiny.” But what does this mean? A host of alternative translations render “daimon” in that statement as “genius,” “fate,” “calling,” etc.
Genius and vocation are inborn characteristics of human nature; there is no authoritative voice, only multiple readings.
The essence of it means we carry our fate within us.
Our fulfillment is expressing and living out the true self, also called self-actualization and self-realization.
Plato and the Greeks called it "daimon," the Romans "genius," the Christians "guardian angel." Today we use the terms heart, spirit, and soul.
Picasso said, quoting Rimbaud "JE EST ' un autre" (I is another). But if " I " are another, how do I know this " other " that I live? This alterity was his madness, his daemon that in Spanish is called "duende". It's that madness that imposed the great artist his vision, possedendolo and allowing them to express the soul in his works. This is duende's says Federico Carcia Lorca's "Mystery and excitement", Is "the spirit of the earth". Duende he sounds dark and these are "the mystery, the roots that sink in the limo that we all know, that we all, but where it comes from what is substantial in the art"... " the duende hurts, and in the healing of this wound that never heals the unusual, the invented of human work. The Duende loves the edge, the wound and is close to the places where the shapes are melt in a desire to exceed their expressions visible ". The Duende we might even say he loves the edges of the wounds, it lives on the borders, and know deeply the wound...
“Present in body and absent in spirit, he lies back on the couch, shamed by his own daimon for the potentials in his soul that will not be subdued. He feels himself inwardly subversive, imagining in his passivity extremes of aggression and desire that must be suppressed. Solution: more work, more money, more drink, more weight, more things.” (The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman)
“For the daimon surprises. It crosses my intentions with its interventions, sometimes with a little twinge of hesitation, sometimes with a quick crush on someone or something. These surprises feel small and irrational; you can brush them aside; yet they also convey a sense of importance, which can make you say afterward: “Fate.””(The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling,
James Hillman)
Yet even if we find our personal calling we have the freedom to choose to follow it or ignore it. If we choose to ignore it we can be sure our “inner voice” won’t go away. It will be there whether we are aware of its presence or not, pushing us in the direction of our destiny until our final hours: “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 Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman)
It will be good for your humility if you can accept the gifts of your unconscious guide that dwells in yourself, and it is good for your pride to humiliate itself to such an extent that you can accept what you receive. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 459
Language of the Birds
http://www.worldwisdom.com/public/viewpdf/default.aspx?article-title=The_Language_of_the_Birds_by_Rene_Guenon.pdf
There is often mention, in diverse traditions, of a mysterious language called “the language of the birds”—a designation that is clearly symbolic, for the very importance that is attributed to the knowledge of this language, as the prerogative of a high initiation, does not allow us to take it literally. We read, for example, in the Qurʾān: “And Solomon was David’s heir. And he said, O mankind! Lo! we have been taught the language of the birds (ullimnāmanṭiq aṭ-ṭayr) and have been given
abundance of all things” (27:16). Elsewhere we read of heroes who,
having vanquished the dragon, like Siegfried in the Nordic legend,
instantly understand the language of the birds; and this makes it easy
to interpret the symbolism in question. Victory over the dragon has,
as its immediate consequence, the conquest of immortality, which is
represented by some object the approach to which is guarded by the
dragon; and this conquest essentially implies the reintegration into the
center of the human state, that is, into the point where communication is established with the higher states of the being. It is this communication which is represented by the understanding of the language of the birds; and in fact birds are frequently taken as symbols of the angels, that is, precisely, of the higher states. In the Qurʾānic text given above, the termaṣ-ṣāffātis taken as meaning literally the birds, but as denoting symbolically the angels (al-malaʾikah); and thus the first verse signifies the constitution of
the celestial or spiritual hierarchies.
We have had occasion elsewhere 1to cite the Gospel parable that refers, in this very sense, to “the birds of the heavens” which come and rest in the branches of
the tree, the same tree that represents the axis which passes through
the center of each state of the being and links all the states with each
other.
2Man and His Becoming according to the Vedānta, chap. 3.
2In the Medieval symbol of the Peridexion (a corruption of the word
Paradision),one sees the birds on the branches of the tree and the dragon at its foot.
http://www.worldwisdom.com/public/viewpdf/default.aspx?article-title=The_Language_of_the_Birds_by_Rene_Guenon.pdf
There is often mention, in diverse traditions, of a mysterious language called “the language of the birds”—a designation that is clearly symbolic, for the very importance that is attributed to the knowledge of this language, as the prerogative of a high initiation, does not allow us to take it literally. We read, for example, in the Qurʾān: “And Solomon was David’s heir. And he said, O mankind! Lo! we have been taught the language of the birds (ullimnāmanṭiq aṭ-ṭayr) and have been given
abundance of all things” (27:16). Elsewhere we read of heroes who,
having vanquished the dragon, like Siegfried in the Nordic legend,
instantly understand the language of the birds; and this makes it easy
to interpret the symbolism in question. Victory over the dragon has,
as its immediate consequence, the conquest of immortality, which is
represented by some object the approach to which is guarded by the
dragon; and this conquest essentially implies the reintegration into the
center of the human state, that is, into the point where communication is established with the higher states of the being. It is this communication which is represented by the understanding of the language of the birds; and in fact birds are frequently taken as symbols of the angels, that is, precisely, of the higher states. In the Qurʾānic text given above, the termaṣ-ṣāffātis taken as meaning literally the birds, but as denoting symbolically the angels (al-malaʾikah); and thus the first verse signifies the constitution of
the celestial or spiritual hierarchies.
We have had occasion elsewhere 1to cite the Gospel parable that refers, in this very sense, to “the birds of the heavens” which come and rest in the branches of
the tree, the same tree that represents the axis which passes through
the center of each state of the being and links all the states with each
other.
2Man and His Becoming according to the Vedānta, chap. 3.
2In the Medieval symbol of the Peridexion (a corruption of the word
Paradision),one sees the birds on the branches of the tree and the dragon at its foot.
Guardian Angels
The daimon is a personification of the ancestors, intimately related, yet separate and remote, like the dead. A daimon is our divine element, an intercessor between gods and mankind -- a 'serpentine' companion spirit, the impersonal collective power of the gods to dispense destiny and the numinous as individual events and experience.
A destiny spirit or guardian angel, it also personifies conscience, the voice of our unconscious, or higher self -- a doppelganger through who's eyes we can catch of glimpse of our far-flung future, the life we will live in reverse. It is our destiny and protector, but it only protects the part of us that serves its plan for your self, because it springs from the impersonal Ground of being.
But to have soul is the whole venture of life, for soul is a life-giving daemon who plays his elfin game above and below human existence, for which reason-in the realm of dogma he is threatened and propitiated with superhuman punishments and blessings that go far beyond the possible deserts of human
beings. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 26-27
Heaven and hell are the fates meted out to the soul and not to civilized man, who in his nakedness and timidity would have no idea of what to do with himself in a heavenly Jerusalem. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 26-27
It was like dying. I did not want to live and to return into this fragmentary, restricted, narrow, almost mechanical life, where you were subject to the laws of gravity and cohesion, imprisoned in a system of 3 dimensions and whirled along with other bodies in the turbulent stream of time. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 357-358
“Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. You may remember this “something” as a signal moment in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have. This is who I am.” (The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman)
“For Napoleon Bonaparte it was his “star” that he always felt in ascendance when he made the right move. For Socrates, it was his daimon, a voice that he heard…which inevitably spoke to him in the negative—telling him what to avoid. For Goethe, he also called it a daimon—a kind of spirit that dwelled within him and compelled him to fulfill his destiny. In more modern times, Albert Einstein talked of a kind of inner voice that shaped the direction of his speculations. All of these are variations on what Leonardo da Vinci experienced with his own sense of fate.” (Mastery, Robert Greene)
“Among his various possible beings each man always finds one which is his genuine and authentic being. The voice which calls him to that authentic being is what we call “vocation.” But the majority of men devote themselves to silencing that voice of the vocation and refusing to hear it. They manage to make a noise within themselves…to distract their own attention in order not to hear it; and they defraud themselves by substituting for their genuine selves a false course of life.” (Jose Ortega Y Gasset)
“Present in body and absent in spirit, he lies back on the couch, shamed by his own daimon for the potentials in his soul that will not be subdued. He feels himself inwardly subversive, imagining in his passivity extremes of aggression and desire that must be suppressed. Solution: more work, more money, more drink, more weight, more things.” (The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman)
“For the daimon surprises. It crosses my intentions with its interventions, sometimes with a little twinge of hesitation, sometimes with a quick crush on someone or something. These surprises feel small and irrational; you can brush them aside; yet they also convey a sense of importance, which can make you say afterward: “Fate.””(The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling,
James Hillman)
“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 Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling,
James Hillman)
“Among his various possible beings each man always finds one which is his genuine and authentic being. The voice which calls him to that authentic being is what we call “vocation.” But the majority of men devote themselves to silencing that voice of the vocation and refusing to hear it. They manage to make a noise within themselves…to distract their own attention in order not to hear it; and they defraud themselves by substituting for their genuine selves a false course of life.” (Jose Ortega Y Gasset)
The daimon is a personification of the ancestors, intimately related, yet separate and remote, like the dead. A daimon is our divine element, an intercessor between gods and mankind -- a 'serpentine' companion spirit, the impersonal collective power of the gods to dispense destiny and the numinous as individual events and experience.
A destiny spirit or guardian angel, it also personifies conscience, the voice of our unconscious, or higher self -- a doppelganger through who's eyes we can catch of glimpse of our far-flung future, the life we will live in reverse. It is our destiny and protector, but it only protects the part of us that serves its plan for your self, because it springs from the impersonal Ground of being.
But to have soul is the whole venture of life, for soul is a life-giving daemon who plays his elfin game above and below human existence, for which reason-in the realm of dogma he is threatened and propitiated with superhuman punishments and blessings that go far beyond the possible deserts of human
beings. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 26-27
Heaven and hell are the fates meted out to the soul and not to civilized man, who in his nakedness and timidity would have no idea of what to do with himself in a heavenly Jerusalem. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 26-27
It was like dying. I did not want to live and to return into this fragmentary, restricted, narrow, almost mechanical life, where you were subject to the laws of gravity and cohesion, imprisoned in a system of 3 dimensions and whirled along with other bodies in the turbulent stream of time. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 357-358
“Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. You may remember this “something” as a signal moment in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have. This is who I am.” (The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman)
“For Napoleon Bonaparte it was his “star” that he always felt in ascendance when he made the right move. For Socrates, it was his daimon, a voice that he heard…which inevitably spoke to him in the negative—telling him what to avoid. For Goethe, he also called it a daimon—a kind of spirit that dwelled within him and compelled him to fulfill his destiny. In more modern times, Albert Einstein talked of a kind of inner voice that shaped the direction of his speculations. All of these are variations on what Leonardo da Vinci experienced with his own sense of fate.” (Mastery, Robert Greene)
“Among his various possible beings each man always finds one which is his genuine and authentic being. The voice which calls him to that authentic being is what we call “vocation.” But the majority of men devote themselves to silencing that voice of the vocation and refusing to hear it. They manage to make a noise within themselves…to distract their own attention in order not to hear it; and they defraud themselves by substituting for their genuine selves a false course of life.” (Jose Ortega Y Gasset)
“Present in body and absent in spirit, he lies back on the couch, shamed by his own daimon for the potentials in his soul that will not be subdued. He feels himself inwardly subversive, imagining in his passivity extremes of aggression and desire that must be suppressed. Solution: more work, more money, more drink, more weight, more things.” (The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, James Hillman)
“For the daimon surprises. It crosses my intentions with its interventions, sometimes with a little twinge of hesitation, sometimes with a quick crush on someone or something. These surprises feel small and irrational; you can brush them aside; yet they also convey a sense of importance, which can make you say afterward: “Fate.””(The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling,
James Hillman)
“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 Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling,
James Hillman)
“Among his various possible beings each man always finds one which is his genuine and authentic being. The voice which calls him to that authentic being is what we call “vocation.” But the majority of men devote themselves to silencing that voice of the vocation and refusing to hear it. They manage to make a noise within themselves…to distract their own attention in order not to hear it; and they defraud themselves by substituting for their genuine selves a false course of life.” (Jose Ortega Y Gasset)
Daimon, Serpent & Bird
The daimon of sexuality approaches our soul as a serpent. She is half human soul and is called thought-desire. The daimon of spirituality descends into our soul as the white bird. He is half human soul and is called desire-thought.
~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 354.
The daimon of sexuality approaches our soul as a serpent. She is half human soul and is called thought-desire. The daimon of spirituality descends into our soul as the white bird. He is half human soul and is called desire-thought.
~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 354.
THE DAIMON WHO LIVES IN YOUR TREE
In The Soul’s Code, Hillman (1996) offers the acorn theory as an alternative to explaining human life in terms of genetic determinism or as a sheer accident. The idea for the acorn theory came from Plato’s "Myth of Er" in The Republic.
Following Plato, Hillman asserts that every soul (psyche) is granted a unique daimon before birth, and this daimon has chosen a pattern that individuals must live while on earth. The daimon leads the soul into the world, but the daimon is forgotten at birth. Although forgotten, the daimon remembers the destiny of the soul and guides the person through life, “therefore the daimon is the carrier of your destiny” (Hillman, p. 8).
Prior to birth, people chose the body, parents, place, and circumstances most suited to the soul. We are summoned into the world with a calling. From this, Hillman concludes: (1) the daimonic call is a fundamental fact of human existence; (2) people should strive to align life with the call, and (3) come to understand that accidents, illnesses, and all maladies are in the service of fulfilling the call.
It is important that we hear the double sense of the Plotinus fragment: one’s character is one’s daimon. For the ancient Greeks your character is “given” to you in some sense—who you are is not completely within your control. “Your” actions reveal “your” character but are also something given to you, something granted by the divine. Daimon is the uncanny because it presents itself in everything ordinary without being the ordinary. With the ancient Greeks, the daemonic appears not only through elements “inside” the self—the passions, the blood—as noted above, but also “outside” the self—in wind, rain, fire, animals.
You can't make something out of nothing, not even with will-power.
And what is will-power?
To have will-power means that you have a lot of drive.
Creativeness is drive!
A creative calling is like a daimonion,
which, in some instances, can ruin a person's entire life.
~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 164-167
In The Soul’s Code, Hillman (1996) offers the acorn theory as an alternative to explaining human life in terms of genetic determinism or as a sheer accident. The idea for the acorn theory came from Plato’s "Myth of Er" in The Republic.
Following Plato, Hillman asserts that every soul (psyche) is granted a unique daimon before birth, and this daimon has chosen a pattern that individuals must live while on earth. The daimon leads the soul into the world, but the daimon is forgotten at birth. Although forgotten, the daimon remembers the destiny of the soul and guides the person through life, “therefore the daimon is the carrier of your destiny” (Hillman, p. 8).
Prior to birth, people chose the body, parents, place, and circumstances most suited to the soul. We are summoned into the world with a calling. From this, Hillman concludes: (1) the daimonic call is a fundamental fact of human existence; (2) people should strive to align life with the call, and (3) come to understand that accidents, illnesses, and all maladies are in the service of fulfilling the call.
It is important that we hear the double sense of the Plotinus fragment: one’s character is one’s daimon. For the ancient Greeks your character is “given” to you in some sense—who you are is not completely within your control. “Your” actions reveal “your” character but are also something given to you, something granted by the divine. Daimon is the uncanny because it presents itself in everything ordinary without being the ordinary. With the ancient Greeks, the daemonic appears not only through elements “inside” the self—the passions, the blood—as noted above, but also “outside” the self—in wind, rain, fire, animals.
You can't make something out of nothing, not even with will-power.
And what is will-power?
To have will-power means that you have a lot of drive.
Creativeness is drive!
A creative calling is like a daimonion,
which, in some instances, can ruin a person's entire life.
~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 164-167
“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.
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 neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life - and it prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns.
It has much to do with feelings of uniqueness, of grandeur and with the restlessness of the heart, its impatience, its dissatisfaction, its yearning. It needs its share of beauty. It wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition, particularly by the person who is its caretaker. Metaphoric images are its first unlearned language, which provides the poetic basis of mind, making possible communication between all people and all things by means of metaphors”
― James Hillman
“...you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.” ―James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling
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 neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life - and it prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns.
It has much to do with feelings of uniqueness, of grandeur and with the restlessness of the heart, its impatience, its dissatisfaction, its yearning. It needs its share of beauty. It wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition, particularly by the person who is its caretaker. Metaphoric images are its first unlearned language, which provides the poetic basis of mind, making possible communication between all people and all things by means of metaphors”
― James Hillman
“...you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.” ―James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling
Caleb Knodell, Self-Portrait as Possessed, oil on linen, 49 x 50 inches
Don’t try to better than you are, otherwise the devil gets angry. Don’t try to be worse because God gets angry. Try to be what you are, that is acrobatics enough. ~C.G. Jung, Visions Seminars, Vol.1, page 235
Interlocuteur
"If we became aware of the ancestral lives in us, we might disintegrate. An ancestor might take possession of us and ride us to death." ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 139
"[W]ithout relatedness individuation is hardly possible. Relatedness begins with conversation mostly. Therefore communication is indubitably important." --Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 609-610
We think we shape ourselves and try to act authentically. But our identity is malleable, and the unconscious plays a big role in that. To adapt with integrity, to be true to yourself, would require a clear sense of who you are, really and it is still context dependent. We are not the authors of our own narrative. Psychological well-being is tied to a coherent sense of self identity, but is not its only source.
Interlocuteur
"If we became aware of the ancestral lives in us, we might disintegrate. An ancestor might take possession of us and ride us to death." ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 139
"[W]ithout relatedness individuation is hardly possible. Relatedness begins with conversation mostly. Therefore communication is indubitably important." --Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 609-610
We think we shape ourselves and try to act authentically. But our identity is malleable, and the unconscious plays a big role in that. To adapt with integrity, to be true to yourself, would require a clear sense of who you are, really and it is still context dependent. We are not the authors of our own narrative. Psychological well-being is tied to a coherent sense of self identity, but is not its only source.
Love should be Broken ~Carl Jung, Red Book, Pages 326-327.
Sacred Love Versus Profane Love (1602–03) by Giovanni Baglione
Not the power of the flesh, but of love, should be broken for the sake of life, since life stands above love. A man needs his mother until his life has developed. Then he separates from her. And so life needs love until it has developed, then it will cut loose from it. The separation of the child from the mother is difficult, but the separation of life from love is harder. Love seeks to have and to hold, but life wants more.
The beginning of all things is love, but the being of things is life. This distinction is terrible. Why; Oh spirit of the darkest depths, do you force me to say that whoever loves does not live and whoever lives does not love? I always get it backward! Should everything be turned into its opposite? Will there be a sea where DIAHMON's temple stands? Will his shady island sink into the deepest ground? Into the whirlpool of the withdrawing flood that earlier swallowed all peoples and lands? Will the bottom of the sea be where Ararat arises?
What repulsive words do you mutter, you mute son of the earth? You want to sever my soul's embrace? You, my son, do you thrust yourself between? Who are you? And who gives you the power? Everything that I strove for, everything I wrested from myself do you want to reverse it again and destroy it? You are the son of the devil, to whom everything holy is inimical. You grow overpowering You frighten me. Let me be happy in the embrace of my soul and do not disturb the peace of the temple.
