DAIMON CLUB GENEALOGY

Daimon is an inner force, an inner passion, a mixture of desires and aspirations. Our daimon is the genius that lives with us, good and evil at the same time. As Blake would say, it's the marriage between heaven and hell. It's death in life and life in death. It's a kind of enthusiasm that guides us towards the search for knowledge, without believing in any superior entity. It's an olistic approach to life that struggles against any form of vanity, of stupid power and false authority. It's a form of magic, of ecstatic feeling,  it's the art of living for freedom without having to submit our inner thoughts to the banalities of our society. It's a dream that gives hope to our intellect, it's a mistery without solution. it's the absurdity of our life, it's a nonsensical joke. That's why I thought to link the surrealistic poetics with the spirit of my creation, and that's why the Daimon Club was born. Now I only hope to be able to communicate to other people this idea, and to divulge our love for equality, peace and freedom. (to read more about daimonology go to this page, but unfortunately it's in Italian, because I have still to translate it)

Carl William Brown

One of the first examples of surrealistic writer and daimon guided author was Laurence Sterne. He  was born in Ireland in 1713 end died in 1768. As a clergyman, Sterne was rather unusual. Besides being involved in frequent amorous escapades, together with some friends he formed a group called "The Demoniacks" which used to meet at Skelton Castle, a curious house on the border of the Cleveland Moors, (belonging to a friend of Sterne's, who called it "Crazy Castle", where they indulged in moderate revelry. When I found the Daimon Club I didn't know about Sterne's association, but now what I intend to point out is that unfortunately we don't have a castle, and it's always more difficult to find people who like to be open minded, not only from a sexual point of view, but also from an artistic and intellectual one.

Carl William Brown

When towards the end of 1997 Carl William Brown registered the first few pages of the Daimon Club website in the main search engines the term Daimon did not appear becuase as a matter of fact it was unknown. Therefore, digitally speaking, it was our association that has had the privilege of inaugurating what would soon have become a real phenomenon. Try to type today on the most famous Internet spider the word Daimon, or Daimon Club and you will immediately realize the real development of the trend.

Carl William Brown

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.
James Hillman

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.
James Hillman

Personal Daimons by Patrick Harpur

Guardian angels derived from Neoplatonism and, along with the other classes of angels, became part of Christian dogma at the Council of Nicaea (AD 325). But, long before this, the ancient Greeks believed that individuals were attached at birth to a daimon who determined, wholly or in part, their destiny. Philemon was clearly such a daimon for Jung, who emphasized the crucial part this strange Gnostic figure played in his life and work. Plato's mentor, Socrates, had a daimon who was famous for always saying "No." It did not enter into rational discourse with Socrates; it merely warned him when he was about to do something wrong (especially something displeasing to the gods), like the prompting of conscience...
However, Plato in Timaeus identified the individual daimon with the element of pure reason in man and so it became "a sort of lofty spirit-guide, or Freudian super-ego." This may be true of certain, perhaps exceptional individuals, but is is also true - as we shall see - that daimons are as likely to represent unreason or at least to be equivocal. But meanwhile it is instructive to consider the case of Napoleon. He had a familiar spirit "which protected him. which guided him, as a daemon, and which he called his star, or which visited him in the figure of a dwarf clothed in red that warned him."

This reminds us that personal daimons favor two forms by which to manifest: the abstract light, globe, oval and (as here) shining sphere, or the personification - angelic, manikin-like or whatever. It confirms, in other words, my speculation ... that the two forms are different manifestations of each other, with (in Napoleon's case) different functions: the star guides, the dwarf warns. Both are images of the soul, which is another way of understanding the daimon.

Indeed, it seems that, next to personification, daimons prefer luminous appearances or "phasmata," as the Syrian Neoplatonist Iamblichus (d. 326) called them. He was a real expert on daimons, and ufologists could do worse than study the distinctions he makes between phasmata. For instance, while phasmata of archangels are both "terrible and mild," their images "full of supernatural light," the phasmata of daimons are "various" and "dreadful." They appear "at different times ... in a different form, and appear at one time great, but at another small, yet are still recognized to be the phasmata of daemons." As we have seen, this could equally well describe their personifications. Their "operations," interestingly, "appear to be more rapid than they are in reality" (an observation which might be borne in mind by ufologists). Their images are "obscure," presenting themselves within a "turbid fire" which is "unstable."

The first of the great Neoplatonists, Plotinus (AD 204-70), maintained that the individual daimon was "not an anthropomorphic daemon, but an inner psychological principle," viz:- the level above that on which we consciously live, and so is both within and yet transcendent... Like Jung, he takes it as read that daimons are objective phenomena and thinks to emphasize only that, paradoxically, they manifest both inwardly (dreams, inspirations, thoughts, fantasies) and outwardly or transcendently (visions and apparitions). Plotinus does not, we notice - like the early Jung - speak of daimons as primarily "inner" and as seen outwardly only in "projection." He seems to agree with the later Jung - that there is a psyche "outside the body." However, his use of the word "transcendent" also suggests that the real distinction to be made is not between inner and outer, but between personal and impersonal. There is a sense, he seems to be saying, in which daimons can be both at once.

