Plato suggested we are each born with a unique daimon or guardian before we are born, and it has selected an image or a pattern that we will live on earth. The daimon oversaw our experiences with mortality — our fate — our personal yet transcendent god. When it wears a personal face, it is called an angel or a daimon, or genius. Its incorporeal form is the soul. It does not develop with education or maturity.

The daimon is the soul companion that guides us, but at birth we forget. The daimon remembers, however, what belongs to us, and therefore, it is our daimon that is the carrier of our destiny. It is essentially identical with Jung’s notion of the Self. Our daimon is a soul-guide, 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.

The Greeks called it “daimon,” the Romans “genius,” the Christians “guardian angel”. We call it “heart,” “spirit,” and “soul.” — anima or anima mundi. Anima is the ongoing source of life, the very breath of life that is generative, not only of the body, but also of what makes us human, giving us identity, personality and character. It shapes the way we perceive, understand, and make sense of the world. The ancients understood soul as the carrier of one’s genius or daimon. This invisible otherness is an animating force connecting us to the ancestors and to the gods themselves.

Palaeolithic, Neolithic and later Bronze-Age associated  serpent veneration with rain and fertility religious invocations in India. In the South Pacific, in Australia and in Central and South America, serpents were regarded as chthonian spirits of earth who possessed life-giving powers. Chaldean and Arabic words for “serpent” and “life” have a synergy. In Classical Greece, the Agathos Daimon was literally the “noble spirit”, a personal companion spirit ensuing health and good fortune. The Agathos Daimon was the numinous element portrayed in iconography as a serpent, The serpentine staff of Asklepios, the Drakon god of healing, is forerunner of the caduceus symbol of medicine. 

Our destiny leads us to soul-work; telos is the urge that propels the soul. Affects have telos, and it is through the transformational process that the telosis invoked. The locus, of our eternal individuality, the telos of that spiritual motion is the Angel, genius, or daimon. the “telos” or end-goal of eternity is not just at our personal end or the end of time , but in each moment. All psychic events have an innate telos. Telos compels life force.

Soul awakens encountering its archetypal image in the “imaginal world.” The personified presence of the soul’s heavenly twin is our guiding angel, or daimon. The angel is the inner guide, the hermeneutical principle, the opening to the origin, unveiling the divine face. It is uniquely and “imaginally” discernable by each visionary, where knowledge and being interpenetrate. Daemon is the soul that rules and moves our entire living being. The ‘daemonic’ includes all parts of the body.

In A Blue Fire and Healing Fiction, James Hillman has much to say about the overweening ego and its Faustian pursuit of manic psychic growth. When applied as a sort of prescription, he considers it to be self-aggrandizement, a hubris with a relentless drive to be shunned and avoided for a more soulful, fundamentally imagistic poetic approach. He cautions that the maxim originally meant, “Know that you are but human, not divine.” If we take a person, even ourselves, as a god and venerate them, then all possibility of illumination vanishes. Eliminating belief and conditioning ideologies opens us to images as they present themselves phenomenologically.

Hillman concludes, “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.

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. 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.

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.”

The daimon is a paleo-god, one that has always been with us. Jung called soul a life-giving daemon. Every person has their “seed-self”, “guiding force”, or acorn of character from birth. Our spirits grow from this seed that is our daimon. Like all archetypes, it has a light and a dark side — a mania, destructiveness, dark impulses, or possession (existential anxiety, anger, rage).

The inspirational spirit guides us toward the fulfillment of our potential and shows us our vulnerabilities and dream or imaginal life. Creativity is a constructive capacity to express the daimonic, which demands either positive or negative expression. The effect is naturally therapeutic, a channel for psychic energy.

Those for whom it becomes a vocation are called to the creative life, sometimes even possessed by the daimonic creative dynamic, giving substance and meaning to their artistry. When artists open to the unknown, they open to the unconscious.

Anxiety self-arises in the process itself as a sort of guide. When we surrender ego control of the process to the daimon, there are also moments of lucidity, clarity, passionate intensity that transcend mundane concerns.

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. Vocation is the voice that calls us to authentic being. Socrates said his daimon inevitably spoke to him in the negative—telling him what to avoid.

