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Greek · δαίμων

daimon

A companion in a story of a life, not a certificate of destiny.

Etymology

Greek daimōn: a divinity, a spirit, a lot, sometimes a guiding presence. Not originally a demon in the later Christian sense. Hillman, reading Plato’s Myth of Er, used the acorn and the daimon as a poetic psychology of vocation.1

Semantic range

What image of a life keeps returning. What was loved before it was useful. What biography, temperament, and reinforcement also explain.2

What the gloss loses

English demon contaminates the word. Destiny-talk hardens a metaphor into a fate.

Misuse

Treating recurrence as proof of predetermined destiny. The framework is poetic / psychological.

What image of your life keeps returning?

Notes

  1. Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940), s.v. δαίμων.
  2. James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).