...[P]ersonal daimons are not fixed but can develop or unfold according to our own spiritual development. Jung might say: in the course of individuation, we move beyond the personal unconscious to the impersonal, collective unconscious, through the daimonic to the divine. Acording to Iamblichus, we are assigned a daimon at birth to govern and direct our lives but our task is to obtain a god in its place.

Ancient Hellenic Culture Hermetic Magic Theology and Daimonology

Quotes are from "Hermetic Magic" by Stephen Edred Flowers, Ph.D.

"Hermetic theology poses a number of questions or problems for the student to solve. What is a god? Is there only one, or are there many? By what names are the gods to be called?"

"Philosophical Hermeticism holds that the gods are creations of the universal mind or intelligence (Nous) and are in fact abstract functions or archetypes of relative being. This is the root cause of the happy sense of eclectism in the Hermetic tradition. In reality the various gods and goddesses of national (natural) traditions are mere images of real archetypes which in fact exist beyond their sensible images."

"But to the practical-minded magicians, the images cannot be dispensed with just because they are quasi-illusions. Magicians must inspire and motivate their own psyches to effective action."

"For the most part, the magicians would try to convince the power of a god to work for them, while the daimon would be something they would eventually try to absorb and make their own to work with at will."

"Angels on the other hand are quite different from daimons. The chief difference between them lies in the fact that the angel is not independent. It is the mere, messenger, or 'active principle', of a greater god."

"The ability to be eclectic in any effective way must be based on a deep level of understanding of the core principles that the gods and goddesses of various pantheons represent. It is not based on arbitrary choices predicated on questions of style or fashion."

PERSONAL VIEWPOINT

After reading the above material and some other resources, I have finally formed my Anthropos. I now believe that the gods and goddesses are the combination of the subconscious of all the people that believe in them. And just as the whole is greater than the parts, this group mind has a consciousness and personality all it's own.

The angels or superconscious of each individual is a personal communication path between the individual and this group mind (gods, goddesses). Therefore, if you want to communicate with a goddess or a god wants to communicate with you, it is done through such an angel.

A Daimon or the id, is the individual or group passion that powers magic. In order to effectively do magic you must be passionate about what you're trying to perform and/or you need to inspire passion in a number of others. This type of emotional communication is performed through a Daimon.

Soul and Body (an abstract from Patrick Harpur's remarkable book Daimonic Reality)

Traditional views of human nature have always allowed for (at least) two "souls" of the latter kind. In ancient Egypt, for instance, they were known as the ka and the ba; in China, hun and p'o. One of these souls inhabits the body and is the equivalent of what, faute de mieux, we call the ego. I will call it the rational ego to distinguish it from the second soul, variously called, in other cultures, the shadow-soul, ghost-soul, death-soul, image-soul and dream-soul, for which our culture has either the word "soul" or else no word, because it is not generally believed to exist. However, it does exist and can be thought of as an ego, in the sense that it confers identity and individuality. It enables us, that is - like the rational ego - to say "I." But it is an ego, not of consciousness, but of the unconscious; not a waking, but a dream ego; not a rational ego, but an irrational ego. I will call it the daimonic ego. Like the rational ego, it has a body - not a physical one but a dream-body, a "subtle" body such as daimons are imagined as having, an "astral" body as some esoteric doctrines say: in short, a daimonic body.

The combination of rational ego and physical body is not directly analogous to the daimonic ego and daimonic body because the latter are not, strictly speaking, experienced as separate. The daimonic body immediately reflects the daimonic ego, and vice versa. It is an imaginative body, an image, as we know from dreams, when it can wear whatever clothes it wishes and can even change its shape altogether. Suddenly it can shift from a position of observing someone to becoming that person - that is, it embodies the way in which the daimonic ego shifts its point of view, looking out of the eyes of a person whom the moment before it was watching, or feeling the emotions of someone in whom it was previously inducing those emotions.

Thus it is this daimonic ego-body, so to speak, which is the "soul" that can be "lost," the soul that, in the shaman, makes otherworld journeys. It is this which leaves the physical body in the "out-of-the-body" experiences or in fashionable "near-death experiences" when, typically, we "die" on the operating table, only to find that we are floating above our bodies, able to observe what is going on and to hear what the surgeons are saying (they are startled to have their words repeated to them later, when we recover). It is this soul, too, which can be seen by us, or others, in those cases of "bilocation" when our doppelgängers (doubles) appear mysteriously. It is this soul which, in Christian mystics, ascends towards the Godhead, sparking the debate as to whether it remains intact during mystical union (as a sense of identity) or whether it is, finally, dissolved in, or subsumed by, God.

The daimonic and rational egos are not as separate as, for the sake of convenience, I have made them out to be. They constantly flow into each other, just as our waking lives and dream lives influence each other. The daimonic ego can at any time dispossess consciousness of its rational ego as, for instance, when we are absorbed in some imaginative activity or when we are seized by a visionary experience. Conversely, the rational ego can traduce the daimonic, carrying over into dreams and visions those "daylight" attitudes which are wholly inappropriate to the twilight world of the daimons. Naturally, the rational ego is often frightened by the irrational images it encounters there. It tries to run away or lash out - only to find that it cannot move, because such literal muscular actions have no power to move the daimonic body.

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