On Daimons and True Will
So here is a thing it took me years to realise: Our holy daimon has neither a clue nor any interest in what we want. She/he isn’t concerned with our True Will. Let me explain.
In my book Holy Daimon (Scarlet Imprint, 2018 and 2023) I offer the most approximate analogy I have yet found to explain a human’s relation to their holy daimon. Let me quote this section here. In case you read the book, just skip forward.
Imagine a doctor who has a difficult disease to cure. The disease is hidden in the body of a patient. As the disease is widespread, the doctor cannot simply cut open the patient and take out the affected organs. The approach has to be more subtle, yet no less determined or effective. The doctor inserts a thin cable into the body of the patient. Attached to the end of the cable is a tiny device consisting of a camera and a laser. The recorded images from inside the patient’s body are sent through the cable to a screen for the doctor to look at as he directs the device and operates on the patient.
Now this little setup in our imaginary operating theatre is all we need to get a more realistic picture of our relationship with our holy daimon. You, as in your current incarnated self, are the camera at the end of the tube. The doctor is your holy daimon. The patient is the world of creation into which you have been fully immersed. The beginning of this operation was the point of your first incarnation, and its end will be your last. Over the course of the entire operation the doctor will use many different cameras on the tube. However, both the screen and the hard drive that stores the camera’s images will always be the same.
What can we take from this?
• First, there is no need for the holy daimon to ‘talk’ to the camera at the end of the tube. She/he is in control of it already. Even if they never see each other, their ‘relationship’ is perfectly fine. It ‘just works.’
• Second, the only thing the doctor needs the camera to do is to ‘record’: to point the laser and follow the lead she/he is giving.
• Third, emotions don’t play a role here. It doesn’t matter if the camera finds what it records pleasant or unpleasant. Its only job is to explore the body of the patient objectively and operate on it successfully.
• Fourth, if the camera developed a conscious free will of its own and started to act independently from the doctor’s lead, then it would mess up the operation. The camera has no idea where it is, why it was put there, or how deliberate actions to save something much bigger than it are being acted out through it. (p. 123 - 124)
So, examining doctor and endoscopic ocular. From all I practically learned about the relationship with my daimon that analogy getting pretty close. This entire inner and outer body of mine is the ocular, my daimon is the operating doctor. I guess by now you realise the irony of calling him/her “my” holy daimon. It’s rather the other way around, I am her/his human. Or to be precise: I am her/his human ocular in the body of the world.
The above aspect I had figured out only weeks into our communion. The following insight, unfortunately, took me an entire 15 years to grasp. I only realised it earlier in 2023.
To stay with the analogy: An operating doctor has a unique purpose for each examination they undertake. Doctors don’t insert endoscopes into a patient’s body just to go for a joyride. They are on a mission and choose the shortest and safest way from the entry point to the point of exploration in the body to be examined. Now, this is where the above analogy breaks down. For our daimon does not define a purpose on our behalf. Or at least, I should say, the daimon I call “my” daimon has no particular life goals for me. Instead, s/he is interested in absolutely all and any of my experiences. I can feed her/him sadness, joy, anger, love, numbness, excitement, bitterness, and sweetness - and she/he will inhale them all with equal and utter curiosity. Our daimon, that is my current working hypothesis, drinks all of our life, irrespective of taste, viscosity, color, or dose. They are angelic witnesses to the account of our existence, irrespective of the pathways the river of our lives takes down the mountain of the earth.
What Socrates said about his daimon is something I cannot verify at all from my one lived experience. Never has “my” daimon “warned” me about an act or decision, whether past, present, or future. All the advice I received from her/him - and there's a lot of advice I've received over the last decade and a half - was about the quality of my presence. It was about how to hold myself towards this world, how to be present in it. And of course, it was so much more than advise: Every time we commune consciously the daimon gives me fresh breath and new strength, resilience and respite, a smile and a lot of similitude. This then is the danger of “becoming alike to the angelic mind” (see: Black Abbot • White Magic, Scarlet Imprint, 2021). It’s the peril of stagnating in the fascinating and pacifying presence of our daimons. The danger of giving ourselves up and over to them. The danger to exhale, and speak to ourselves: I have arrived. This is enough. Just breathing in your blinding light is all I ever want and need. Because that would be a medical instrument falling in love with the doctor performing the operation. The two are intentionally distinct and have different tasks: one to oversee the entire process, the other to perform a particular routine. And it is us humans who own the laborious routine of making hard choices.
It is upon us and us alone to find, define and walk our path through the body of creation. Take my word for it or prove me wrong. I am convinced that no actual personal daimon will ever choose a direction of travel on our behalf. They weave and we walk.
This gets us to an essential point. One I was only able to shift into focus and understand late last year: We can indeed achieve communion with our Holy Daimon and yet remain entirely clueless about our True Will. At least this is what happened to me for several years.
Well, here it would be nice if I could unravel the mysteries of True Will. I am afraid I’ll have to disappoint. This is a realm of mysteries I am just walking into myself... However, what I have figured out so far is that these mysteries certainly lead us into the flesh and through the flesh. If you will, all my goêtic writings are live performances, unrehearsed acts, ferocious expeditions into the mysteries of True Will. Because even under my own skin it’s not just one person who wants something. The deeper I walk into these mysteries, the more I realise that there is a mountain will and a river will, a dragon will and a mother will, an ancestral will and many animal wills. And they all flow through me. My flesh is the point where their rivers meet, my bone is the crossing of their bridges. And, I would venture to guess, it is the same for you.
True Will, it seems to me today, is a realm of mysteries even harder to unravel than communion with our daimon. Statistics would support this point: In the course of our lives, we all try to find out what we really want. Only a few of us succeed. Very few of us humans, on the other hand, actually set out to achieve communion with their holy daimon. In proportion, many more people succeed in the second endeavour than the first.
I guess, someday I aspire to write a book on True Will, with the same momentary certainty and lived evidence that I was able to do with my holy daimon. Such a book would by no means be objectively true or anything resembling dogma. But it would be a summary of my own personal doxa, that is, my personal folklore marked in blood. A truthful echo of the melodies I have sung with the spirits in moments of happiness, bliss, delight, but also of bitter intent and stinging resolution.
Until then, I would like to offer the following thought - both to myself and to you, if you would like to hear it. As flawed and feeble, as blind and bumbling as we human beings may be, nothing absolves us of the responsibility to live our own lives. This life. In this moment. No gods, no daimons, no authorities or institutions can absolve us from the terrible dilemma of finding our own path through the night. It is Prometheus all the way.