Off with you, you pierce me with paralyzing force. For I do not want your way. Should I languidly fall at your feet? You devil and son of the devil, speak! Your silence is unbearable, and of awful stupidity. I won my soul, and to what did she give birth for me? You, monster, a son, ha!-a frightful miscreant, a stammerer, a newt's brain, a primordial lizard! You want to be king of the earth? You want to banish proud free men, bewitch beautiful women, break up castles, rip open the belly of old cathedrals? Dumb thing, a lazy bug-eyed frog that wears pond weed on his skull's pate! And you want to call yourself my son? You're no son of mine, but the spawn of the devil. The father of the devil entered into the womb of my soul and in you has become flesh.
I recognize you, DIAHMON, you most cunning of all fraudsters! You have deceived me. You impregnated my maidenly soul with the terrible worm. DIAHMON, damned charlatan, you aped the mysteries for me, you lay the mantle of the stars on me, you played a Christ-fool's comedy with me, you hanged me, carefully and ludicrously; in the tree just like Odin, you let me devise runes to enchant Salome-and meanwhile you procreated my soul with the worm, spew of the dust. Deception upon deception! Terrible devil trickery!
You gave me the force of magic, you crowned me, you clad me with the shimmer of power, that let me play a would-be Joseph father to your son. You lodged a puny basilisk in the nest of the dove. My soul, you adulterous whore, you became pregnant with this bastard! I am dishonored; I, laughable father of the Antichrist!
How I mistrusted you! And how poor was my mistrust, that it could not gauge the magnitude of this infamous act! What do you break apart? You broke love and life in twain. From this ghastly sundering, the frog and the son of the frog come forth. Ridiculous-disgusting sight! Irresistible advent! They will sit on the banks of the sweet water and listen to the nocturnal song of frogs, since their God has been born as a son of frogs.
Where is Salome? Where is the unresolvable question of love? No more questions, my gaze turned to the coming things, and Salome is where I am. The woman follows your strongest, not you. Thus she bears you your children, in both a good and a bad way. ~Carl Jung, Red Book, Pages 326-327.
Jung said, “The daimon throws us down, makes us traitors to our ideals and cherished convictions—traitors to the selves we thought we were.” Rollo May pointed out that, “The daimonic . . . can be either creative or destructive and is normally both.” It carries the energy of the demonic (destructive aspect) and daimonic (creative aspect). Freud called Jung, "a man in the grip of his daimon." And it is the daemon that has a specific interest in the outcome of our lives.
“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.
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 neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life – and it prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns.
It has much to do with feelings of uniqueness, of grandeur and with the restlessness of the heart, its impatience, its dissatisfaction, its yearning. It needs its share of beauty. It wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition, particularly by the person who is its caretaker. Metaphoric images are its first unlearned language, which provides the poetic basis of mind, making possible communication between all people and all things by means of metaphors.” –James Hillman
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 neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life – and it prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns.
It has much to do with feelings of uniqueness, of grandeur and with the restlessness of the heart, its impatience, its dissatisfaction, its yearning. It needs its share of beauty. It wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition, particularly by the person who is its caretaker. Metaphoric images are its first unlearned language, which provides the poetic basis of mind, making possible communication between all people and all things by means of metaphors.” –James Hillman
The ancient Greeks believed that our character or genius was a daimon who oversaw our experiences with mortality -- our fate -- our personal yet transcendent god. Every person had their spirit or guardian angel. Through the daimon we find hope in an inevitably doomed existence...and perhaps taste our immortality.
Every person has their "seed-self", "guiding force", or acorn of character from birth. Our spirits grow from this seed that is our daimon. The inspirational spirit guides us toward the fulfillment of our potential and shows us our vulnerabilities and dream or imaginal life. Genealogy itself offers a microcosm of rich and varied learning experiences, often described as addictive.
The Grail Quest becomes one of "personal best," searching for something intuitively sensed that may in fact be lost soul. When we challenge ourselves we give it the very best of our skills, creativity, attention, and conscious intention. Not many will approach their family tree with such a mission, but the rewards are proportional to the dedication to the task. We keep 'looking for something' and come to realize it is the lost parts of ourselves.
Phenom
Talent can be a childhood refuge from traumatic reality -- it takes us away from the awful place in a sort of creative dissociation. It can develop a superpowerful concentration and focus also seen in spiritual mystics. But it also exposes our wounds. Most won't realize how they got there themselves but experience themselves as phenomenal.
Fear disguises genius with depression and anxiety. Lack of opportunity can be debilitating or degrading. Such genius needs recognition, guidance, and nurturing for survival, to deal with premature vision of the Macrocosm slamming into their microcosm. It can come through the daimon. Barriers prevent most from achieving their potential.
All old trees had their daimon, and the World Tree -- mankind's most magnificent legend -- is no exception. The personified tree is the daimon at the same time because they are different categories of existence -- secular and sacred. When we are 'called', we are called by our daimon. If we ignore that call we may wither away or live half a life. The daimon helps us know ourselves. If we are fortunate the daimon informs our life and death with some nobility and poetry.
The tree articulates a psychophysical reality -- the life of the cosmos. Mind is rooted in the Unconscious much as a tree is rooted in the ground. Shaping matter as well as mind, it retains its character through endless variations. Psychoid is more fundamental than matter and psyche and the basis of synchronicity.
The Acorn Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree
Meaning is essential to tree phenomenology. Again, its character is the personal or family daimon. The tree is the image and mirror of our condition, It is an ancient idea that if we planted a tree at birth our fate is shared with it. This describes the character of the family tree and symbol of wholeness.
Developmental Escalation
Hillman said the genius reveals both fears and talents in very young children, who may have a premature experience of the self [not-me] as an active factor in childhood development -- accelerated psychic growth. Prodigies are naturally endowed with exceptional abilities in youth, but may have issues -- "acting out" with social armoring of persona, acting out of shadow, and hubris of the self. Some reject their gifts entirely in a sort of "Oh no, not me."
Gifts of consciousness may include aesthetic, kinesthetic, emotional and cognitive intelligence. Such experiences change the person having them. Introverts need internal validation foremost, while extroverts seek it externally mirrored back in the world. Wild early success can lead to long decline. The adult can remain burdened by the child prodigy routine, including self-expectations and drive. Drive can jump the tracks. The inner child fails to mature and may turn self-destructive, as the recovery movement showed.
Escaping reason and reality can only be balanced by embracing the mystery in our unique way. If spirituality becomes a physical experience, like meditation, or a drug/music-induced trip, doing psychogenealogy can restore spirituality and talent as a relationship among dissociated parts. It heals memories associated with dissociative states.
Some children fear identifying their genius for personal and social reasons. They don't want to 'own' it or feel or be perceived as different, even extraordinary. Hubris, exhibitionism, and competitiveness push us ahead of ourselves. The creative genius who peaks too early is a story trope. Some fight even harder to get their grief out of the basement. Nothing is going to hit as hard as life.
In a dysplasia of cognitive and affective development, cognitive stages outpace affective development which is stalled (Gowan). This block (the gulf between innate and actualized talents) is the cause of most absence of creativity in gifted adults and sometimes lead to non-actualizing or self-destructive tendencies. M.-L. von Franz said “the wounded healer IS the archetype of the Self [our wholeness, the God within] and is at the bottom of all genuine healing procedures." (Creativity & Giftedness)
But the pedigree doesn't illustrate the argument as much as embody it -- the genius and the wound are inherited and inherent. Certain wounds or deficits may come with genius and require challenges to release the gift and its new perspective. The wound lets in the energy that pushes or drags us to make us whole.
In A Blue Fire, Hillman says, “Why do we focus so intensely on our problems? What draws us to them? Why are they so attractive? They have the magnet power of love: somehow we desire our problems; we are in love with them much as we want to get rid of them . . . Problems sustain us -- maybe that's why they don't go away. What would a life be without them? Completely tranquilized and loveless . . . There is a secret love hiding in each problem.”
Our symptoms are aspects of the wound and our genius, and this notion conforms with applying family therapies within the genealogical core generations. It frees the humane individual for self-actualization, accepting the self with mature responsibility.
Like all archetypal symbols, the symbol of the tree has undergone a development of meaning in the course of the centuries. It is far removed from the original meaning of the shamanistic tree, even though certain basic features prove to be unalterable. The psychoid form underlying any archetypal image retains its character at all stages of development, though empirically it is capable of endless variations. The outward form of the tree may change in the course of time, but the richness and vitality of a symbol are expressed more in its change of meaning.
(Jung,CW13 ¶ 350)
This plant is an inner, spiritual growth, the development of a tree of life and knowledge which played a great role in alchemy....In general it is advisable to watch these inner developments and not let them slip back into the unconscious, lest they get stuck in the physiological sphere, or rather in the realm of the [psychoid] unconscious which merges with the body, where they give rise to pathological formations which a wise man carefully avoids. (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 607-608)
The daimon is our spiritual guide or self, and our character -- a divine mediating power that impels our action and drives or mediates our destiny. It is what makes us unique in relation to the world. This inborn immortal factor embodies our innate talents, inherent gifts, and positive or negative natural tendencies.
This supreme form of soul is our constant companion and source of inspiration -- like the Latin genii, our genius. This "genius" (from the Latin genere) means to generate, to beget, making the daimon the voice of the generative process in us. It can be a personification of the transcendent function, experienced in dreams and in our acts of doing and becoming.
The daimon is also our suffering, emotional disorders, and more, but could also heal, and promote health, happiness, resilience, perseverance, and harmony. The vitality of the inner universe is mobilized in happiness, misery, regret. The daimon can inform even a painful death with some poetry and grace.
Suffering can be produced by painful states of mind such as hatred, envy, alienation, scapegoating, cruelty, and loneliness. The daimon can also bring altruism, empathy, compassion, concern, care, consolation, and pity. It brings understanding of the beauty, compassion, and the foundation of wisdom. It is the psychobiological transformations of epigenetics, changing our responses to life experiences.
Regardless of the nature of the genes we inherit from our parents, dynamic change at this level allows us almost unlimited influence on our fate. Beyond "biology as destiny" is “self-directed biological transformation,” but under the daimon, not the ego. The disruptive and transformative reality of the individuation process manifests the uncanny otherness of the unconscious.
Every person has their "seed-self", "guiding force", or acorn of character from birth. Our spirits grow from this seed that is our daimon. The inspirational spirit guides us toward the fulfillment of our potential and shows us our vulnerabilities and dream or imaginal life. Genealogy itself offers a microcosm of rich and varied learning experiences, often described as addictive.
The Grail Quest becomes one of "personal best," searching for something intuitively sensed that may in fact be lost soul. When we challenge ourselves we give it the very best of our skills, creativity, attention, and conscious intention. Not many will approach their family tree with such a mission, but the rewards are proportional to the dedication to the task. We keep 'looking for something' and come to realize it is the lost parts of ourselves.
Phenom
Talent can be a childhood refuge from traumatic reality -- it takes us away from the awful place in a sort of creative dissociation. It can develop a superpowerful concentration and focus also seen in spiritual mystics. But it also exposes our wounds. Most won't realize how they got there themselves but experience themselves as phenomenal.
Fear disguises genius with depression and anxiety. Lack of opportunity can be debilitating or degrading. Such genius needs recognition, guidance, and nurturing for survival, to deal with premature vision of the Macrocosm slamming into their microcosm. It can come through the daimon. Barriers prevent most from achieving their potential.
All old trees had their daimon, and the World Tree -- mankind's most magnificent legend -- is no exception. The personified tree is the daimon at the same time because they are different categories of existence -- secular and sacred. When we are 'called', we are called by our daimon. If we ignore that call we may wither away or live half a life. The daimon helps us know ourselves. If we are fortunate the daimon informs our life and death with some nobility and poetry.
The tree articulates a psychophysical reality -- the life of the cosmos. Mind is rooted in the Unconscious much as a tree is rooted in the ground. Shaping matter as well as mind, it retains its character through endless variations. Psychoid is more fundamental than matter and psyche and the basis of synchronicity.
The Acorn Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree
Meaning is essential to tree phenomenology. Again, its character is the personal or family daimon. The tree is the image and mirror of our condition, It is an ancient idea that if we planted a tree at birth our fate is shared with it. This describes the character of the family tree and symbol of wholeness.
Developmental Escalation
Hillman said the genius reveals both fears and talents in very young children, who may have a premature experience of the self [not-me] as an active factor in childhood development -- accelerated psychic growth. Prodigies are naturally endowed with exceptional abilities in youth, but may have issues -- "acting out" with social armoring of persona, acting out of shadow, and hubris of the self. Some reject their gifts entirely in a sort of "Oh no, not me."
Gifts of consciousness may include aesthetic, kinesthetic, emotional and cognitive intelligence. Such experiences change the person having them. Introverts need internal validation foremost, while extroverts seek it externally mirrored back in the world. Wild early success can lead to long decline. The adult can remain burdened by the child prodigy routine, including self-expectations and drive. Drive can jump the tracks. The inner child fails to mature and may turn self-destructive, as the recovery movement showed.
Escaping reason and reality can only be balanced by embracing the mystery in our unique way. If spirituality becomes a physical experience, like meditation, or a drug/music-induced trip, doing psychogenealogy can restore spirituality and talent as a relationship among dissociated parts. It heals memories associated with dissociative states.
Some children fear identifying their genius for personal and social reasons. They don't want to 'own' it or feel or be perceived as different, even extraordinary. Hubris, exhibitionism, and competitiveness push us ahead of ourselves. The creative genius who peaks too early is a story trope. Some fight even harder to get their grief out of the basement. Nothing is going to hit as hard as life.
In a dysplasia of cognitive and affective development, cognitive stages outpace affective development which is stalled (Gowan). This block (the gulf between innate and actualized talents) is the cause of most absence of creativity in gifted adults and sometimes lead to non-actualizing or self-destructive tendencies. M.-L. von Franz said “the wounded healer IS the archetype of the Self [our wholeness, the God within] and is at the bottom of all genuine healing procedures." (Creativity & Giftedness)
But the pedigree doesn't illustrate the argument as much as embody it -- the genius and the wound are inherited and inherent. Certain wounds or deficits may come with genius and require challenges to release the gift and its new perspective. The wound lets in the energy that pushes or drags us to make us whole.
In A Blue Fire, Hillman says, “Why do we focus so intensely on our problems? What draws us to them? Why are they so attractive? They have the magnet power of love: somehow we desire our problems; we are in love with them much as we want to get rid of them . . . Problems sustain us -- maybe that's why they don't go away. What would a life be without them? Completely tranquilized and loveless . . . There is a secret love hiding in each problem.”
Our symptoms are aspects of the wound and our genius, and this notion conforms with applying family therapies within the genealogical core generations. It frees the humane individual for self-actualization, accepting the self with mature responsibility.
Like all archetypal symbols, the symbol of the tree has undergone a development of meaning in the course of the centuries. It is far removed from the original meaning of the shamanistic tree, even though certain basic features prove to be unalterable. The psychoid form underlying any archetypal image retains its character at all stages of development, though empirically it is capable of endless variations. The outward form of the tree may change in the course of time, but the richness and vitality of a symbol are expressed more in its change of meaning.
(Jung,CW13 ¶ 350)
This plant is an inner, spiritual growth, the development of a tree of life and knowledge which played a great role in alchemy....In general it is advisable to watch these inner developments and not let them slip back into the unconscious, lest they get stuck in the physiological sphere, or rather in the realm of the [psychoid] unconscious which merges with the body, where they give rise to pathological formations which a wise man carefully avoids. (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 607-608)
The daimon is our spiritual guide or self, and our character -- a divine mediating power that impels our action and drives or mediates our destiny. It is what makes us unique in relation to the world. This inborn immortal factor embodies our innate talents, inherent gifts, and positive or negative natural tendencies.
This supreme form of soul is our constant companion and source of inspiration -- like the Latin genii, our genius. This "genius" (from the Latin genere) means to generate, to beget, making the daimon the voice of the generative process in us. It can be a personification of the transcendent function, experienced in dreams and in our acts of doing and becoming.
The daimon is also our suffering, emotional disorders, and more, but could also heal, and promote health, happiness, resilience, perseverance, and harmony. The vitality of the inner universe is mobilized in happiness, misery, regret. The daimon can inform even a painful death with some poetry and grace.
Suffering can be produced by painful states of mind such as hatred, envy, alienation, scapegoating, cruelty, and loneliness. The daimon can also bring altruism, empathy, compassion, concern, care, consolation, and pity. It brings understanding of the beauty, compassion, and the foundation of wisdom. It is the psychobiological transformations of epigenetics, changing our responses to life experiences.
Regardless of the nature of the genes we inherit from our parents, dynamic change at this level allows us almost unlimited influence on our fate. Beyond "biology as destiny" is “self-directed biological transformation,” but under the daimon, not the ego. The disruptive and transformative reality of the individuation process manifests the uncanny otherness of the unconscious.
Assyrologist Simo Parpola calls the sacred tree a cosmological symbol of the Assyrians, dating from the second millennium BCE: “The crown of the tree is the god of heaven, Anu; its foundation is the god of the netherworld, Nergal; in between heaven and earth, connecting them, is the goddess of love, Ishtar,” and Ashera, the deposed mate of Yahweh.
The Genius of Genealogy
The Genius of Genealogy
Iona Miller, (c)2016
"The eye of the heart that ‘sees’ is also the eye of death that sees through visible presentations to an invisible core. When Michelangelo sculpted portraits of his contemporaries or of the figures of religion and myth, he attempted to see what he called the immagine del cuor, the heart’s image, “a prefiguration” of what he was sculpting, as if the chisel that cut the rock followed the eye that penetrated his subject to the heart. The portrait aimed to reveal the inner soul of what he was carving." (Hillman, Soul's Code, p146)
DAIMON:
Voice of the Higher Presence
The ancient Greeks believed that our character or genius was a daimon [Latin daemon] or divine spirit who oversaw our experiences with mortality -- dispenser of our fate -- our personal yet transcendent god. The root of daimon, from the Indo-European, is to “deal out.”
Daimon is character and character is destiny, the individual, immortal and potentially divine part of ourselves. Each unique image acts as a personal daimon, the force of fate. We care for our soul by allowing that force to move through us constantly and to have expression. Sometimes we may seem possessed by it. Jung described it as a spirit with a degree of autonomy, an inner urge, both guide and tempter, having a strong influence on interior life.
In the Hellenistic ruler cult that began with Alexander the Great, it was not the ruler, but his guiding daemon that was venerated. In the Archaic or early Classical period, the daimon had been democratized and internalized for each person, whom it served to guide, motivate, and inspire, as one possessed of such good spirits. Similarly, the first-century Roman imperial cult began by venerating the genius or numen of Augustus, a distinction that blurred in time.
All old trees had their daimon or tree numen, and the World Tree is no exception. This is the ancestral or family daimon -- the secret voice of family memories. The tree is the wise or knowing diamon at the same time because they are different categories of existence -- secular and sacred in phase co-existence, (an influence perceptible by mind if not by the senses). Active in many contexts, sometimes the daimon appears in the form of Asklepios the healer, whose staff is entwined with the serpent.
The daimon lives in the thymus in our trunk, and we can converse with it. In fact, it needs talk. It can waken you to your innermost passions, so you need to talk with it and work out a liveable connection to the creative spirit. It can appear in love triangles, difficult relationships, and partnerships.