Leonardo da Vinci experienced it as his own sense of fate. Goethe’s daimon was a kind of spirit dwelling within him, compelling him to fulfill his destiny. Einstein’s inner voice shaped the direction of his speculations. 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.

Hillman suggests restlessness of heart, impatience, dissatisfaction, and yearning are daimonic feelings. Daimon is character and character is destiny, the individual, immortal 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. The daimon helps us know ourselves. A daimon is our divine element, an intercessor between gods and mankind. It’s a ‘serpentine’ companion spirit, the impersonal collective power of the gods to dispense destiny and the numinous as individual events and experience.

Psychologist Rollo May describes the classic Greek conception of the “daimonic” or darker side of our being, noting that the daimonic (unlike the demonic, which is merely destructive) is as much concerned with creativity as with negative  reactions.

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.

A destiny spirit, muse, 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 protector, but it only protects the part of us that serves its plan for us, because it springs from the impersonal Ground of being.

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.

Hillman argues that watered-down, popularized routine performance of active imagination feeds fantasies of power. He thinks we reach too far, grasping desperately with our unconscious drives for control. In other words, our motivation is the exact opposite of what we may think it is. A feedback loop shapes information flow.

He quotes Plotinus, saying, “It is for them to come to me, not for me to go to them.” For Hillman, “Each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny.” He makes a clear distinction that Jung’s method is not for “spiritual discipline, artistic creativity, premature escapism or transcendence of the worldly, moral philosophy, mystical vision or union, personal betterment, or magical effect.”

Active imagination is aimed at speech, not silence, or mystical activity. It is not for working on or by images with the human will. He doesn’t use words like individuation, projection, the Self as a ‘center of psyche’, or even unconscious. Hermeneutics just leads away from the specificity and inherent significance of the image into cross-cultural amplifications.

The soul is profoundly other with its own integrity. Ficino claimed three powers to soul’s essence: the powers of life, understanding, and desiring. It frees consciousness of science, turning events into experience of images. We know by means of vision those things we cannot see. Only the image actually presented embodies meaning. Metaphorical insight emerges from hearing while seeing.

Favoring soul over ego, the aim he claims is to avoid “the disease of literalism.” Psychic consciousness is a dialogue, a conversation rooted in love of soul and its inherent beauty. Its aim differs from art because it is not product-oriented but ouroboric self-understanding, unfolding story without end. So, “Know Thyself” becomes revelatory, nonlinear, discontinuous, and self-organizing.

Plato and Socrates used a mythical mode of imagination to heal souls — a healing return to the middle realm of mythology within this cosmos we actually inhabit. Myth captures the mystery and essence of living and being alive. Like alchemy, myth cannot be taken literally.

Hillman thought “Know Thyself” terminates when we leave linear time with the imaginal act, seeing the archetypal in an image through an imagistic approach sensing images and living nature. He brushes off the heroic, symbolic, and allegorical. We know ourselves through the pure uninterpreted revelations of psyche’s nature, a sort of disintegrated integration, not imposed self-improvement that constrains the soul.

As Hillman advises in The Soul’s Code, “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.”

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).

Plotinus says one’s character is one’s daimon, your character “given” to you in some sense, 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 but also “outside” the self.

Hillman concludes, “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.” 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.

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. The path through the opposites may be termed “The Middle Way” and is seen in examples from many cultures. For example, the Chinese concept of the Tao with its components Yin and Yang; the dictum of from ancient Delphi and Greek philosopher Aristotle to “Know Thyself” springs from Apollonian religion which asserts that “The Mean is best.” This is the basis of the Golden Mean in art and philosophy. In the working of the Tree of Life in Hermetic Qabalism, the mean is symbolized by the Middle Pillar.

More recently the opposites were united in the philosophical formula of Hegel: thesis-antithesis and synthesis. The path through the opposites is also symbolized as walking the razor’s edge. –Iona Miller, 2017

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. 

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.

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.

Anima Mundi, the World Soul also has a daimon that guides and cajoles her to her destiny, whatever that may be. The Anima Mundi and her Daimon are archetypal powers.