You are not going to walk away from here with any answers. Get angry at me. Go ahead. Some night, many years from now, maybe someone will choose to explain what happened, but for now you have to accept what you have seen. You no longer need to worry. The diamonic is any natural function which has the power to take over the power to take over the whole person. Pleasures of the flesh and eros, anger and rage, and the craving for power are examples. The diamonic can be either creative or destructive and is normally both. When this power goes awry and one element usurps control over the total personality, we have daimon possession, the traditional name through history for psychosis. The daimonic is obviously not an entity but refers to a fundamental, archetypal function of human experience—an existential reality in modern mortals and, so far as we know, in all mortals. The diamonic is the urge in every being to affirm itself, assert itself, perpetuate and increase itself. The diamonic becomes evil when it usurps the total self without regard to the integration of that self, or to the unique forms and desires of others and their need for integration. It then appears as excessive aggression, hostility, cruelty—the things about ourselves which horrify us most, and which we repress whenever we can or, more likely, project on others. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6

However, these are the reverse side of the same assertion which empowers our creativity. All life is a flux between these two aspects of the daimonic. We can repress the daimonic, but we cannot avoid the toll of apathy and the tendency toward later explosion which such repression brings in its wake. If we do not acknowledge our emotional side, learn how to cultivate and appreciate it, then we lose out on an important part of life. Human beings are not mechanical or machinelike. They have a full range of emotional responses. If we are honest, most of us probably would admit that we would prefer a bit more feeling in the people around us. There must be a reason why emotions are part of human nature, though we cannot fully explain it. Probably there are survival values attached to certain strongly felt emotions such as fear, anger, surprise, and sorrow. However, even beyond this, a human being meeting the variety of experiences life presents cannot help but realize that a great part of really experiencing life is emotional and sensate and intuitive, as we well as merely cognitive. The Greek concept of daimon—the origin of our modern concept—included the creativity of the poet and artist as well as that of the ethical and religious leader, and is the contagious power which the lover has. Ecstasy, a divine madness, seizes the creative person. This is an early form of the puzzling and never-solved problem of the intimate relationship between the genius and mad person. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6

Some people believe their daimon is a kind of guardian. The daimonic is not conscience; for conscience is largely a social product, related to the cultural mores and, in psychoanalytic terms, to the power of the superego. The daimonic refers to the power of nature rather than the superego, and is beyond good and evil. Nor is it mortal’s recall to oneself, for its source lies in those realms where the self is rooted in natural forces which go beyond the self and are felt as the grasp of fate upon us. The daimonic arises from the ground of being rather than the self as such. It is shown particularly in creativity. Speaking of the tremendous power emanating from daimonic persons, all untied moral powers do not prevail against them. And they cannot be overcome expect by the Universe itself which they have challenged to combat. Happiness—or eudaimonism—in the Greek language was the result of being blesses with a good genius. Happiness is to live in harmony with one’s daimon. Nowadays, we would relate eudaimonism to the state of integration of potentialities and other aspects of one’s being, with behavior. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6

The daimon gives individual guidance in particular situations. The daimonic was translated into Latin as genii (or jinni). This is a concept in Roman religion from which our word genius comes and which originally meant a tutelar deity, a sprit presiding over the destiny of a person, and later became a particular mental endowment or talent. As genius (its root being the Latin genere) means to generate, to beget, so the daimonic voice of the generative process within the individual. The daimonic is the unique pattern of sensibilities and powers which constitutes the individual as a self in relation to one’s World. It can speak in dreams and to the sensitive person in conscious meditation and self-questioning. The deteriorated form of this concept, consisting of the belief that we are taken over by little demons flying around equipped with horns, is a projection of inner experience outward, reified into an objective reality. It was entirely right that the Enlightenment and Age of Reason, in the flush of their success in making all life reasonable, should have thrown this out, and have regarded it as a deteriorated and unproductive approach to mental illness. However, only during the last couple of decades has it been clearly impressed upon us that in discarding the false demonology, we accepted, against out intention, a banality and a shallowness in our whole approach to mental disease. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6

This banality was specifically damaging to our experience of love and will. For the destructive activities of the daimonic are only the reverse side of its constructive motivation. If we throw out our devils, we had better be prepared to bid goodbye to our angels as well. In the daimonic lies our vitality, our capacity to open ourselves to the power of eros. We must rediscover the daimonic in a new form which will be adequate to our own predicament and fructifying for our own day. And this will not be a rediscovery alone but a recreation of the reality of the daimonic.  The daimonic needs to be directed and channeled. Here is where human consciousness becomes so important. We initially experience the daimoinc as a blind push. It is impersonal in the sense that it makes us nature’s tool. It pushes us toward the blind assertion of ourselves, as in rage, or toward the triumph of the species. When I am in a rage, it could not matter to me less who I am or who you are; I want only to strike out and destroy you. However, consciousness can integrate the daimonic, make it personal. This is the purpose of psychotherapy. The daimonic fights against death, fights always to assert its own vitality, accepts no three-score and ten or other timetable of life. It is this daimonic which is referred to when we adjure someone who is seriously ill not to give up the fight. The daimonic will never take a rational no for an answer. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6

The daimonic will never take a rational no for an answer. In this respect the daimonic is the enemy of technology. It will accept no clock time or nine-to-five schedules or assembly lines to which we surrender ourselves as robots. If the daimonic is shown particularly in creativity, we should find the clearest testimonies to its presence in poets and artists. Poets often have a conscious awareness that they are struggling with the daimonic, and that the issue is their working something through the depts which push the self to a new place. Every poet is the Devil’s party. To live is to war with trolls in the heart and soul. To write is to sit in judgment on oneself. And in my heart the daemons and the gods wage an eternal battle. The daimonic is basically the other Will, which is believed to be both a force outside the being which is at the same time oriented into one’s personal being. These theories, of course, came about in a chaotic time of psychological and spiritual upheaval when the medieval period was dying and the modern not yet born. It was a time of actual fear among people of witchcraft, sorcerers, and others who claimed to know how to consort with the demons. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6