When we are 'called', we are called by our daimon. If we ignore that call we may wither away or live half a life. To answer that call is essentially a shamanic initiation that opens relations with the Otherworld -- equilibrium of conscious and unconscious. If we are fortunate the daimon informs our creativity and death with some nobility.
We were infused with the value of our potential. Creativity has frequently been treated as a form of self-expression or a way of understanding or coping with life that is intimately connected with personal dignity, expression of one's inner being, self-actualization, and the like (e.g., Maslow, 1973; May, 1976; Rogers, 1961). Moustakis (1977) summarized the individualistic approach to creativity by seeing it as the pathway to living your own life your own way.
This plant is an inner, spiritual growth, the development of a tree of life and knowledge which played a great role in alchemy....In general it is advisable to watch these inner developments and not let them slip back into the unconscious, lest they get stuck in the physiological sphere, or rather in the realm of the [psychoid] unconscious which merges with the body, where they give rise to pathological formations which a wise man carefully avoids. (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 607-608)
Constructive/Destructive Polar Opposites
Jung called compulsions the greatest mystery of human behavior. The heterogeneous character of the daimon is confirmed by the description of its body as an “alien garment.” As trickster, it urges us toward the deathless mental aspects of compulsions. The daimon both instigates an abrupt change of behavior pattern and at the same time gives a conscious reason or narrative account. Sometimes the daimon is inhibiting - a cautionary spirit and works against our desires.
The daimon can incite 'oblivion-seeking' in the person -- the escapism and oblivion of addiction and altered states. It seduces the ego into oblivion and anesthetizes it. The incarnate daimon is also the physical principle of love. There is the flesh and blood reality, the character, the daimonic element within and the lived history of the human person, which is a deep mystery.
‘Fate’ is distinguished from ‘fatalism’, ‘telos’ is distinguished from ‘teleology’, and ‘accidents’ and ‘necessity’ are all explanations of how individuals may be guided but not determined by daimonic influence. We must be free to choose to grow into the daimonic image, or to ignore this, or to try to forge another identity, or to find what there is for us to find: the stars do not determine human life, they simply guide.
James Hillman's acorn theory says that the "daimon" selects the egg and the sperm, that their union results from our necessity, not the other way around. This has huge implications. Soul, calling, or image, it guides our unique path. The daimon guides us down into the form of our calling -- in terms of a soul’s descent rather than a developmental ascent from nature and nurture.
Cost of Personal Satisfactions
Sometimes, however the "daimon" asks a great deal from you. You feel as if you've never done enough. You've never written enough, played enough, or fought enough, whatever it is. There is always more because it is like an unquenchable urge. It costs what you might call your normalcy. (Hillman)
"A child defends its daimon's dignity. That's why even a frail child at a 'tender' age refuses to submit to what it feels is unfair and untrue and reacts so savagely to abusive misperecptions. The idea of childhood abuse needs to be expanded beyond the sexual kind--which is so vicious not principally because it is sexual, but because it abuses the dignity at the core of personality, that acorn of myth."[Hillman, Pg.27 The Soul's Code.]
"The acorn theory proposes, and I will bring evidence for the claim that you and I and every single person is born with a defining image. Individuality resides in a formal cause--to use old philosophical language going back to Aristotle. We each embody our own idea, in the language of Plato and Plotinus. And this form, this idea, this image does not tolerate too much straying. The theory also attributes to this innate image an angelic or daimonic intention, as if it were a spark of consciousness; and, moreover, holds that it has our interest at heart because it chose us for its reasons."[James Hillman, Pg. 12, The Soul's Code]
Hillman suggests that the daimon explains the impossible marriages, quick conceptions, and sudden desertions that form the stories of so many of our parents. He goes further to point out the poverty of seeing our mothers and fathers as, literally, mom and dad, when nature could be our mother, books our father - whatever connects us to the world and teaches us. Quoting Alfred North Whitehead, who said that ‘religion is world loyalty’, Hillman says that we must believe in the world’s ability to provide for us and lovingly reveal to us its mysteries.
The Soul’s Code shows how the daimon will assert itself in love, giving rise to obsessions and torments of romantic agony that defy the logic of evolutionary biology.
Fate, Fortune, & Chance
Every person had their spirit or guardian angel, an occult power mediating the celestial and terrestrial realms. It appears 'replete with knowledge' and the power of Presence, perhaps even an audible voice. In popular thought, such daimones were credited with conveying supernatural powers and abilities to humans, resulting in increased physical or intellectual prowess for special occasions. They could also effect changes in human moods and temperaments, and their accompanying actions.
The daimon is our invisible and irrational spiritual guide or self, and our character -- a divine mediating power that impels our action and drives or mediates our destiny. It is what makes us unique in relation to the world. This inborn immortal factor embodies our innate talents, inherent gifts, and positive or negative natural tendencies -- and a way to honor the individuality of soul.
This supreme form of soul is our constant companion and source of inspiration -- like the Latin genii, our genius. This "genius" (from the Latin genere) means to generate, to beget, making the daimon the voice of the generative process in us. It can be a personification of the transcendent function, experienced in dreams and in our acts of doing and becoming. The gifted child tends to be blessed with some sort of self-remembrance. Jung notes, "A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon." (pp. 356-357)
The daimon is also our suffering, emotional disorder, and more, but could also heal, and promote health, happiness, resilience, perseverance, and harmony. The vitality of the inner universe is mobilized in happiness, misery, regret. The daimon can inform even a painful death with some poetry and grace.
Suffering can be produced by painful states of mind such as hatred, envy, alienation, scapegoating, cruelty, and loneliness. The daimon can also bring altruism, empathy, compassion, concern, care, consolation, and pity. It brings understand of the beauty, compassion, and the foundation of wisdom...perhaps even the psychobiological transformations of epigenetics, changing our responses to life experiences.
Regardless of the nature of the genes we inherit from our parents, dynamic change at this level allows us almost unlimited influence on our fate. Beyond "biology a destiny" is “self-directed biological transformation,” but under the daimon, not the ego. the disruptive and transformative reality of the individuation process, the uncanny otherness of the unconscious.
"The eye of the heart that ‘sees’ is also the eye of death that sees through visible presentations to an invisible core. When Michelangelo sculpted portraits of his contemporaries or of the figures of religion and myth, he attempted to see what he called the immagine del cuor, the heart’s image, “a prefiguration” of what he was sculpting, as if the chisel that cut the rock followed the eye that penetrated his subject to the heart. The portrait aimed to reveal the inner soul of what he was carving." (Hillman, Soul's Code, p146)
DAIMON:
Voice of the Higher Presence
The ancient Greeks believed that our character or genius was a daimon [Latin daemon] or divine spirit who oversaw our experiences with mortality -- dispenser of our fate -- our personal yet transcendent god. The root of daimon, from the Indo-European, is to “deal out.”
Daimon is character and character is destiny, the individual, immortal and potentially divine part of ourselves. Each unique image acts as a personal daimon, the force of fate. We care for our soul by allowing that force to move through us constantly and to have expression. Sometimes we may seem possessed by it. Jung described it as a spirit with a degree of autonomy, an inner urge, both guide and tempter, having a strong influence on interior life.
In the Hellenistic ruler cult that began with Alexander the Great, it was not the ruler, but his guiding daemon that was venerated. In the Archaic or early Classical period, the daimon had been democratized and internalized for each person, whom it served to guide, motivate, and inspire, as one possessed of such good spirits. Similarly, the first-century Roman imperial cult began by venerating the genius or numen of Augustus, a distinction that blurred in time.
All old trees had their daimon or tree numen, and the World Tree is no exception. This is the ancestral or family daimon -- the secret voice of family memories. The tree is the wise or knowing diamon at the same time because they are different categories of existence -- secular and sacred in phase co-existence, (an influence perceptible by mind if not by the senses). Active in many contexts, sometimes the daimon appears in the form of Asklepios the healer, whose staff is entwined with the serpent.
The daimon lives in the thymus in our trunk, and we can converse with it. In fact, it needs talk. It can waken you to your innermost passions, so you need to talk with it and work out a liveable connection to the creative spirit. It can appear in love triangles, difficult relationships, and partnerships.
When we are 'called', we are called by our daimon. If we ignore that call we may wither away or live half a life. To answer that call is essentially a shamanic initiation that opens relations with the Otherworld -- equilibrium of conscious and unconscious. If we are fortunate the daimon informs our creativity and death with some nobility.
We were infused with the value of our potential. Creativity has frequently been treated as a form of self-expression or a way of understanding or coping with life that is intimately connected with personal dignity, expression of one's inner being, self-actualization, and the like (e.g., Maslow, 1973; May, 1976; Rogers, 1961). Moustakis (1977) summarized the individualistic approach to creativity by seeing it as the pathway to living your own life your own way.
This plant is an inner, spiritual growth, the development of a tree of life and knowledge which played a great role in alchemy....In general it is advisable to watch these inner developments and not let them slip back into the unconscious, lest they get stuck in the physiological sphere, or rather in the realm of the [psychoid] unconscious which merges with the body, where they give rise to pathological formations which a wise man carefully avoids. (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 607-608)
Constructive/Destructive Polar Opposites
Jung called compulsions the greatest mystery of human behavior. The heterogeneous character of the daimon is confirmed by the description of its body as an “alien garment.” As trickster, it urges us toward the deathless mental aspects of compulsions. The daimon both instigates an abrupt change of behavior pattern and at the same time gives a conscious reason or narrative account. Sometimes the daimon is inhibiting - a cautionary spirit and works against our desires.
The daimon can incite 'oblivion-seeking' in the person -- the escapism and oblivion of addiction and altered states. It seduces the ego into oblivion and anesthetizes it. The incarnate daimon is also the physical principle of love. There is the flesh and blood reality, the character, the daimonic element within and the lived history of the human person, which is a deep mystery.
‘Fate’ is distinguished from ‘fatalism’, ‘telos’ is distinguished from ‘teleology’, and ‘accidents’ and ‘necessity’ are all explanations of how individuals may be guided but not determined by daimonic influence. We must be free to choose to grow into the daimonic image, or to ignore this, or to try to forge another identity, or to find what there is for us to find: the stars do not determine human life, they simply guide.
James Hillman's acorn theory says that the "daimon" selects the egg and the sperm, that their union results from our necessity, not the other way around. This has huge implications. Soul, calling, or image, it guides our unique path. The daimon guides us down into the form of our calling -- in terms of a soul’s descent rather than a developmental ascent from nature and nurture.
Cost of Personal Satisfactions
Sometimes, however the "daimon" asks a great deal from you. You feel as if you've never done enough. You've never written enough, played enough, or fought enough, whatever it is. There is always more because it is like an unquenchable urge. It costs what you might call your normalcy. (Hillman)
"A child defends its daimon's dignity. That's why even a frail child at a 'tender' age refuses to submit to what it feels is unfair and untrue and reacts so savagely to abusive misperecptions. The idea of childhood abuse needs to be expanded beyond the sexual kind--which is so vicious not principally because it is sexual, but because it abuses the dignity at the core of personality, that acorn of myth."[Hillman, Pg.27 The Soul's Code.]
"The acorn theory proposes, and I will bring evidence for the claim that you and I and every single person is born with a defining image. Individuality resides in a formal cause--to use old philosophical language going back to Aristotle. We each embody our own idea, in the language of Plato and Plotinus. And this form, this idea, this image does not tolerate too much straying. The theory also attributes to this innate image an angelic or daimonic intention, as if it were a spark of consciousness; and, moreover, holds that it has our interest at heart because it chose us for its reasons."[James Hillman, Pg. 12, The Soul's Code]
Hillman suggests that the daimon explains the impossible marriages, quick conceptions, and sudden desertions that form the stories of so many of our parents. He goes further to point out the poverty of seeing our mothers and fathers as, literally, mom and dad, when nature could be our mother, books our father - whatever connects us to the world and teaches us. Quoting Alfred North Whitehead, who said that ‘religion is world loyalty’, Hillman says that we must believe in the world’s ability to provide for us and lovingly reveal to us its mysteries.
The Soul’s Code shows how the daimon will assert itself in love, giving rise to obsessions and torments of romantic agony that defy the logic of evolutionary biology.
Fate, Fortune, & Chance
Every person had their spirit or guardian angel, an occult power mediating the celestial and terrestrial realms. It appears 'replete with knowledge' and the power of Presence, perhaps even an audible voice. In popular thought, such daimones were credited with conveying supernatural powers and abilities to humans, resulting in increased physical or intellectual prowess for special occasions. They could also effect changes in human moods and temperaments, and their accompanying actions.
The daimon is our invisible and irrational spiritual guide or self, and our character -- a divine mediating power that impels our action and drives or mediates our destiny. It is what makes us unique in relation to the world. This inborn immortal factor embodies our innate talents, inherent gifts, and positive or negative natural tendencies -- and a way to honor the individuality of soul.
This supreme form of soul is our constant companion and source of inspiration -- like the Latin genii, our genius. This "genius" (from the Latin genere) means to generate, to beget, making the daimon the voice of the generative process in us. It can be a personification of the transcendent function, experienced in dreams and in our acts of doing and becoming. The gifted child tends to be blessed with some sort of self-remembrance. Jung notes, "A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon." (pp. 356-357)
The daimon is also our suffering, emotional disorder, and more, but could also heal, and promote health, happiness, resilience, perseverance, and harmony. The vitality of the inner universe is mobilized in happiness, misery, regret. The daimon can inform even a painful death with some poetry and grace.
Suffering can be produced by painful states of mind such as hatred, envy, alienation, scapegoating, cruelty, and loneliness. The daimon can also bring altruism, empathy, compassion, concern, care, consolation, and pity. It brings understand of the beauty, compassion, and the foundation of wisdom...perhaps even the psychobiological transformations of epigenetics, changing our responses to life experiences.
Regardless of the nature of the genes we inherit from our parents, dynamic change at this level allows us almost unlimited influence on our fate. Beyond "biology a destiny" is “self-directed biological transformation,” but under the daimon, not the ego. the disruptive and transformative reality of the individuation process, the uncanny otherness of the unconscious.
In The Soul’s Code, James Hillman discusses Plato’s Er myth—that the soul is given a daimon (inner attendant spirit or inspiring force) at birth, which is the carrier of one’s destiny. We may forget our daimon, but it doesn’t forget us.
The daimon has our interest at heart, guiding providence; it motivates, protects, invents, has prescience, and persists. The daimon can be a force of deviance and oddity, especially when it is opposed or neglected. Hillman enumerates various signs of daimonic feelings: restlessness of heart, impatience, dissatisfaction, and yearning. He notes that the daimon wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition—especially by you.
The daimonic can be both creative and destructive. We get the notion of demonic possession from the destructive workings of these forces; this is also where the notion of “evil genius” comes from. Many artists are haunted by their daimons, showing that our wounds made us who we are and that living creatively with them is key. We can learn to use this inextinguishable heat to forge works and the self.
The daimon has our interest at heart, guiding providence; it motivates, protects, invents, has prescience, and persists. The daimon can be a force of deviance and oddity, especially when it is opposed or neglected. Hillman enumerates various signs of daimonic feelings: restlessness of heart, impatience, dissatisfaction, and yearning. He notes that the daimon wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition—especially by you.
The daimonic can be both creative and destructive. We get the notion of demonic possession from the destructive workings of these forces; this is also where the notion of “evil genius” comes from. Many artists are haunted by their daimons, showing that our wounds made us who we are and that living creatively with them is key. We can learn to use this inextinguishable heat to forge works and the self.
Winged daemon depicted in ancient Corinthian plate.
DAIMON
The ancient Greeks believed that our character or genius was a daimon who oversaw our experiences with mortality -- our fate -- our personal yet transcendent god. Every person had their spirit or guardian angel. Every person has their "seed-self", "guiding force", or acorn of character from birth. Our spirits grow from this seed that is our daimon. The inspirational spirit guides us toward the fulfillment of our potential and shows us our vulnerabilities and dream or imaginal life.
All old trees had their daimon, and the World Tree -- mankind's most magnificent legend -- is no exception. The personified tree is the daimon at the same time because they are different categories of existence -- secular and sacred. When we are 'called', we are called by our daimon. If we ignore that call we may wither away or live half a life. The daimon helps us know ourselves. If we are fortunate the daimon informs our life and death with some nobility and poetry.
The tree articulates a psychophysical reality -- the life of the cosmos. Mind is rooted in the Unconscious much as a tree is rooted in the ground. Shaping matter as well as mind, it retains its character through endless variations. Psychoid is more fundamental than matter and psyche and the basis of synchronicity.
The Acorn Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree
Meaning is essential to tree phenomenology. Again, its character is the personal or family daimon. The tree is the image and mirror of our condition, It is an ancient idea that if we planted a tree at birth our fate is shared with it. This describes the character of the family tree and symbol of wholeness.
Hillman said the genius reveals both fears and talents in very young children, who may have a premature experience of the self. M.-L. von Franz said “the wounded healer IS the archetype of the Self [our wholeness, the God within] and is at the bottom of all genuine healing procedures."
But the pedigree doesn't illustrate the argument as much as embody it. Certain wounds or deficits may come with genius and require challenges to release the gift and its new perspective. The wound lets in the energy that pushes or drags us to make us whole. Our symptoms are aspects of the wound and our genius, and this notion conforms with applying family therapies within the genealogical core.
Like all archetypal symbols, the symbol of the tree has undergone a development of meaning in the course of the centuries. It is far removed from the original meaning of the shamanistic tree, even though certain basic features prove to be unalterable. The psychoid form underlying any archetypal image retains its character at all stages of development, though empirically it is capable of endless variations. The outward form of the tree may change in the course of time, but the richness and vitality of a symbol are expressed more in its change of meaning.
(Jung,CW13 ¶ 350)
This plant is an inner, spiritual growth, the development of a tree of life and knowledge which played a great role in alchemy....In general it is advisable to watch these inner developments and not let them slip back into the unconscious, lest they get stuck in the physiological sphere, or rather in the realm of the [psychoid] unconscious which merges with the body, where they give rise to pathological formations which a wise man carefully avoids. (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 607-608)
The daimon is our spiritual guide or self, and our character -- a divine mediating power that impels our action and drives or mediates our destiny. It is what makes us unique in relation to the world. This inborn immortal factor embodies our innate talents, inherent gifts, and positive or negative natural tendencies.
This supreme form of soul is our constant companion and source of inspiration -- like the Latin genii, our genius. This "genius" (from the Latin genere) means to generate, to beget, making the daimon the voice of the generative process in us. It can be a personification of the transcendent function, experienced in dreams and in our acts of doing and becoming.
The daimon is also our suffering, emotional disorders, and more, but could also heal, and promote health, happiness, resilience, perseverance, and harmony. The vitality of the inner universe is mobilized in happiness, misery, regret. The daimon can inform even a painful death with some poetry and grace.
Suffering can be produced by painful states of mind such as hatred, envy, alienation, scapegoating, cruelty, and loneliness. The daimon can also bring altruism, empathy, compassion, concern, care, consolation, and pity. It brings understanding of the beauty, compassion, and the foundation of wisdom. It is the psychobiological transformations of epigenetics, changing our responses to life experiences.
Regardless of the nature of the genes we inherit from our parents, dynamic change at this level allows us almost unlimited influence on our fate. Beyond "biology as destiny" is “self-directed biological transformation,” but under the daimon, not the ego. The disruptive and transformative reality of the individuation process manifests the uncanny otherness of the unconscious.
Alice Miller describes how many of the most successful people are plagued by feelings of emptiness and alienation? Far too many of us had to learn as children to hide our own feelings, needs, and memories skillfully in order to meet our parents’ expectations and win their ”love.” Alice Miller writes, ”When I used the word ’gifted’ in the title, I had in mind neither children who receive high grades in school nor children talented in a special way. I simply meant all of us who have survived an abusive childhood thanks to an ability to adapt even to unspeakable cruelty by becoming numb… Without this ’gift’ offered us by nature, we would not have survived.” Byond merely surviving we reclaim our life by discovering our own crucial needs and our own truth.
The ancient Greeks believed that our character or genius was a daimon who oversaw our experiences with mortality -- our fate -- our personal yet transcendent god. Every person had their spirit or guardian angel. Every person has their "seed-self", "guiding force", or acorn of character from birth. Our spirits grow from this seed that is our daimon. The inspirational spirit guides us toward the fulfillment of our potential and shows us our vulnerabilities and dream or imaginal life.
All old trees had their daimon, and the World Tree -- mankind's most magnificent legend -- is no exception. The personified tree is the daimon at the same time because they are different categories of existence -- secular and sacred. When we are 'called', we are called by our daimon. If we ignore that call we may wither away or live half a life. The daimon helps us know ourselves. If we are fortunate the daimon informs our life and death with some nobility and poetry.
The tree articulates a psychophysical reality -- the life of the cosmos. Mind is rooted in the Unconscious much as a tree is rooted in the ground. Shaping matter as well as mind, it retains its character through endless variations. Psychoid is more fundamental than matter and psyche and the basis of synchronicity.
The Acorn Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree
Meaning is essential to tree phenomenology. Again, its character is the personal or family daimon. The tree is the image and mirror of our condition, It is an ancient idea that if we planted a tree at birth our fate is shared with it. This describes the character of the family tree and symbol of wholeness.
Hillman said the genius reveals both fears and talents in very young children, who may have a premature experience of the self. M.-L. von Franz said “the wounded healer IS the archetype of the Self [our wholeness, the God within] and is at the bottom of all genuine healing procedures."
But the pedigree doesn't illustrate the argument as much as embody it. Certain wounds or deficits may come with genius and require challenges to release the gift and its new perspective. The wound lets in the energy that pushes or drags us to make us whole. Our symptoms are aspects of the wound and our genius, and this notion conforms with applying family therapies within the genealogical core.
Like all archetypal symbols, the symbol of the tree has undergone a development of meaning in the course of the centuries. It is far removed from the original meaning of the shamanistic tree, even though certain basic features prove to be unalterable. The psychoid form underlying any archetypal image retains its character at all stages of development, though empirically it is capable of endless variations. The outward form of the tree may change in the course of time, but the richness and vitality of a symbol are expressed more in its change of meaning.
(Jung,CW13 ¶ 350)
This plant is an inner, spiritual growth, the development of a tree of life and knowledge which played a great role in alchemy....In general it is advisable to watch these inner developments and not let them slip back into the unconscious, lest they get stuck in the physiological sphere, or rather in the realm of the [psychoid] unconscious which merges with the body, where they give rise to pathological formations which a wise man carefully avoids. (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 607-608)
The daimon is our spiritual guide or self, and our character -- a divine mediating power that impels our action and drives or mediates our destiny. It is what makes us unique in relation to the world. This inborn immortal factor embodies our innate talents, inherent gifts, and positive or negative natural tendencies.
This supreme form of soul is our constant companion and source of inspiration -- like the Latin genii, our genius. This "genius" (from the Latin genere) means to generate, to beget, making the daimon the voice of the generative process in us. It can be a personification of the transcendent function, experienced in dreams and in our acts of doing and becoming.
The daimon is also our suffering, emotional disorders, and more, but could also heal, and promote health, happiness, resilience, perseverance, and harmony. The vitality of the inner universe is mobilized in happiness, misery, regret. The daimon can inform even a painful death with some poetry and grace.
Suffering can be produced by painful states of mind such as hatred, envy, alienation, scapegoating, cruelty, and loneliness. The daimon can also bring altruism, empathy, compassion, concern, care, consolation, and pity. It brings understanding of the beauty, compassion, and the foundation of wisdom. It is the psychobiological transformations of epigenetics, changing our responses to life experiences.
Regardless of the nature of the genes we inherit from our parents, dynamic change at this level allows us almost unlimited influence on our fate. Beyond "biology as destiny" is “self-directed biological transformation,” but under the daimon, not the ego. The disruptive and transformative reality of the individuation process manifests the uncanny otherness of the unconscious.
Alice Miller describes how many of the most successful people are plagued by feelings of emptiness and alienation? Far too many of us had to learn as children to hide our own feelings, needs, and memories skillfully in order to meet our parents’ expectations and win their ”love.” Alice Miller writes, ”When I used the word ’gifted’ in the title, I had in mind neither children who receive high grades in school nor children talented in a special way. I simply meant all of us who have survived an abusive childhood thanks to an ability to adapt even to unspeakable cruelty by becoming numb… Without this ’gift’ offered us by nature, we would not have survived.” Byond merely surviving we reclaim our life by discovering our own crucial needs and our own truth.
DAIMONS IN THE TREE
Mirror, Mirror
Genealogy is the silver backing on our mirror of introspection. A reflective perspective "mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment—and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground."
James Hillman continues, “...you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.”
If we do not fashion for ourselves a picture of the world, we do not see ourselves either, who are the faithful reflections of that world. Only when mirrored in our picture of the world can we see ourselves in the round. Only in our creative acts do we step forth into the light and see ourselves whole and complete. Never shall we put any face on the world other than our own, and we have to do this precisely in order to find ourselves. For higher than science or art as an end in itself stands man, the creator of his instruments. (Jung, "Analytical Psychology and Weltanschauung" (1928). In CW 8: Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.737)
We can also apply what depth psychology says to our ancestral search. Sure, it's a challenge that sets a high bar, but really just means bringing a certain sensibility and aesthetic to the disciple of ancestral search itself -- much as in art.
The Tenth Muse
The tenth muse is your daimon, helpful awareness through the dark. We can call it a daemon, genius, or muse, guardian angel, death, nature, or any conventional element for the abyss of the transcendent imagination, which has infinite aspects. It is our true calling -- our fate -- soul's intimate connection with death.
When death finds us it finds us alive. "The reality of the psyche is lived in the death of the literal," according to Gaston Bachelard. The muse connects with the mythic and can help or hinder the creative process. Death is a muse that inform us the darkness of the depths is haunted with loving souls. The essence of soul is the paradox of life/death, light/dark, past/future.
The muse supports imaginal life from the yawning darkness of the psychological depths, the soul of which is love itself. The muse moves within us and the story comes up and out, conjuring images, deepening awareness -- a dialogue with nature. Ultimately, though, the symbol-using mortal body, aware because of its symbols of both the apparent immortality of ideas and its own inevitable death, is not merely a system of cognition, a cultural construct, or an operator of rules. It is a fragile, embodied soul in need of understanding, and most in need just when it is asked to enter into transactions of consequence with other souls. http://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1059&context=jaepl
The magical creature, Duende or tener duende ("having duende") loosely means having soul, a heightened state of emotion, expression and authenticity. El duende is the spirit of evocation. It comes from inside as a physical/emotional response to art. It is what gives you chills, makes you smile or cry as a bodily reaction to an artistic performance that is particularly expressive.
According to Christopher Maurer, editor of "In Search of Duende", at least four elements can be isolated in Lorca's vision of duende: irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical. The duende is an earth spirit who helps the artist see the limitations of intelligence, reminding them that "ants could eat him or that a great arsenic lobster could fall suddenly on his head"; who brings the artist face-to-face with death, and who helps them create and communicate memorable, spine-chilling art. The duende is seen, in Lorca's lecture, as an alternative to style, to mere virtuosity, to God-given grace and charm (what Spaniards call "angel"), and to the classical, artistic norms dictated by the muse. Not that the artist simply surrenders to the duende; they have to battle it skillfully, "on the rim of the well", in "hand-to-hand combat". To a higher degree than the muse or the angel, the duende seizes not only the performer but also the audience, creating conditions where art can be understood spontaneously with little, if any, conscious effort. It is, in Lorca's words, "a sort of corkscrew that can get art into the sensibility of an audience... the very dearest thing that life can offer the intellectual." The critic Brook Zern has written, of a performance of someone with duende, "it dilates the mind's eye, so that the intensity becomes almost unendurable... There is a quality of first-timeness, of reality so heightened and exaggerated that it becomes unreal...".[3]
Lorca writes: "The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought. I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, 'The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.' Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation.". He suggests, "everything that has black sounds in it, has duende. [i.e. emotional 'darkness'] [...] This 'mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains' is, in sum, the spirit of the earth, the same duende that scorched the heart of Nietzsche, who searched in vain for its external forms on the Rialto Bridge and in the music of Bizet, without knowing that the duende he was pursuing had leaped straight from the Greek mysteries to the dancers of Cadiz or the beheaded, Dionysian scream of Silverio's siguiriya." [...] "The duende's arrival always means a radical change in forms. It brings to old planes unknown feelings of freshness, with the quality of something newly created, like a miracle, and it produces an almost religious enthusiasm." [...] "All arts are capable of duende, but where it finds greatest range, naturally, is in music, dance, and spoken poetry, for these arts require a living body to interpret them, being forms that are born, die, and open their contours against an exact present." Wikipedia
"[T]he duinde is the part that is connected to the earth, the blood, the party. It is this that Rilke refers to in his line that our role in life is to be decisively defeated by greater and greater beings. ...This is the struggle with the daimon .... While our culture has no words for this, other cultures have referred to it as "the ancestors" or "the spirits" that operate invisibly in our world. ... "the invisibles." What we do when we aren't aware of "the invisibles"? We buy insurance, and maybe even make a little money out of the catastrophe, instead of asking "Why did this happen now? What does is mean? What is my daimon's rag telling me?"" Hillman, Meade http://www.menweb.org/chardest.htm
"The "other" in us always seems alien and unacceptable; but if we let ourselves be aggrieved the feeling sinks in, and we are the richer for this little bit of self-knowledge." (Jung, "Psychological Aspects of the Kore" (1941). In CW 9, P. 918)
"This process of coming to terms with the Other in us is well worth while, because in this way we get to know aspects of our nature which we would not allow anybody else to show us and which we ourselves would never have admitted."
(Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955) CW 14: P. 706)
More Character; More Genius
In our genealogical work we call up the voices of the deep. There is no authoritative voice, only multiple readings. The ancient Greeks believed that our character or genius was an autonomous daimon who oversaw our experiences with mortality -- our fate -- our personal yet transcendent god.
"Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever enduring. He transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night." (Jung, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology of Poetry" (1922). In CW 15: The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature. P.129)
Every person has their spirit or guardian angel that remains throughout life and into death. Hillman notes, “Character forms a life regardless of how obscurely that life is lived and how little light falls on it from the stars.”
“To the question, “Why am I old?” the usual answer is, “Because I am becoming dead.” But the facts show that I reveal more character as I age, not more death.” (Hillman)
Pliny called daimons 'the generating breath of the universe’ (XVI xxxix, 93). Plato called daimons envoys and interpreters between heaven and earth. They are the medium of the prophetic and esoteric arts, and mediators of the spirit world.
The daimon has a specific interest in the outcome of our lives. It is a driving force or spiritual energy leading to the creative formation of individuality. This is where we find hope in an inevitably doomed existence...and perhaps taste our immortality. It is a formidable image that our family tree is not only our ancestors as insubstantial shades, but a forest of thousands of daimons.
Beyond Control
Jung referred to the daimon as something alien from the unconscious, an “archetype” or “numinous imperative." This force is as real as hunger and the fear of death, making demands of us and acting with authority. When we look for 'signs', we attend to our daimon, but it can also hide things from us in our blind spots.
Daemons, linked by Jung to anima/animus, are usually the opposite sex of their host. They share our feelings, thoughts and experiences. The daemon is an extension of the human but semi-independent, with praeternatural knowledge. When the human dies, the daimon fades away becoming part of everything.
Under its influence we can feel taken over. Intense and energetic feelings exceed normal human limits. In its “grip,” the daimon makes us feel swept up or carried by a force we don't understand. We seem possessed of an energy that transcends our conscious drives, needs and desires. It provokes by creating predicaments to solve and a sense of creative urgency.
Every person has their "seed-self", "guiding force", or acorn of character from birth. Our spirits grow from this seed that is our daimon. The inspirational spirit guides us toward the fulfillment of our potential and shows us our vulnerabilities and dream or imaginal life. The daimon holds the tension of opposites between good and bad aspects, but provokes internal conflict that leads to dialogue that promotes self-awareness. It is our voice of wisdom in the solitude.
Talent can be a childhood refuge from traumatic reality -- it takes us away from the awful place in a sort of creative dissociation. It can develop a superpowerful concentration and focus also seen in spiritual mystics. But it also exposes our wounds. Fear disguises genius with depression and anxiety. Lack of opportunity can be debilitating or degrading. Such genius needs recognition and nurturing for survival. Dispirited souls have lost their ‘daemons.’
All old trees had their daimon, and the World Tree -- mankind's most magnificent legend -- is no exception. The personified tree is the daimon at the same time because they are different categories of existence -- secular and sacred.
When we are 'called', we are called by our daimon, as Hillman notes: “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." If we ignore that call we may wither away or live half a life. The daimon helps us know ourselves. If we are fortunate the daimon informs our life and death with some nobility and poetry.
In Soul's Code, Hillman remind us, “Fatalism accounts for life as a whole. Whatever happens can be fit within the large generality of individuation, or my journey, or growth. Fatalism comforts, for it raises no questions. There's no need to examine just how events fit in.”
The tree articulates a psychophysical reality -- the life of the cosmos. Mind is rooted in the Unconscious much as a tree is rooted in the ground. Shaping matter as well as mind, it retains its character through endless variations. The psychoid is more fundamental than matter and psyche and the basis of synchronicity. This vital principle is an innate impulse that directs the behavior of an organism. The daemon tells us what to keep and where to keep it.
As Hillman summarizes: "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 neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life - and it prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns."
The Acorn Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree
Meaning is essential to tree phenomenology. Again, its character is the personal or family daimon. The tree is the image and mirror of our condition. It is an ancient idea that if a tree is planted at our birth our fate is shared with it. Other families plant memorial trees for the deceased. This describes the character of the family tree and symbol of wholeness.
Hillman suggests it goes beyond meaning: “It seems, as one becomes older, / That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence,” wrote T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets, which meditates on time, age, and memory, goes on to say, “We had the experience but missed the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores the experience / In a different form, beyond any meaning.”
Developmental Escalation
Hillman said the genius reveals both fears and talents in very young children. They may have a premature experience of the self [not-me] as an active factor in childhood development -- accelerated psychic growth. Prodigies are naturally endowed with exceptional abilities in youth.
The adult can remain burdened by the child prodigy routine, including self-expectations and drive. Drive can jump the tracks. The inner child fails to mature and may turn self-destructive, as the recovery movement showed. Escaping reason and reality can only be balanced by embracing the mystery in our unique way. If spirituality becomes a physical experience: meditation, or a drug/music-induced trip, doing psychogenealogy can restore spirituality as a relationship.
Some children fear identifying their genius for personal and social reasons. They don't want to 'pwn' it or feel or be perceived as different, even extraordinary. Hubris, exhibitionism, and competitiveness push us ahead of ourselves. The creative genius who peaks to early is a story trope. Some fight even harder to get their grief out of the basement. Nothing is going to hit as hard as life.
In a dysplasia of cognitive and affective development, cognitive stages outpace affective development which is stalled (Gowan). This block (the gulf between innate and actualized talents) is the cause of most absence of creativity in gifted adults and sometimes lead to non-actualizing or self-destructive tendencies. M.-L. von Franz said “the wounded healer IS the archetype of the Self [our wholeness, the God within] and is at the bottom of all genuine healing procedures." (Creativity & Giftedness)
But the pedigree doesn't illustrate the argument as much as embody it -- the genius and the wound are inherited and inherent. Certain wounds or deficits may come with genius and require challenges to release the gift and its new perspective. The wound lets in the energy that pushes or drags us to make us whole. Our symptoms are aspects of the wound and our genius, and this notion conforms with applying family therapies within the genealogical core generations. It frees the humane individual for self-actualization.
Like all archetypal symbols, the symbol of the tree has undergone a development of meaning in the course of the centuries. It is far removed from the original meaning of the shamanistic tree, even though certain basic features prove to be unalterable. The psychoid form underlying any archetypal image retains its character at all stages of development, though empirically it is capable of endless variations. The outward form of the tree may change in the course of time, but the richness and vitality of a symbol are expressed more in its change of meaning.
(Jung,CW13 ¶ 350)
This plant is an inner, spiritual growth, the development of a tree of life and knowledge which played a great role in alchemy....In general it is advisable to watch these inner developments and not let them slip back into the unconscious, lest they get stuck in the physiological sphere, or rather in the realm of the [psychoid] unconscious which merges with the body, where they give rise to pathological formations which a wise man carefully avoids. (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 607-608)
The daimon is our spiritual guide or self, and our character -- a divine mediating power that impels our action and drives or mediates our destiny. It is what makes us unique in relation to the world. This inborn immortal factor embodies our innate talents, inherent gifts, and positive or negative natural tendencies.
This supreme form of soul is our constant companion and source of inspiration -- like the Latin genii, our genius. This "genius" (from the Latin genere) means to generate, to beget, making the daimon the voice of the generative process in us. It can be a personification of the transcendent function, experienced in dreams and in our acts of doing and becoming.
The daimon is also our suffering, emotional disorders, and more, but could also heal, and promote health, happiness, resilience, perseverance, and harmony. The vitality of the inner universe is mobilized in happiness, misery, regret. The daimon can inform even a painful death with some poetry and grace.
Suffering can be produced by painful states of mind such as hatred, envy, alienation, scapegoating, cruelty, and loneliness. The daimon can also bring altruism, empathy, compassion, concern, care, consolation, and pity. It brings understanding of the beauty, compassion, and the foundation of wisdom. It is the psychobiological transformations of epigenetics, changing our responses to life experiences.
Regardless of the nature of the genes we inherit from our parents, dynamic change at this level allows us almost unlimited influence on our fate. Beyond "biology as destiny" is “self-directed biological transformation,” but under the daimon, not the ego. The disruptive and transformative reality of the individuation process manifests the uncanny otherness of the unconscious.
Mirror, Mirror
Genealogy is the silver backing on our mirror of introspection. A reflective perspective "mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment—and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground."
James Hillman continues, “...you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.”
If we do not fashion for ourselves a picture of the world, we do not see ourselves either, who are the faithful reflections of that world. Only when mirrored in our picture of the world can we see ourselves in the round. Only in our creative acts do we step forth into the light and see ourselves whole and complete. Never shall we put any face on the world other than our own, and we have to do this precisely in order to find ourselves. For higher than science or art as an end in itself stands man, the creator of his instruments. (Jung, "Analytical Psychology and Weltanschauung" (1928). In CW 8: Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.737)
We can also apply what depth psychology says to our ancestral search. Sure, it's a challenge that sets a high bar, but really just means bringing a certain sensibility and aesthetic to the disciple of ancestral search itself -- much as in art.
The Tenth Muse
The tenth muse is your daimon, helpful awareness through the dark. We can call it a daemon, genius, or muse, guardian angel, death, nature, or any conventional element for the abyss of the transcendent imagination, which has infinite aspects. It is our true calling -- our fate -- soul's intimate connection with death.
When death finds us it finds us alive. "The reality of the psyche is lived in the death of the literal," according to Gaston Bachelard. The muse connects with the mythic and can help or hinder the creative process. Death is a muse that inform us the darkness of the depths is haunted with loving souls. The essence of soul is the paradox of life/death, light/dark, past/future.
The muse supports imaginal life from the yawning darkness of the psychological depths, the soul of which is love itself. The muse moves within us and the story comes up and out, conjuring images, deepening awareness -- a dialogue with nature. Ultimately, though, the symbol-using mortal body, aware because of its symbols of both the apparent immortality of ideas and its own inevitable death, is not merely a system of cognition, a cultural construct, or an operator of rules. It is a fragile, embodied soul in need of understanding, and most in need just when it is asked to enter into transactions of consequence with other souls. http://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1059&context=jaepl
The magical creature, Duende or tener duende ("having duende") loosely means having soul, a heightened state of emotion, expression and authenticity. El duende is the spirit of evocation. It comes from inside as a physical/emotional response to art. It is what gives you chills, makes you smile or cry as a bodily reaction to an artistic performance that is particularly expressive.
According to Christopher Maurer, editor of "In Search of Duende", at least four elements can be isolated in Lorca's vision of duende: irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical. The duende is an earth spirit who helps the artist see the limitations of intelligence, reminding them that "ants could eat him or that a great arsenic lobster could fall suddenly on his head"; who brings the artist face-to-face with death, and who helps them create and communicate memorable, spine-chilling art. The duende is seen, in Lorca's lecture, as an alternative to style, to mere virtuosity, to God-given grace and charm (what Spaniards call "angel"), and to the classical, artistic norms dictated by the muse. Not that the artist simply surrenders to the duende; they have to battle it skillfully, "on the rim of the well", in "hand-to-hand combat". To a higher degree than the muse or the angel, the duende seizes not only the performer but also the audience, creating conditions where art can be understood spontaneously with little, if any, conscious effort. It is, in Lorca's words, "a sort of corkscrew that can get art into the sensibility of an audience... the very dearest thing that life can offer the intellectual." The critic Brook Zern has written, of a performance of someone with duende, "it dilates the mind's eye, so that the intensity becomes almost unendurable... There is a quality of first-timeness, of reality so heightened and exaggerated that it becomes unreal...".[3]
Lorca writes: "The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought. I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, 'The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.' Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation.". He suggests, "everything that has black sounds in it, has duende. [i.e. emotional 'darkness'] [...] This 'mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains' is, in sum, the spirit of the earth, the same duende that scorched the heart of Nietzsche, who searched in vain for its external forms on the Rialto Bridge and in the music of Bizet, without knowing that the duende he was pursuing had leaped straight from the Greek mysteries to the dancers of Cadiz or the beheaded, Dionysian scream of Silverio's siguiriya." [...] "The duende's arrival always means a radical change in forms. It brings to old planes unknown feelings of freshness, with the quality of something newly created, like a miracle, and it produces an almost religious enthusiasm." [...] "All arts are capable of duende, but where it finds greatest range, naturally, is in music, dance, and spoken poetry, for these arts require a living body to interpret them, being forms that are born, die, and open their contours against an exact present." Wikipedia
"[T]he duinde is the part that is connected to the earth, the blood, the party. It is this that Rilke refers to in his line that our role in life is to be decisively defeated by greater and greater beings. ...This is the struggle with the daimon .... While our culture has no words for this, other cultures have referred to it as "the ancestors" or "the spirits" that operate invisibly in our world. ... "the invisibles." What we do when we aren't aware of "the invisibles"? We buy insurance, and maybe even make a little money out of the catastrophe, instead of asking "Why did this happen now? What does is mean? What is my daimon's rag telling me?"" Hillman, Meade http://www.menweb.org/chardest.htm
"The "other" in us always seems alien and unacceptable; but if we let ourselves be aggrieved the feeling sinks in, and we are the richer for this little bit of self-knowledge." (Jung, "Psychological Aspects of the Kore" (1941). In CW 9, P. 918)
"This process of coming to terms with the Other in us is well worth while, because in this way we get to know aspects of our nature which we would not allow anybody else to show us and which we ourselves would never have admitted."
(Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955) CW 14: P. 706)
More Character; More Genius
In our genealogical work we call up the voices of the deep. There is no authoritative voice, only multiple readings. The ancient Greeks believed that our character or genius was an autonomous daimon who oversaw our experiences with mortality -- our fate -- our personal yet transcendent god.
"Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever enduring. He transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night." (Jung, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology of Poetry" (1922). In CW 15: The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature. P.129)
Every person has their spirit or guardian angel that remains throughout life and into death. Hillman notes, “Character forms a life regardless of how obscurely that life is lived and how little light falls on it from the stars.”
“To the question, “Why am I old?” the usual answer is, “Because I am becoming dead.” But the facts show that I reveal more character as I age, not more death.” (Hillman)
Pliny called daimons 'the generating breath of the universe’ (XVI xxxix, 93). Plato called daimons envoys and interpreters between heaven and earth. They are the medium of the prophetic and esoteric arts, and mediators of the spirit world.
The daimon has a specific interest in the outcome of our lives. It is a driving force or spiritual energy leading to the creative formation of individuality. This is where we find hope in an inevitably doomed existence...and perhaps taste our immortality. It is a formidable image that our family tree is not only our ancestors as insubstantial shades, but a forest of thousands of daimons.
Beyond Control
Jung referred to the daimon as something alien from the unconscious, an “archetype” or “numinous imperative." This force is as real as hunger and the fear of death, making demands of us and acting with authority. When we look for 'signs', we attend to our daimon, but it can also hide things from us in our blind spots.
Daemons, linked by Jung to anima/animus, are usually the opposite sex of their host. They share our feelings, thoughts and experiences. The daemon is an extension of the human but semi-independent, with praeternatural knowledge. When the human dies, the daimon fades away becoming part of everything.
Under its influence we can feel taken over. Intense and energetic feelings exceed normal human limits. In its “grip,” the daimon makes us feel swept up or carried by a force we don't understand. We seem possessed of an energy that transcends our conscious drives, needs and desires. It provokes by creating predicaments to solve and a sense of creative urgency.
Every person has their "seed-self", "guiding force", or acorn of character from birth. Our spirits grow from this seed that is our daimon. The inspirational spirit guides us toward the fulfillment of our potential and shows us our vulnerabilities and dream or imaginal life. The daimon holds the tension of opposites between good and bad aspects, but provokes internal conflict that leads to dialogue that promotes self-awareness. It is our voice of wisdom in the solitude.
Talent can be a childhood refuge from traumatic reality -- it takes us away from the awful place in a sort of creative dissociation. It can develop a superpowerful concentration and focus also seen in spiritual mystics. But it also exposes our wounds. Fear disguises genius with depression and anxiety. Lack of opportunity can be debilitating or degrading. Such genius needs recognition and nurturing for survival. Dispirited souls have lost their ‘daemons.’
All old trees had their daimon, and the World Tree -- mankind's most magnificent legend -- is no exception. The personified tree is the daimon at the same time because they are different categories of existence -- secular and sacred.
When we are 'called', we are called by our daimon, as Hillman notes: “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." If we ignore that call we may wither away or live half a life. The daimon helps us know ourselves. If we are fortunate the daimon informs our life and death with some nobility and poetry.
In Soul's Code, Hillman remind us, “Fatalism accounts for life as a whole. Whatever happens can be fit within the large generality of individuation, or my journey, or growth. Fatalism comforts, for it raises no questions. There's no need to examine just how events fit in.”
The tree articulates a psychophysical reality -- the life of the cosmos. Mind is rooted in the Unconscious much as a tree is rooted in the ground. Shaping matter as well as mind, it retains its character through endless variations. The psychoid is more fundamental than matter and psyche and the basis of synchronicity. This vital principle is an innate impulse that directs the behavior of an organism. The daemon tells us what to keep and where to keep it.
As Hillman summarizes: "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 neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life - and it prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns."
The Acorn Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree
Meaning is essential to tree phenomenology. Again, its character is the personal or family daimon. The tree is the image and mirror of our condition. It is an ancient idea that if a tree is planted at our birth our fate is shared with it. Other families plant memorial trees for the deceased. This describes the character of the family tree and symbol of wholeness.
Hillman suggests it goes beyond meaning: “It seems, as one becomes older, / That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence,” wrote T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets, which meditates on time, age, and memory, goes on to say, “We had the experience but missed the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores the experience / In a different form, beyond any meaning.”
Developmental Escalation
Hillman said the genius reveals both fears and talents in very young children. They may have a premature experience of the self [not-me] as an active factor in childhood development -- accelerated psychic growth. Prodigies are naturally endowed with exceptional abilities in youth.
The adult can remain burdened by the child prodigy routine, including self-expectations and drive. Drive can jump the tracks. The inner child fails to mature and may turn self-destructive, as the recovery movement showed. Escaping reason and reality can only be balanced by embracing the mystery in our unique way. If spirituality becomes a physical experience: meditation, or a drug/music-induced trip, doing psychogenealogy can restore spirituality as a relationship.
Some children fear identifying their genius for personal and social reasons. They don't want to 'pwn' it or feel or be perceived as different, even extraordinary. Hubris, exhibitionism, and competitiveness push us ahead of ourselves. The creative genius who peaks to early is a story trope. Some fight even harder to get their grief out of the basement. Nothing is going to hit as hard as life.
In a dysplasia of cognitive and affective development, cognitive stages outpace affective development which is stalled (Gowan). This block (the gulf between innate and actualized talents) is the cause of most absence of creativity in gifted adults and sometimes lead to non-actualizing or self-destructive tendencies. M.-L. von Franz said “the wounded healer IS the archetype of the Self [our wholeness, the God within] and is at the bottom of all genuine healing procedures." (Creativity & Giftedness)
But the pedigree doesn't illustrate the argument as much as embody it -- the genius and the wound are inherited and inherent. Certain wounds or deficits may come with genius and require challenges to release the gift and its new perspective. The wound lets in the energy that pushes or drags us to make us whole. Our symptoms are aspects of the wound and our genius, and this notion conforms with applying family therapies within the genealogical core generations. It frees the humane individual for self-actualization.
Like all archetypal symbols, the symbol of the tree has undergone a development of meaning in the course of the centuries. It is far removed from the original meaning of the shamanistic tree, even though certain basic features prove to be unalterable. The psychoid form underlying any archetypal image retains its character at all stages of development, though empirically it is capable of endless variations. The outward form of the tree may change in the course of time, but the richness and vitality of a symbol are expressed more in its change of meaning.
(Jung,CW13 ¶ 350)
This plant is an inner, spiritual growth, the development of a tree of life and knowledge which played a great role in alchemy....In general it is advisable to watch these inner developments and not let them slip back into the unconscious, lest they get stuck in the physiological sphere, or rather in the realm of the [psychoid] unconscious which merges with the body, where they give rise to pathological formations which a wise man carefully avoids. (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 607-608)
The daimon is our spiritual guide or self, and our character -- a divine mediating power that impels our action and drives or mediates our destiny. It is what makes us unique in relation to the world. This inborn immortal factor embodies our innate talents, inherent gifts, and positive or negative natural tendencies.
This supreme form of soul is our constant companion and source of inspiration -- like the Latin genii, our genius. This "genius" (from the Latin genere) means to generate, to beget, making the daimon the voice of the generative process in us. It can be a personification of the transcendent function, experienced in dreams and in our acts of doing and becoming.
The daimon is also our suffering, emotional disorders, and more, but could also heal, and promote health, happiness, resilience, perseverance, and harmony. The vitality of the inner universe is mobilized in happiness, misery, regret. The daimon can inform even a painful death with some poetry and grace.
Suffering can be produced by painful states of mind such as hatred, envy, alienation, scapegoating, cruelty, and loneliness. The daimon can also bring altruism, empathy, compassion, concern, care, consolation, and pity. It brings understanding of the beauty, compassion, and the foundation of wisdom. It is the psychobiological transformations of epigenetics, changing our responses to life experiences.
Regardless of the nature of the genes we inherit from our parents, dynamic change at this level allows us almost unlimited influence on our fate. Beyond "biology as destiny" is “self-directed biological transformation,” but under the daimon, not the ego. The disruptive and transformative reality of the individuation process manifests the uncanny otherness of the unconscious.
Australian music artist Nick Cave discussed his interpretation of duende in his lecture pertaining to the nature of the love song (Vienna, 1999):
In his brilliant lecture entitled "The Theory and Function of Duende" Federico García Lorca attempts to shed some light on the eerie and inexplicable sadness that lives in the heart of certain works of art. "All that has dark sound has duende", he says, "that mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain." In contemporary rock music, the area in which I operate, music seems less inclined to have its soul, restless and quivering, the sadness that Lorca talks about. Excitement, often; anger, sometimes: but true sadness, rarely, Bob Dylan has always had it. Leonard Cohen deals specifically in it. It pursues Van Morrison like a black dog and though he tries to he cannot escape it. Tom Waits and Neil Young can summon it. It haunts Polly Harvey. My friends the Dirty Three have it by the bucket load. The band Spiritualized are excited by it. Tindersticks desperately want it, but all in all it would appear that duende is too fragile to survive the brutality of technology and the ever increasing acceleration of the music industry. Perhaps there is just no money in sadness, no dollars in duende. Sadness or duende needs space to breathe. Melancholy hates haste and floats in silence. It must be handled with care."
All love songs must contain duende. For the love song is never truly happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain. Those songs that speak of love without having within in their lines an ache or a sigh are not love songs at all but rather Hate Songs disguised as love songs, and are not to be trusted. These songs deny us our humanness and our God-given right to be sad and the air-waves are littered with them. The love song must resonate with the DAIMONS IN THE TREE
Interlocuteur
"If we became aware of the ancestral lives in us, we might disintegrate. An ancestor might take possession of us and ride us to death." ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 139
"[W]ithout relatedness individuation is hardly possible. Relatedness begins with conversation mostly. Therefore communication is indubitably important." --Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 609-610
On this basis the main body of the collective unconscious cannot be strictly said to be psychological but psychical. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 140
We think we shape ourselves and try to act authentically. But our identity is malleable, and the unconscious plays a big role in that. To adapt with integrity, to be true to yourself, requires a clear sense of who you are, really, and it is still context dependent. Individual human consciousness is formed in the dynamic interrelation of self and other, and therefore is inherently intersubjective. Deep memories guide our attention and inform our behavior.
We are not the authors of our own narrative. Psychological well-being is tied to a coherent sense of self identity, but is not its only source. Conscious and unconscious are two forces welded and embodied into one configuration. The later is a persistent inner voice. In the ancestral quest, 'the other' is no longer isolated but full of imaginative possibilities, mutual interaction, and influence without domination.
One cannot exist without the other. But this 'other' is not a parapsychological phenomena, nor a proper subject for a seance, ghostly tidings, a devil, nor a physical haunting, or any other supernatural literalism. But it is a dynamic psychoid reality -- a force majeure, also known as cas fortuit (French) or casus fortuitus (Latin) "chance occurrence, unavoidable accident."
It personifies in a variety of ways that the ancestors are 'dying to show you,' should you be 'dying to meet' them. Hence, we have so many idiomatic expressions that we are 'dying to hear, know, learn, or do,' -- 'dying to be me,' in which a radical transformation is implicit, 'dying to self.' How many ways are we dying to live, love, belong, to see, and to tell the story and to be heard? Or, 'dying to quit', 'dying to leave,' or 'dying to be free'and 'dying to be remembered.'
Mirror, Mirror
Genealogy is a self-creating artform -- the silver backing on our mirror of introspection. A reflective perspective "mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment—and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground."
James Hillman continues, “...you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.”
As Jung says in CW8, "If we do not fashion for ourselves a picture of the world, we do not see ourselves either, who are the faithful reflections of that world. Only when mirrored in our picture of the world can we see ourselves in the round. Only in our creative acts do we step forth into the light and see ourselves whole and complete. Never shall we put any face on the world other than our own, and we have to do this precisely in order to find ourselves. For higher than science or art as an end in itself stands man, the creator of his instruments." (Jung, "Analytical Psychology and Weltanschauung" (1928). P.737)
Hillman offers no recommendations; he doesn't try to fix things: "My suggestion is that there's no way out of the human condition," he says. "Sex, death, marriage, children, parents, illness. There's no way out. They're a misery, all of them. You can spend 10 years in therapy and it will still be sex, death, marriage . . . " http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/23/magazine/how-the-soul-is-sold.html?pagewanted=all
We can also apply what depth psychology says about this to our ancestral search. Sure, it's a challenge that sets a high bar, but really just means bringing a certain sensibility and aesthetic to the disciple of ancestral search itself. In this sense, we are 'dead serious' much as in art -- summoning deceased relatives back to consciousness with their wisdom, and hunger, and sacrificial demands.
The Tenth Muse
The tenth muse is your daimon, helpful awareness through the dark. We can call it a daemon, genius, or muse, guardian angel, death, nature, or any conventional element for the abyss of the transcendent imagination, which has infinite aspects. It is our true calling -- self-determination -- our fate -- soul's intimate connection with death.
When death finds us, it finds us alive. "The reality of the psyche is lived in the death of the literal," according to Gaston Bachelard. The muse connects with the mythic and can help or hinder the creative process. Death is a muse that inform us the darkness of the depths is haunted with loving souls. The essence of soul is the paradox of life/death, light/dark, male/female.
The muse supports imaginal life from the yawning darkness of the psychological depths, the soul of which is love itself -- eros/thanatos. The muse moves within us and the story comes up and out, conjuring images, deepening awareness -- a dialogue with nature.
Hillman strongly suggests the daemonic is a taskmaster, "to do these things or say these things or produce these things," he explains. "It's the slave driver. You spend your life making it, then it tortures you: 'What are you doing now? We want more. You didn't finish that.' " Charisma is a trait of genius and psychopath.
Ultimately, though, the symbol-using mortal body, aware because of its symbols of both the apparent immortality of ideas and its own inevitable death, is not merely a system of cognition, a cultural construct, or an operator of rules. It is a fragile, embodied soul in need of understanding, and most in need just when it is asked to enter into transactions of consequence with other souls. http://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1059&context=jaepl
The Man Who Fell to Birth
The magical creature, duende or tener duende ("having duende") loosely means having soul, a heightened state of emotion, expression and authenticity. El duende is the spirit of evocation, from inside as a physical/emotional response to art. It is what gives you chills, makes you smile or cry as a bodily reaction to an artistic performance that is particularly expressive.
Duende embodies at least four elements: irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical. ...The duende is an alternative to style, to mere virtuosity, to God-given grace and charm (what Spaniards call "angel"), and to the classical, artistic norms dictated by the muse. The artist must not surrender to the duende, but battle it skillfully.
Lorca writes: "The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought. I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, 'The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.' Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation.". He suggests, "everything that has black sounds in it, has duende. [i.e. emotional 'darkness'] "The duende's arrival always means a radical change in forms. It brings to old planes unknown feelings of freshness, with the quality of something newly created, like a miracle, and it produces an almost religious enthusiasm."
Hillman amplifies that view. "[T]he duende is the part that is connected to the earth, the blood, the party. It is this that Rilke refers to in his line that our role in life is to be decisively defeated by greater and greater beings. ...This is the struggle with the daimon .... While our culture has no words for this, other cultures have referred to it as "the ancestors" or "the spirits" that operate invisibly in our world. ... "the invisibles." What we do when we aren't aware of "the invisibles"? We buy insurance, and maybe even make a little money out of the catastrophe, instead of asking "Why did this happen now? What does is mean? What is my daimon's rag telling me?"" Hillman, Meade http://www.menweb.org/chardest.htm
"The "other" in us always seems alien and unacceptable; but if we let ourselves be aggrieved the feeling sinks in, and we are the richer for this little bit of self-knowledge." (Jung, "Psychological Aspects of the Kore" (1941). In CW 9, P. 918)
"This process of coming to terms with the Other in us is well worth while, because in this way we get to know aspects of our nature which we would not allow anybody else to show us and which we ourselves would never have admitted."
(Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955) CW 14: P. 706)
More Character; More Genius
In our genealogical work we call up the voices of the deep. There is no authoritative voice, only multiple readings. The ancient Greeks believed that our character or genius was an autonomous daimon who oversaw our experiences with mortality -- our fate -- our personal yet transcendent god.
"Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever enduring. He transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night." (Jung, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology of Poetry" (1922). In CW 15: The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature. P.129)
Every person has their spirit or guardian angel that remains throughout life and into death. Hillman notes, “Character forms a life regardless of how obscurely that life is lived and how little light falls on it from the stars.”
“To the question, “Why am I old?” the usual answer is, “Because I am becoming dead.” But the facts show that I reveal more character as I age, not more death.” (Hillman)
Pliny called daimons 'the generating breath of the universe’ (XVI xxxix, 93). Plato called daimons envoys and interpreters between heaven and earth. They are the medium of the prophetic and esoteric arts, and mediators of the spirit world.
The daimon has a specific interest in the outcome of our lives. It is a driving force or spiritual energy leading to the creative formation of individuality. This is where we find hope in an inevitably doomed existence...and perhaps taste our immortality. It is a formidable image that our family tree is not only our ancestors as insubstantial shades, but a forest of thousands of daimons.
Beyond Control
Jung referred to the daimon as something alien from the unconscious, an “archetype” or “numinous imperative." This force is as real as hunger and the fear of death, making demands of us and acting with authority. When we look for 'signs', we attend to our daimon, but it can also hide things from us in our blind spots.
Daemons, linked by Jung to anima/animus, are usually the opposite sex of their host. They share our feelings, thoughts and experiences. The daemon is an extension of the human but semi-independent, with praeternatural knowledge. When the human dies, the daimon fades away becoming part of everything.
Under its influence we can feel taken over. Intense and energetic feelings exceed normal human limits. In its “grip,” the daimon makes us feel swept up or carried by a force we don't understand. We seem possessed of an energy that transcends our conscious drives, needs and desires. It provokes by creating predicaments to solve and a sense of creative urgency.
Every person has their "seed-self", "guiding force", or acorn of character from birth. Our spirits grow from this seed that is our daimon. The inspirational spirit guides us toward the fulfillment of our potential and shows us our vulnerabilities and dream or imaginal life. The daimon holds the tension of opposites between good and bad aspects, but provokes internal conflict that leads to dialogue that promotes self-awareness. It is our voice of wisdom in the solitude.
Laws of Inheritance
Talent can be a childhood refuge from traumatic reality -- it takes us away from the awful place in a sort of creative dissociation. It can develop a superpowerful concentration and focus also seen in spiritual mystics. But it also exposes our wounds. Fear disguises genius with depression and anxiety. Lack of opportunity can be debilitating or degrading. Such genius needs recognition and nurturing for survival. Dispirited souls have lost their ‘daemons.’
All old trees had their daimon, and the World Tree -- mankind's most magnificent legend -- is no exception. The personified tree is the daimon at the same time because they are different categories of existence -- secular and sacred.
When we are 'called', we are called by our daimon, as Hillman notes: “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." If we ignore that call we may wither away or live half a life. The daimon helps us know ourselves. If we are fortunate the daimon informs our life and death with some nobility and poetry.
In Soul's Code, Hillman remind us, “Fatalism accounts for life as a whole. Whatever happens can be fit within the large generality of individuation, or my journey, or growth. Fatalism comforts, for it raises no questions. There's no need to examine just how events fit in.”
The tree articulates a psychophysical reality -- the life of the cosmos. Mind is rooted in the Unconscious much as a tree is rooted in the ground. Shaping matter as well as mind, it retains its character through endless variations. The psychoid is more fundamental than matter and psyche and the basis of synchronicity. This vital principle is an innate impulse that directs the behavior of an organism. The daemon tells us what to keep and where to keep it.
As Hillman summarizes: "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 neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life - and it prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns."
The Acorn Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree
Meaning is essential to tree phenomenology. Again, its character is the personal or family daimon. The tree is the image and mirror of our condition. It is an ancient idea that if a tree is planted at our birth our fate is shared with it. Other families plant memorial trees for the deceased. This describes the character of the family tree and symbol of wholeness.
Hillman suggests it goes beyond meaning: “It seems, as one becomes older, / That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence,” wrote T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets, which meditates on time, age, and memory, goes on to say, “We had the experience but missed the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores the experience / In a different form, beyond any meaning.”
Developmental Escalation
Hillman said the genius reveals both fears and talents in very young children. They may have a premature experience of the self [not-me] as an active factor in childhood development -- accelerated psychic growth. Prodigies are naturally endowed with exceptional abilities in youth.
The adult can remain burdened by the child prodigy routine, including self-expectations and drive. Drive can jump the tracks. The inner child fails to mature and may turn self-destructive, as the recovery movement showed. Escaping reason and reality can only be balanced by embracing the mystery in our unique way. If spirituality becomes a physical experience: meditation, or a drug/music-induced trip, doing psychogenealogy can restore spirituality as a relationship.
Some children fear identifying their genius for personal and social reasons. They don't want to 'pwn' it or feel or be perceived as different, even extraordinary. Hubris, exhibitionism, and competitiveness push us ahead of ourselves. The creative genius who peaks to early is a story trope. Some fight even harder to get their grief out of the basement. Nothing is going to hit as hard as life.
In a dysplasia of cognitive and affective development, cognitive stages outpace affective development which is stalled (Gowan). This block (the gulf between innate and actualized talents) is the cause of most absence of creativity in gifted adults and sometimes lead to non-actualizing or self-destructive tendencies. M.-L. von Franz said “the wounded healer IS the archetype of the Self [our wholeness, the God within] and is at the bottom of all genuine healing procedures." (Creativity & Giftedness)
But the pedigree doesn't illustrate the argument as much as embody it -- the genius and the wound are inherited and inherent. Certain wounds or deficits may come with genius and require challenges to release the gift and its new perspective. The wound lets in the energy that pushes or drags us to make us whole. Our symptoms are aspects of the wound and our genius, and this notion conforms with applying family therapies within the genealogical core generations. It frees the humane individual for self-actualization.
Like all archetypal symbols, the symbol of the tree has undergone a development of meaning in the course of the centuries. It is far removed from the original meaning of the shamanistic tree, even though certain basic features prove to be unalterable. The psychoid form underlying any archetypal image retains its character at all stages of development, though empirically it is capable of endless variations. The outward form of the tree may change in the course of time, but the richness and vitality of a symbol are expressed more in its change of meaning.
(Jung,CW13 ¶ 350)
This plant is an inner, spiritual growth, the development of a tree of life and knowledge which played a great role in alchemy....In general it is advisable to watch these inner developments and not let them slip back into the unconscious, lest they get stuck in the physiological sphere, or rather in the realm of the [psychoid] unconscious which merges with the body, where they give rise to pathological formations which a wise man carefully avoids. (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 607-608)
The daimon is our spiritual guide or self, and our character -- a divine mediating power that impels our action and drives or mediates our destiny. Destiny is not something over which we can gain control. We can only learn to dance with it. It is what makes us unique in relation to the world. This inborn immortal factor embodies our innate talents, inherent gifts, and positive or negative natural tendencies.
This supreme form of soul is our constant companion and source of inspiration -- like the Latin genii, our genius. This "genius" (from the Latin genere) means to generate, to beget, making the daimon the voice of the generative process in us. It can be a personification of the transcendent function, experienced in dreams and in our acts of doing and becoming.
The daimon is also our suffering, emotional disorders, and more, but could also heal, and promote health, happiness, resilience, perseverance, and harmony. The vitality of the inner universe is mobilized in happiness, misery, regret. The daimon can inform even a painful death with some poetry and grace.
Suffering can be produced by painful states of mind such as hatred, envy, alienation, scapegoating, cruelty, and loneliness. The daimon can also bring altruism, empathy, compassion, concern, care, consolation, and pity. It brings understanding of the beauty, compassion, and the foundation of wisdom. It is the psychobiological transformations of epigenetics, changing our responses to life experiences.
Regardless of the nature of the genes we inherit from our parents, dynamic change at this level allows us almost unlimited influence on our fate. Beyond "biology as destiny" is “self-directed biological transformation,” but under the daimon, not the ego. The disruptive and transformative reality of the individuation process manifests the uncanny otherness of the unconsof sorrow, the tintinnabulation of grief. The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil - the enduring metaphor of Christ crucified between two criminals comes to mind here - so within the fabric of the love song, within its melody, its lyric, one must sense an acknowledgement of its capacity for suffering.[5]
wikipedia, duende
In his brilliant lecture entitled "The Theory and Function of Duende" Federico García Lorca attempts to shed some light on the eerie and inexplicable sadness that lives in the heart of certain works of art. "All that has dark sound has duende", he says, "that mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain." In contemporary rock music, the area in which I operate, music seems less inclined to have its soul, restless and quivering, the sadness that Lorca talks about. Excitement, often; anger, sometimes: but true sadness, rarely, Bob Dylan has always had it. Leonard Cohen deals specifically in it. It pursues Van Morrison like a black dog and though he tries to he cannot escape it. Tom Waits and Neil Young can summon it. It haunts Polly Harvey. My friends the Dirty Three have it by the bucket load. The band Spiritualized are excited by it. Tindersticks desperately want it, but all in all it would appear that duende is too fragile to survive the brutality of technology and the ever increasing acceleration of the music industry. Perhaps there is just no money in sadness, no dollars in duende. Sadness or duende needs space to breathe. Melancholy hates haste and floats in silence. It must be handled with care."
All love songs must contain duende. For the love song is never truly happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain. Those songs that speak of love without having within in their lines an ache or a sigh are not love songs at all but rather Hate Songs disguised as love songs, and are not to be trusted. These songs deny us our humanness and our God-given right to be sad and the air-waves are littered with them. The love song must resonate with the DAIMONS IN THE TREE
Interlocuteur
"If we became aware of the ancestral lives in us, we might disintegrate. An ancestor might take possession of us and ride us to death." ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 139
"[W]ithout relatedness individuation is hardly possible. Relatedness begins with conversation mostly. Therefore communication is indubitably important." --Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 609-610
On this basis the main body of the collective unconscious cannot be strictly said to be psychological but psychical. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 140
We think we shape ourselves and try to act authentically. But our identity is malleable, and the unconscious plays a big role in that. To adapt with integrity, to be true to yourself, requires a clear sense of who you are, really, and it is still context dependent. Individual human consciousness is formed in the dynamic interrelation of self and other, and therefore is inherently intersubjective. Deep memories guide our attention and inform our behavior.
We are not the authors of our own narrative. Psychological well-being is tied to a coherent sense of self identity, but is not its only source. Conscious and unconscious are two forces welded and embodied into one configuration. The later is a persistent inner voice. In the ancestral quest, 'the other' is no longer isolated but full of imaginative possibilities, mutual interaction, and influence without domination.
One cannot exist without the other. But this 'other' is not a parapsychological phenomena, nor a proper subject for a seance, ghostly tidings, a devil, nor a physical haunting, or any other supernatural literalism. But it is a dynamic psychoid reality -- a force majeure, also known as cas fortuit (French) or casus fortuitus (Latin) "chance occurrence, unavoidable accident."
It personifies in a variety of ways that the ancestors are 'dying to show you,' should you be 'dying to meet' them. Hence, we have so many idiomatic expressions that we are 'dying to hear, know, learn, or do,' -- 'dying to be me,' in which a radical transformation is implicit, 'dying to self.' How many ways are we dying to live, love, belong, to see, and to tell the story and to be heard? Or, 'dying to quit', 'dying to leave,' or 'dying to be free'and 'dying to be remembered.'
Mirror, Mirror
Genealogy is a self-creating artform -- the silver backing on our mirror of introspection. A reflective perspective "mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment—and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground."
James Hillman continues, “...you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.”
As Jung says in CW8, "If we do not fashion for ourselves a picture of the world, we do not see ourselves either, who are the faithful reflections of that world. Only when mirrored in our picture of the world can we see ourselves in the round. Only in our creative acts do we step forth into the light and see ourselves whole and complete. Never shall we put any face on the world other than our own, and we have to do this precisely in order to find ourselves. For higher than science or art as an end in itself stands man, the creator of his instruments." (Jung, "Analytical Psychology and Weltanschauung" (1928). P.737)
Hillman offers no recommendations; he doesn't try to fix things: "My suggestion is that there's no way out of the human condition," he says. "Sex, death, marriage, children, parents, illness. There's no way out. They're a misery, all of them. You can spend 10 years in therapy and it will still be sex, death, marriage . . . " http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/23/magazine/how-the-soul-is-sold.html?pagewanted=all
We can also apply what depth psychology says about this to our ancestral search. Sure, it's a challenge that sets a high bar, but really just means bringing a certain sensibility and aesthetic to the disciple of ancestral search itself. In this sense, we are 'dead serious' much as in art -- summoning deceased relatives back to consciousness with their wisdom, and hunger, and sacrificial demands.
The Tenth Muse
The tenth muse is your daimon, helpful awareness through the dark. We can call it a daemon, genius, or muse, guardian angel, death, nature, or any conventional element for the abyss of the transcendent imagination, which has infinite aspects. It is our true calling -- self-determination -- our fate -- soul's intimate connection with death.
When death finds us, it finds us alive. "The reality of the psyche is lived in the death of the literal," according to Gaston Bachelard. The muse connects with the mythic and can help or hinder the creative process. Death is a muse that inform us the darkness of the depths is haunted with loving souls. The essence of soul is the paradox of life/death, light/dark, male/female.
The muse supports imaginal life from the yawning darkness of the psychological depths, the soul of which is love itself -- eros/thanatos. The muse moves within us and the story comes up and out, conjuring images, deepening awareness -- a dialogue with nature.
Hillman strongly suggests the daemonic is a taskmaster, "to do these things or say these things or produce these things," he explains. "It's the slave driver. You spend your life making it, then it tortures you: 'What are you doing now? We want more. You didn't finish that.' " Charisma is a trait of genius and psychopath.
Ultimately, though, the symbol-using mortal body, aware because of its symbols of both the apparent immortality of ideas and its own inevitable death, is not merely a system of cognition, a cultural construct, or an operator of rules. It is a fragile, embodied soul in need of understanding, and most in need just when it is asked to enter into transactions of consequence with other souls. http://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1059&context=jaepl
The Man Who Fell to Birth
The magical creature, duende or tener duende ("having duende") loosely means having soul, a heightened state of emotion, expression and authenticity. El duende is the spirit of evocation, from inside as a physical/emotional response to art. It is what gives you chills, makes you smile or cry as a bodily reaction to an artistic performance that is particularly expressive.
Duende embodies at least four elements: irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical. ...The duende is an alternative to style, to mere virtuosity, to God-given grace and charm (what Spaniards call "angel"), and to the classical, artistic norms dictated by the muse. The artist must not surrender to the duende, but battle it skillfully.
Lorca writes: "The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought. I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, 'The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.' Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation.". He suggests, "everything that has black sounds in it, has duende. [i.e. emotional 'darkness'] "The duende's arrival always means a radical change in forms. It brings to old planes unknown feelings of freshness, with the quality of something newly created, like a miracle, and it produces an almost religious enthusiasm."
Hillman amplifies that view. "[T]he duende is the part that is connected to the earth, the blood, the party. It is this that Rilke refers to in his line that our role in life is to be decisively defeated by greater and greater beings. ...This is the struggle with the daimon .... While our culture has no words for this, other cultures have referred to it as "the ancestors" or "the spirits" that operate invisibly in our world. ... "the invisibles." What we do when we aren't aware of "the invisibles"? We buy insurance, and maybe even make a little money out of the catastrophe, instead of asking "Why did this happen now? What does is mean? What is my daimon's rag telling me?"" Hillman, Meade http://www.menweb.org/chardest.htm
"The "other" in us always seems alien and unacceptable; but if we let ourselves be aggrieved the feeling sinks in, and we are the richer for this little bit of self-knowledge." (Jung, "Psychological Aspects of the Kore" (1941). In CW 9, P. 918)
"This process of coming to terms with the Other in us is well worth while, because in this way we get to know aspects of our nature which we would not allow anybody else to show us and which we ourselves would never have admitted."
(Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955) CW 14: P. 706)
More Character; More Genius
In our genealogical work we call up the voices of the deep. There is no authoritative voice, only multiple readings. The ancient Greeks believed that our character or genius was an autonomous daimon who oversaw our experiences with mortality -- our fate -- our personal yet transcendent god.
"Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever enduring. He transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night." (Jung, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology of Poetry" (1922). In CW 15: The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature. P.129)
Every person has their spirit or guardian angel that remains throughout life and into death. Hillman notes, “Character forms a life regardless of how obscurely that life is lived and how little light falls on it from the stars.”
“To the question, “Why am I old?” the usual answer is, “Because I am becoming dead.” But the facts show that I reveal more character as I age, not more death.” (Hillman)
Pliny called daimons 'the generating breath of the universe’ (XVI xxxix, 93). Plato called daimons envoys and interpreters between heaven and earth. They are the medium of the prophetic and esoteric arts, and mediators of the spirit world.
The daimon has a specific interest in the outcome of our lives. It is a driving force or spiritual energy leading to the creative formation of individuality. This is where we find hope in an inevitably doomed existence...and perhaps taste our immortality. It is a formidable image that our family tree is not only our ancestors as insubstantial shades, but a forest of thousands of daimons.
Beyond Control
Jung referred to the daimon as something alien from the unconscious, an “archetype” or “numinous imperative." This force is as real as hunger and the fear of death, making demands of us and acting with authority. When we look for 'signs', we attend to our daimon, but it can also hide things from us in our blind spots.
Daemons, linked by Jung to anima/animus, are usually the opposite sex of their host. They share our feelings, thoughts and experiences. The daemon is an extension of the human but semi-independent, with praeternatural knowledge. When the human dies, the daimon fades away becoming part of everything.
Under its influence we can feel taken over. Intense and energetic feelings exceed normal human limits. In its “grip,” the daimon makes us feel swept up or carried by a force we don't understand. We seem possessed of an energy that transcends our conscious drives, needs and desires. It provokes by creating predicaments to solve and a sense of creative urgency.
Every person has their "seed-self", "guiding force", or acorn of character from birth. Our spirits grow from this seed that is our daimon. The inspirational spirit guides us toward the fulfillment of our potential and shows us our vulnerabilities and dream or imaginal life. The daimon holds the tension of opposites between good and bad aspects, but provokes internal conflict that leads to dialogue that promotes self-awareness. It is our voice of wisdom in the solitude.
Laws of Inheritance
Talent can be a childhood refuge from traumatic reality -- it takes us away from the awful place in a sort of creative dissociation. It can develop a superpowerful concentration and focus also seen in spiritual mystics. But it also exposes our wounds. Fear disguises genius with depression and anxiety. Lack of opportunity can be debilitating or degrading. Such genius needs recognition and nurturing for survival. Dispirited souls have lost their ‘daemons.’
All old trees had their daimon, and the World Tree -- mankind's most magnificent legend -- is no exception. The personified tree is the daimon at the same time because they are different categories of existence -- secular and sacred.
When we are 'called', we are called by our daimon, as Hillman notes: “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." If we ignore that call we may wither away or live half a life. The daimon helps us know ourselves. If we are fortunate the daimon informs our life and death with some nobility and poetry.
In Soul's Code, Hillman remind us, “Fatalism accounts for life as a whole. Whatever happens can be fit within the large generality of individuation, or my journey, or growth. Fatalism comforts, for it raises no questions. There's no need to examine just how events fit in.”
The tree articulates a psychophysical reality -- the life of the cosmos. Mind is rooted in the Unconscious much as a tree is rooted in the ground. Shaping matter as well as mind, it retains its character through endless variations. The psychoid is more fundamental than matter and psyche and the basis of synchronicity. This vital principle is an innate impulse that directs the behavior of an organism. The daemon tells us what to keep and where to keep it.
As Hillman summarizes: "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 neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life - and it prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns."
The Acorn Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree
Meaning is essential to tree phenomenology. Again, its character is the personal or family daimon. The tree is the image and mirror of our condition. It is an ancient idea that if a tree is planted at our birth our fate is shared with it. Other families plant memorial trees for the deceased. This describes the character of the family tree and symbol of wholeness.
Hillman suggests it goes beyond meaning: “It seems, as one becomes older, / That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence,” wrote T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets, which meditates on time, age, and memory, goes on to say, “We had the experience but missed the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores the experience / In a different form, beyond any meaning.”
Developmental Escalation
Hillman said the genius reveals both fears and talents in very young children. They may have a premature experience of the self [not-me] as an active factor in childhood development -- accelerated psychic growth. Prodigies are naturally endowed with exceptional abilities in youth.
The adult can remain burdened by the child prodigy routine, including self-expectations and drive. Drive can jump the tracks. The inner child fails to mature and may turn self-destructive, as the recovery movement showed. Escaping reason and reality can only be balanced by embracing the mystery in our unique way. If spirituality becomes a physical experience: meditation, or a drug/music-induced trip, doing psychogenealogy can restore spirituality as a relationship.
Some children fear identifying their genius for personal and social reasons. They don't want to 'pwn' it or feel or be perceived as different, even extraordinary. Hubris, exhibitionism, and competitiveness push us ahead of ourselves. The creative genius who peaks to early is a story trope. Some fight even harder to get their grief out of the basement. Nothing is going to hit as hard as life.
In a dysplasia of cognitive and affective development, cognitive stages outpace affective development which is stalled (Gowan). This block (the gulf between innate and actualized talents) is the cause of most absence of creativity in gifted adults and sometimes lead to non-actualizing or self-destructive tendencies. M.-L. von Franz said “the wounded healer IS the archetype of the Self [our wholeness, the God within] and is at the bottom of all genuine healing procedures." (Creativity & Giftedness)
But the pedigree doesn't illustrate the argument as much as embody it -- the genius and the wound are inherited and inherent. Certain wounds or deficits may come with genius and require challenges to release the gift and its new perspective. The wound lets in the energy that pushes or drags us to make us whole. Our symptoms are aspects of the wound and our genius, and this notion conforms with applying family therapies within the genealogical core generations. It frees the humane individual for self-actualization.
Like all archetypal symbols, the symbol of the tree has undergone a development of meaning in the course of the centuries. It is far removed from the original meaning of the shamanistic tree, even though certain basic features prove to be unalterable. The psychoid form underlying any archetypal image retains its character at all stages of development, though empirically it is capable of endless variations. The outward form of the tree may change in the course of time, but the richness and vitality of a symbol are expressed more in its change of meaning.
(Jung,CW13 ¶ 350)
This plant is an inner, spiritual growth, the development of a tree of life and knowledge which played a great role in alchemy....In general it is advisable to watch these inner developments and not let them slip back into the unconscious, lest they get stuck in the physiological sphere, or rather in the realm of the [psychoid] unconscious which merges with the body, where they give rise to pathological formations which a wise man carefully avoids. (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 607-608)
The daimon is our spiritual guide or self, and our character -- a divine mediating power that impels our action and drives or mediates our destiny. Destiny is not something over which we can gain control. We can only learn to dance with it. It is what makes us unique in relation to the world. This inborn immortal factor embodies our innate talents, inherent gifts, and positive or negative natural tendencies.
This supreme form of soul is our constant companion and source of inspiration -- like the Latin genii, our genius. This "genius" (from the Latin genere) means to generate, to beget, making the daimon the voice of the generative process in us. It can be a personification of the transcendent function, experienced in dreams and in our acts of doing and becoming.
The daimon is also our suffering, emotional disorders, and more, but could also heal, and promote health, happiness, resilience, perseverance, and harmony. The vitality of the inner universe is mobilized in happiness, misery, regret. The daimon can inform even a painful death with some poetry and grace.
Suffering can be produced by painful states of mind such as hatred, envy, alienation, scapegoating, cruelty, and loneliness. The daimon can also bring altruism, empathy, compassion, concern, care, consolation, and pity. It brings understanding of the beauty, compassion, and the foundation of wisdom. It is the psychobiological transformations of epigenetics, changing our responses to life experiences.
Regardless of the nature of the genes we inherit from our parents, dynamic change at this level allows us almost unlimited influence on our fate. Beyond "biology as destiny" is “self-directed biological transformation,” but under the daimon, not the ego. The disruptive and transformative reality of the individuation process manifests the uncanny otherness of the unconsof sorrow, the tintinnabulation of grief. The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil - the enduring metaphor of Christ crucified between two criminals comes to mind here - so within the fabric of the love song, within its melody, its lyric, one must sense an acknowledgement of its capacity for suffering.[5]
wikipedia, duende
DAIMONS IN THE TREE
Interlocuteur
"If we became aware of the ancestral lives in us, we might disintegrate. An ancestor might take possession of us and ride us to death." ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 139
"[W]ithout relatedness individuation is hardly possible. Relatedness begins with conversation mostly. Therefore communication is indubitably important." --Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 609-610
On this basis the main body of the collective unconscious cannot be strictly said to be psychological but psychical. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 140
We think we shape ourselves and try to act authentically. But our identity is malleable, and the unconscious plays a big role in that. To adapt with integrity, to be true to yourself, requires a clear sense of who you are, really, and it is still context dependent. Individual human consciousness is formed in the dynamic interrelation of self and other, and therefore is inherently intersubjective. Deep memories guide our attention and inform our behavior.
We are not the authors of our own narrative. Psychological well-being is tied to a coherent sense of self identity, but is not its only source. Conscious and unconscious are two forces welded and embodied into one configuration. The later is a persistent inner voice. In the ancestral quest, 'the other' is no longer isolated but full of imaginative possibilities, mutual interaction, and influence without domination.
One cannot exist without the other. But this 'other' is not a parapsychological phenomena, nor a proper subject for a seance, ghostly tidings, a devil, nor a physical haunting, or any other supernatural literalism. But it is a dynamic psychoid reality -- a force majeure, also known as cas fortuit (French) or casus fortuitus (Latin) "chance occurrence, unavoidable accident."
It personifies in a variety of ways that the ancestors are 'dying to show you,' should you be 'dying to meet' them. Hence, we have so many idiomatic expressions that we are 'dying to hear, know, learn, or do,' -- 'dying to be me,' in which a radical transformation is implicit, 'dying to self.' How many ways are we dying to live, love, belong, to see, and to tell the story and to be heard? Or, 'dying to quit', 'dying to leave,' or 'dying to be free'and 'dying to be remembered.'
Mirror, Mirror
Genealogy is a self-creating artform -- the silver backing on our mirror of introspection. A reflective perspective "mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment—and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground."
James Hillman continues, “...you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.”
As Jung says in CW8, "If we do not fashion for ourselves a picture of the world, we do not see ourselves either, who are the faithful reflections of that world. Only when mirrored in our picture of the world can we see ourselves in the round. Only in our creative acts do we step forth into the light and see ourselves whole and complete. Never shall we put any face on the world other than our own, and we have to do this precisely in order to find ourselves. For higher than science or art as an end in itself stands man, the creator of his instruments." (Jung, "Analytical Psychology and Weltanschauung" (1928). P.737)
Hillman offers no recommendations; he doesn't try to fix things: "My suggestion is that there's no way out of the human condition," he says. "Sex, death, marriage, children, parents, illness. There's no way out. They're a misery, all of them. You can spend 10 years in therapy and it will still be sex, death, marriage . . . " http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/23/magazine/how-the-soul-is-sold.html?pagewanted=all
We can also apply what depth psychology says about this to our ancestral search. Sure, it's a challenge that sets a high bar, but really just means bringing a certain sensibility and aesthetic to the disciple of ancestral search itself. In this sense, we are 'dead serious' much as in art -- summoning deceased relatives back to consciousness with their wisdom, and hunger, and sacrificial demands.
The Tenth Muse
The tenth muse is your daimon, helpful awareness through the dark. We can call it a daemon, genius, or muse, guardian angel, death, nature, or any conventional element for the abyss of the transcendent imagination, which has infinite aspects. It is our true calling -- self-determination -- our fate -- soul's intimate connection with death.
When death finds us, it finds us alive. "The reality of the psyche is lived in the death of the literal," according to Gaston Bachelard. The muse connects with the mythic and can help or hinder the creative process. Death is a muse that inform us the darkness of the depths is haunted with loving souls. The essence of soul is the paradox of life/death, light/dark, male/female.
The muse supports imaginal life from the yawning darkness of the psychological depths, the soul of which is love itself -- eros/thanatos. The muse moves within us and the story comes up and out, conjuring images, deepening awareness -- a dialogue with nature.
Hillman strongly suggests the daemonic is a taskmaster, "to do these things or say these things or produce these things," he explains. "It's the slave driver. You spend your life making it, then it tortures you: 'What are you doing now? We want more. You didn't finish that.' " Charisma is a trait of genius and psychopath.
Ultimately, though, the symbol-using mortal body, aware because of its symbols of both the apparent immortality of ideas and its own inevitable death, is not merely a system of cognition, a cultural construct, or an operator of rules. It is a fragile, embodied soul in need of understanding, and most in need just when it is asked to enter into transactions of consequence with other souls. http://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1059&context=jaepl
The Man Who Fell to Birth
The magical creature, duende or tener duende ("having duende") loosely means having soul, a heightened state of emotion, expression and authenticity. El duende is the spirit of evocation, from inside as a physical/emotional response to art. It is what gives you chills, makes you smile or cry as a bodily reaction to an artistic performance that is particularly expressive.
Duende embodies at least four elements: irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical. ...The duende is an alternative to style, to mere virtuosity, to God-given grace and charm (what Spaniards call "angel"), and to the classical, artistic norms dictated by the muse. The artist must not surrender to the duende, but battle it skillfully.
Lorca writes: "The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought. I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, 'The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.' Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation.". He suggests, "everything that has black sounds in it, has duende. [i.e. emotional 'darkness'] "The duende's arrival always means a radical change in forms. It brings to old planes unknown feelings of freshness, with the quality of something newly created, like a miracle, and it produces an almost religious enthusiasm."
Hillman amplifies that view. "[T]he duende is the part that is connected to the earth, the blood, the party. It is this that Rilke refers to in his line that our role in life is to be decisively defeated by greater and greater beings. ...This is the struggle with the daimon .... While our culture has no words for this, other cultures have referred to it as "the ancestors" or "the spirits" that operate invisibly in our world. ... "the invisibles." What we do when we aren't aware of "the invisibles"? We buy insurance, and maybe even make a little money out of the catastrophe, instead of asking "Why did this happen now? What does is mean? What is my daimon's rag telling me?"" Hillman, Meade http://www.menweb.org/chardest.htm
"The "other" in us always seems alien and unacceptable; but if we let ourselves be aggrieved the feeling sinks in, and we are the richer for this little bit of self-knowledge." (Jung, "Psychological Aspects of the Kore" (1941). In CW 9, P. 918)
"This process of coming to terms with the Other in us is well worth while, because in this way we get to know aspects of our nature which we would not allow anybody else to show us and which we ourselves would never have admitted."
(Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955) CW 14: P. 706)
More Character; More Genius
In our genealogical work we call up the voices of the deep. There is no authoritative voice, only multiple readings. The ancient Greeks believed that our character or genius was an autonomous daimon who oversaw our experiences with mortality -- our fate -- our personal yet transcendent god.
"Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever enduring. He transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night." (Jung, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology of Poetry" (1922). In CW 15: The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature. P.129)
Every person has their spirit or guardian angel that remains throughout life and into death. Hillman notes, “Character forms a life regardless of how obscurely that life is lived and how little light falls on it from the stars.”
“To the question, “Why am I old?” the usual answer is, “Because I am becoming dead.” But the facts show that I reveal more character as I age, not more death.” (Hillman)
Pliny called daimons 'the generating breath of the universe’ (XVI xxxix, 93). Plato called daimons envoys and interpreters between heaven and earth. They are the medium of the prophetic and esoteric arts, and mediators of the spirit world.
The daimon has a specific interest in the outcome of our lives. It is a driving force or spiritual energy leading to the creative formation of individuality. This is where we find hope in an inevitably doomed existence...and perhaps taste our immortality. It is a formidable image that our family tree is not only our ancestors as insubstantial shades, but a forest of thousands of daimons.
Beyond Control
Jung referred to the daimon as something alien from the unconscious, an “archetype” or “numinous imperative." This force is as real as hunger and the fear of death, making demands of us and acting with authority. When we look for 'signs', we attend to our daimon, but it can also hide things from us in our blind spots.
Daemons, linked by Jung to anima/animus, are usually the opposite sex of their host. They share our feelings, thoughts and experiences. The daemon is an extension of the human but semi-independent, with praeternatural knowledge. When the human dies, the daimon fades away becoming part of everything.
Under its influence we can feel taken over. Intense and energetic feelings exceed normal human limits. In its “grip,” the daimon makes us feel swept up or carried by a force we don't understand. We seem possessed of an energy that transcends our conscious drives, needs and desires. It provokes by creating predicaments to solve and a sense of creative urgency.
Every person has their "seed-self", "guiding force", or acorn of character from birth. Our spirits grow from this seed that is our daimon. The inspirational spirit guides us toward the fulfillment of our potential and shows us our vulnerabilities and dream or imaginal life. The daimon holds the tension of opposites between good and bad aspects, but provokes internal conflict that leads to dialogue that promotes self-awareness. It is our voice of wisdom in the solitude.
Laws of Inheritance
Talent can be a childhood refuge from traumatic reality -- it takes us away from the awful place in a sort of creative dissociation. It can develop a superpowerful concentration and focus also seen in spiritual mystics. But it also exposes our wounds. Fear disguises genius with depression and anxiety. Lack of opportunity can be debilitating or degrading. Such genius needs recognition and nurturing for survival. Dispirited souls have lost their ‘daemons.’
All old trees had their daimon, and the World Tree -- mankind's most magnificent legend -- is no exception. The personified tree is the daimon at the same time because they are different categories of existence -- secular and sacred.
When we are 'called', we are called by our daimon, as Hillman notes: “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." If we ignore that call we may wither away or live half a life. The daimon helps us know ourselves. If we are fortunate the daimon informs our life and death with some nobility and poetry.
In Soul's Code, Hillman remind us, “Fatalism accounts for life as a whole. Whatever happens can be fit within the large generality of individuation, or my journey, or growth. Fatalism comforts, for it raises no questions. There's no need to examine just how events fit in.”
The tree articulates a psychophysical reality -- the life of the cosmos. Mind is rooted in the Unconscious much as a tree is rooted in the ground. Shaping matter as well as mind, it retains its character through endless variations. The psychoid is more fundamental than matter and psyche and the basis of synchronicity. This vital principle is an innate impulse that directs the behavior of an organism. The daemon tells us what to keep and where to keep it.
As Hillman summarizes: "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 neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life - and it prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns."
The Acorn Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree
Meaning is essential to tree phenomenology. Again, its character is the personal or family daimon. The tree is the image and mirror of our condition. It is an ancient idea that if a tree is planted at our birth our fate is shared with it. Other families plant memorial trees for the deceased. This describes the character of the family tree and symbol of wholeness.
Hillman suggests it goes beyond meaning: “It seems, as one becomes older, / That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence,” wrote T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets, which meditates on time, age, and memory, goes on to say, “We had the experience but missed the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores the experience / In a different form, beyond any meaning.”
Developmental Escalation
Hillman said the genius reveals both fears and talents in very young children. They may have a premature experience of the self [not-me] as an active factor in childhood development -- accelerated psychic growth. Prodigies are naturally endowed with exceptional abilities in youth.
The adult can remain burdened by the child prodigy routine, including self-expectations and drive. Drive can jump the tracks. The inner child fails to mature and may turn self-destructive, as the recovery movement showed. Escaping reason and reality can only be balanced by embracing the mystery in our unique way. If spirituality becomes a physical experience: meditation, or a drug/music-induced trip, doing psychogenealogy can restore spirituality as a relationship.
Some children fear identifying their genius for personal and social reasons. They don't want to 'pwn' it or feel or be perceived as different, even extraordinary. Hubris, exhibitionism, and competitiveness push us ahead of ourselves. The creative genius who peaks to early is a story trope. Some fight even harder to get their grief out of the basement. Nothing is going to hit as hard as life.
In a dysplasia of cognitive and affective development, cognitive stages outpace affective development which is stalled (Gowan). This block (the gulf between innate and actualized talents) is the cause of most absence of creativity in gifted adults and sometimes lead to non-actualizing or self-destructive tendencies. M.-L. von Franz said “the wounded healer IS the archetype of the Self [our wholeness, the God within] and is at the bottom of all genuine healing procedures." (Creativity & Giftedness)
But the pedigree doesn't illustrate the argument as much as embody it -- the genius and the wound are inherited and inherent. Certain wounds or deficits may come with genius and require challenges to release the gift and its new perspective. The wound lets in the energy that pushes or drags us to make us whole. Our symptoms are aspects of the wound and our genius, and this notion conforms with applying family therapies within the genealogical core generations. It frees the humane individual for self-actualization.
Like all archetypal symbols, the symbol of the tree has undergone a development of meaning in the course of the centuries. It is far removed from the original meaning of the shamanistic tree, even though certain basic features prove to be unalterable. The psychoid form underlying any archetypal image retains its character at all stages of development, though empirically it is capable of endless variations. The outward form of the tree may change in the course of time, but the richness and vitality of a symbol are expressed more in its change of meaning.
(Jung,CW13 ¶ 350)
This plant is an inner, spiritual growth, the development of a tree of life and knowledge which played a great role in alchemy....In general it is advisable to watch these inner developments and not let them slip back into the unconscious, lest they get stuck in the physiological sphere, or rather in the realm of the [psychoid] unconscious which merges with the body, where they give rise to pathological formations which a wise man carefully avoids. (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 607-608)
The daimon is our spiritual guide or self, and our character -- a divine mediating power that impels our action and drives or mediates our destiny. Destiny is not something over which we can gain control. We can only learn to dance with it. It is what makes us unique in relation to the world. This inborn immortal factor embodies our innate talents, inherent gifts, and positive or negative natural tendencies.
This supreme form of soul is our constant companion and source of inspiration -- like the Latin genii, our genius. This "genius" (from the Latin genere) means to generate, to beget, making the daimon the voice of the generative process in us. It can be a personification of the transcendent function, experienced in dreams and in our acts of doing and becoming.
The daimon is also our suffering, emotional disorders, and more, but could also heal, and promote health, happiness, resilience, perseverance, and harmony. The vitality of the inner universe is mobilized in happiness, misery, regret. The daimon can inform even a painful death with some poetry and grace.
Suffering can be produced by painful states of mind such as hatred, envy, alienation, scapegoating, cruelty, and loneliness. The daimon can also bring altruism, empathy, compassion, concern, care, consolation, and pity. It brings understanding of the beauty, compassion, and the foundation of wisdom. It is the psychobiological transformations of epigenetics, changing our responses to life experiences.
Regardless of the nature of the genes we inherit from our parents, dynamic change at this level allows us almost unlimited influence on our fate. Beyond "biology as destiny" is “self-directed biological transformation,” but under the daimon, not the ego. The disruptive and transformative reality of the individuation process manifests the uncanny otherness of the unconsvious.
Interlocuteur
"If we became aware of the ancestral lives in us, we might disintegrate. An ancestor might take possession of us and ride us to death." ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 139
"[W]ithout relatedness individuation is hardly possible. Relatedness begins with conversation mostly. Therefore communication is indubitably important." --Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 609-610
On this basis the main body of the collective unconscious cannot be strictly said to be psychological but psychical. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 140
We think we shape ourselves and try to act authentically. But our identity is malleable, and the unconscious plays a big role in that. To adapt with integrity, to be true to yourself, requires a clear sense of who you are, really, and it is still context dependent. Individual human consciousness is formed in the dynamic interrelation of self and other, and therefore is inherently intersubjective. Deep memories guide our attention and inform our behavior.
We are not the authors of our own narrative. Psychological well-being is tied to a coherent sense of self identity, but is not its only source. Conscious and unconscious are two forces welded and embodied into one configuration. The later is a persistent inner voice. In the ancestral quest, 'the other' is no longer isolated but full of imaginative possibilities, mutual interaction, and influence without domination.
One cannot exist without the other. But this 'other' is not a parapsychological phenomena, nor a proper subject for a seance, ghostly tidings, a devil, nor a physical haunting, or any other supernatural literalism. But it is a dynamic psychoid reality -- a force majeure, also known as cas fortuit (French) or casus fortuitus (Latin) "chance occurrence, unavoidable accident."
It personifies in a variety of ways that the ancestors are 'dying to show you,' should you be 'dying to meet' them. Hence, we have so many idiomatic expressions that we are 'dying to hear, know, learn, or do,' -- 'dying to be me,' in which a radical transformation is implicit, 'dying to self.' How many ways are we dying to live, love, belong, to see, and to tell the story and to be heard? Or, 'dying to quit', 'dying to leave,' or 'dying to be free'and 'dying to be remembered.'
Mirror, Mirror
Genealogy is a self-creating artform -- the silver backing on our mirror of introspection. A reflective perspective "mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment—and soul-making means differentiating this middle ground."
James Hillman continues, “...you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.”
As Jung says in CW8, "If we do not fashion for ourselves a picture of the world, we do not see ourselves either, who are the faithful reflections of that world. Only when mirrored in our picture of the world can we see ourselves in the round. Only in our creative acts do we step forth into the light and see ourselves whole and complete. Never shall we put any face on the world other than our own, and we have to do this precisely in order to find ourselves. For higher than science or art as an end in itself stands man, the creator of his instruments." (Jung, "Analytical Psychology and Weltanschauung" (1928). P.737)
Hillman offers no recommendations; he doesn't try to fix things: "My suggestion is that there's no way out of the human condition," he says. "Sex, death, marriage, children, parents, illness. There's no way out. They're a misery, all of them. You can spend 10 years in therapy and it will still be sex, death, marriage . . . " http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/23/magazine/how-the-soul-is-sold.html?pagewanted=all
We can also apply what depth psychology says about this to our ancestral search. Sure, it's a challenge that sets a high bar, but really just means bringing a certain sensibility and aesthetic to the disciple of ancestral search itself. In this sense, we are 'dead serious' much as in art -- summoning deceased relatives back to consciousness with their wisdom, and hunger, and sacrificial demands.
The Tenth Muse
The tenth muse is your daimon, helpful awareness through the dark. We can call it a daemon, genius, or muse, guardian angel, death, nature, or any conventional element for the abyss of the transcendent imagination, which has infinite aspects. It is our true calling -- self-determination -- our fate -- soul's intimate connection with death.
When death finds us, it finds us alive. "The reality of the psyche is lived in the death of the literal," according to Gaston Bachelard. The muse connects with the mythic and can help or hinder the creative process. Death is a muse that inform us the darkness of the depths is haunted with loving souls. The essence of soul is the paradox of life/death, light/dark, male/female.
The muse supports imaginal life from the yawning darkness of the psychological depths, the soul of which is love itself -- eros/thanatos. The muse moves within us and the story comes up and out, conjuring images, deepening awareness -- a dialogue with nature.
Hillman strongly suggests the daemonic is a taskmaster, "to do these things or say these things or produce these things," he explains. "It's the slave driver. You spend your life making it, then it tortures you: 'What are you doing now? We want more. You didn't finish that.' " Charisma is a trait of genius and psychopath.
Ultimately, though, the symbol-using mortal body, aware because of its symbols of both the apparent immortality of ideas and its own inevitable death, is not merely a system of cognition, a cultural construct, or an operator of rules. It is a fragile, embodied soul in need of understanding, and most in need just when it is asked to enter into transactions of consequence with other souls. http://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1059&context=jaepl
The Man Who Fell to Birth
The magical creature, duende or tener duende ("having duende") loosely means having soul, a heightened state of emotion, expression and authenticity. El duende is the spirit of evocation, from inside as a physical/emotional response to art. It is what gives you chills, makes you smile or cry as a bodily reaction to an artistic performance that is particularly expressive.
Duende embodies at least four elements: irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical. ...The duende is an alternative to style, to mere virtuosity, to God-given grace and charm (what Spaniards call "angel"), and to the classical, artistic norms dictated by the muse. The artist must not surrender to the duende, but battle it skillfully.
Lorca writes: "The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought. I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, 'The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.' Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation.". He suggests, "everything that has black sounds in it, has duende. [i.e. emotional 'darkness'] "The duende's arrival always means a radical change in forms. It brings to old planes unknown feelings of freshness, with the quality of something newly created, like a miracle, and it produces an almost religious enthusiasm."
Hillman amplifies that view. "[T]he duende is the part that is connected to the earth, the blood, the party. It is this that Rilke refers to in his line that our role in life is to be decisively defeated by greater and greater beings. ...This is the struggle with the daimon .... While our culture has no words for this, other cultures have referred to it as "the ancestors" or "the spirits" that operate invisibly in our world. ... "the invisibles." What we do when we aren't aware of "the invisibles"? We buy insurance, and maybe even make a little money out of the catastrophe, instead of asking "Why did this happen now? What does is mean? What is my daimon's rag telling me?"" Hillman, Meade http://www.menweb.org/chardest.htm
"The "other" in us always seems alien and unacceptable; but if we let ourselves be aggrieved the feeling sinks in, and we are the richer for this little bit of self-knowledge." (Jung, "Psychological Aspects of the Kore" (1941). In CW 9, P. 918)
"This process of coming to terms with the Other in us is well worth while, because in this way we get to know aspects of our nature which we would not allow anybody else to show us and which we ourselves would never have admitted."
(Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955) CW 14: P. 706)
More Character; More Genius
In our genealogical work we call up the voices of the deep. There is no authoritative voice, only multiple readings. The ancient Greeks believed that our character or genius was an autonomous daimon who oversaw our experiences with mortality -- our fate -- our personal yet transcendent god.
"Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever enduring. He transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night." (Jung, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology of Poetry" (1922). In CW 15: The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature. P.129)
Every person has their spirit or guardian angel that remains throughout life and into death. Hillman notes, “Character forms a life regardless of how obscurely that life is lived and how little light falls on it from the stars.”
“To the question, “Why am I old?” the usual answer is, “Because I am becoming dead.” But the facts show that I reveal more character as I age, not more death.” (Hillman)
Pliny called daimons 'the generating breath of the universe’ (XVI xxxix, 93). Plato called daimons envoys and interpreters between heaven and earth. They are the medium of the prophetic and esoteric arts, and mediators of the spirit world.
The daimon has a specific interest in the outcome of our lives. It is a driving force or spiritual energy leading to the creative formation of individuality. This is where we find hope in an inevitably doomed existence...and perhaps taste our immortality. It is a formidable image that our family tree is not only our ancestors as insubstantial shades, but a forest of thousands of daimons.
Beyond Control
Jung referred to the daimon as something alien from the unconscious, an “archetype” or “numinous imperative." This force is as real as hunger and the fear of death, making demands of us and acting with authority. When we look for 'signs', we attend to our daimon, but it can also hide things from us in our blind spots.
Daemons, linked by Jung to anima/animus, are usually the opposite sex of their host. They share our feelings, thoughts and experiences. The daemon is an extension of the human but semi-independent, with praeternatural knowledge. When the human dies, the daimon fades away becoming part of everything.
Under its influence we can feel taken over. Intense and energetic feelings exceed normal human limits. In its “grip,” the daimon makes us feel swept up or carried by a force we don't understand. We seem possessed of an energy that transcends our conscious drives, needs and desires. It provokes by creating predicaments to solve and a sense of creative urgency.
Every person has their "seed-self", "guiding force", or acorn of character from birth. Our spirits grow from this seed that is our daimon. The inspirational spirit guides us toward the fulfillment of our potential and shows us our vulnerabilities and dream or imaginal life. The daimon holds the tension of opposites between good and bad aspects, but provokes internal conflict that leads to dialogue that promotes self-awareness. It is our voice of wisdom in the solitude.
Laws of Inheritance
Talent can be a childhood refuge from traumatic reality -- it takes us away from the awful place in a sort of creative dissociation. It can develop a superpowerful concentration and focus also seen in spiritual mystics. But it also exposes our wounds. Fear disguises genius with depression and anxiety. Lack of opportunity can be debilitating or degrading. Such genius needs recognition and nurturing for survival. Dispirited souls have lost their ‘daemons.’
All old trees had their daimon, and the World Tree -- mankind's most magnificent legend -- is no exception. The personified tree is the daimon at the same time because they are different categories of existence -- secular and sacred.
When we are 'called', we are called by our daimon, as Hillman notes: “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." If we ignore that call we may wither away or live half a life. The daimon helps us know ourselves. If we are fortunate the daimon informs our life and death with some nobility and poetry.
In Soul's Code, Hillman remind us, “Fatalism accounts for life as a whole. Whatever happens can be fit within the large generality of individuation, or my journey, or growth. Fatalism comforts, for it raises no questions. There's no need to examine just how events fit in.”
The tree articulates a psychophysical reality -- the life of the cosmos. Mind is rooted in the Unconscious much as a tree is rooted in the ground. Shaping matter as well as mind, it retains its character through endless variations. The psychoid is more fundamental than matter and psyche and the basis of synchronicity. This vital principle is an innate impulse that directs the behavior of an organism. The daemon tells us what to keep and where to keep it.
As Hillman summarizes: "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 neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life - and it prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns."
The Acorn Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree
Meaning is essential to tree phenomenology. Again, its character is the personal or family daimon. The tree is the image and mirror of our condition. It is an ancient idea that if a tree is planted at our birth our fate is shared with it. Other families plant memorial trees for the deceased. This describes the character of the family tree and symbol of wholeness.
Hillman suggests it goes beyond meaning: “It seems, as one becomes older, / That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence,” wrote T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets, which meditates on time, age, and memory, goes on to say, “We had the experience but missed the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores the experience / In a different form, beyond any meaning.”
Developmental Escalation
Hillman said the genius reveals both fears and talents in very young children. They may have a premature experience of the self [not-me] as an active factor in childhood development -- accelerated psychic growth. Prodigies are naturally endowed with exceptional abilities in youth.
The adult can remain burdened by the child prodigy routine, including self-expectations and drive. Drive can jump the tracks. The inner child fails to mature and may turn self-destructive, as the recovery movement showed. Escaping reason and reality can only be balanced by embracing the mystery in our unique way. If spirituality becomes a physical experience: meditation, or a drug/music-induced trip, doing psychogenealogy can restore spirituality as a relationship.
Some children fear identifying their genius for personal and social reasons. They don't want to 'pwn' it or feel or be perceived as different, even extraordinary. Hubris, exhibitionism, and competitiveness push us ahead of ourselves. The creative genius who peaks to early is a story trope. Some fight even harder to get their grief out of the basement. Nothing is going to hit as hard as life.
In a dysplasia of cognitive and affective development, cognitive stages outpace affective development which is stalled (Gowan). This block (the gulf between innate and actualized talents) is the cause of most absence of creativity in gifted adults and sometimes lead to non-actualizing or self-destructive tendencies. M.-L. von Franz said “the wounded healer IS the archetype of the Self [our wholeness, the God within] and is at the bottom of all genuine healing procedures." (Creativity & Giftedness)
But the pedigree doesn't illustrate the argument as much as embody it -- the genius and the wound are inherited and inherent. Certain wounds or deficits may come with genius and require challenges to release the gift and its new perspective. The wound lets in the energy that pushes or drags us to make us whole. Our symptoms are aspects of the wound and our genius, and this notion conforms with applying family therapies within the genealogical core generations. It frees the humane individual for self-actualization.
Like all archetypal symbols, the symbol of the tree has undergone a development of meaning in the course of the centuries. It is far removed from the original meaning of the shamanistic tree, even though certain basic features prove to be unalterable. The psychoid form underlying any archetypal image retains its character at all stages of development, though empirically it is capable of endless variations. The outward form of the tree may change in the course of time, but the richness and vitality of a symbol are expressed more in its change of meaning.
(Jung,CW13 ¶ 350)
This plant is an inner, spiritual growth, the development of a tree of life and knowledge which played a great role in alchemy....In general it is advisable to watch these inner developments and not let them slip back into the unconscious, lest they get stuck in the physiological sphere, or rather in the realm of the [psychoid] unconscious which merges with the body, where they give rise to pathological formations which a wise man carefully avoids. (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 607-608)
The daimon is our spiritual guide or self, and our character -- a divine mediating power that impels our action and drives or mediates our destiny. Destiny is not something over which we can gain control. We can only learn to dance with it. It is what makes us unique in relation to the world. This inborn immortal factor embodies our innate talents, inherent gifts, and positive or negative natural tendencies.
This supreme form of soul is our constant companion and source of inspiration -- like the Latin genii, our genius. This "genius" (from the Latin genere) means to generate, to beget, making the daimon the voice of the generative process in us. It can be a personification of the transcendent function, experienced in dreams and in our acts of doing and becoming.
The daimon is also our suffering, emotional disorders, and more, but could also heal, and promote health, happiness, resilience, perseverance, and harmony. The vitality of the inner universe is mobilized in happiness, misery, regret. The daimon can inform even a painful death with some poetry and grace.
Suffering can be produced by painful states of mind such as hatred, envy, alienation, scapegoating, cruelty, and loneliness. The daimon can also bring altruism, empathy, compassion, concern, care, consolation, and pity. It brings understanding of the beauty, compassion, and the foundation of wisdom. It is the psychobiological transformations of epigenetics, changing our responses to life experiences.
Regardless of the nature of the genes we inherit from our parents, dynamic change at this level allows us almost unlimited influence on our fate. Beyond "biology as destiny" is “self-directed biological transformation,” but under the daimon, not the ego. The disruptive and transformative reality of the individuation process manifests the uncanny otherness of the unconsvious.
The angels are a strange genus: they are precisely what they are and cannot be anything else. They are in themselves soulless beings who represent nothing but the thoughts and intuitions of their Lord. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Pages 327-328.
The idea of angels, archangels, “principalities and powers” in St. Paul, the archons of the Gnostics, the heavenly hierarchy of Dionysius the Areopagite, all come from the perception of the relative autonomy of the archetypes. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Page 66, Para 104.
Man is also distinct from the angels because he can receive revelations, be disobedient, grow and change. God changes too and is therefore especially interested in man. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 42.
We have as a matter of fact been able to correct a number of projections. Whether this amounts to much or little, and whether it is a real advance or only an apparent one, is known only to the angels. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 504-506
If consciousness had never split off from the unconscious—an eternally repeated event symbolized as the fall of the angels and the disobedience of the first parents—this problem would never have arisen, any more than would the question of environmental adaptation. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 339.
Why, when Pope Pius XII in one of his last discourses deplored that the world was no longer conscious enough of the presence of angels, he was saying to his faithful Catholics in Christian terms exactly what I am trying to say in terms of psychology to those who stand more chance of understanding this language than any other. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 410-423
But God, who also does not hear our prayers, wants to become man, and for that purpose he has chosen, through the Holy Ghost, the creaturely man filled with darkness—the natural man who is tainted with original sin and who learnt the divine arts and sciences from the fallen angels. ~Carl Jung, CW 11, Para 746.
Every country or people has its own angel, just as the earth has a soul. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 432.
The only thing that really matters now is whether man can climb up to a higher moral level, to a higher plane of consciousness, in order to be equal to the superhuman powers which the fallen angels have played into his hands. ~Carl Jung, Answer to Job, Para 746.
A life without inner contradiction is either only half a life or else a life in the Beyond, which is destined only for angels. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 375.
The word meditation is used, when someone holds an inner dialogue (colloquium) with someone else who is invisible, and also when God is invoked, or when someone speaks to himself or to his good angel. ~Dr. Rulandus, Cited ETH, Page 171.
In these terrible days when evil is once again inundating the world in every conceivable form, I want you to know that I am thinking of you and of your family in Hungary, and hope with you that the avenging angel will pass by their door. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 336.
Around the birth of Christ, there follows the Age of Pisces. Pisces is a water sign.
That is probably why we have to look for the spirit in the water, in life’s flow of images, and in the unconscious. And now we are on the threshold of the sign of Aquarius. The air element is assigned to it, and it is symbolized by an angel or a human being, instead of an animal. Here the spirit is meant to become something subtle again, and man to become who he is. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Pages 354-355.
(c)2015-2016; All Rights Reserved, Iona Miller, Sangreality Trust
iona_m@yahoo.com
Fair Use Notice
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
iona_m@yahoo.com
Fair Use Notice
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
