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Think. Think metaphorically. All those dismemberment myths from Dionysus to Christ had deity falling into Time and shattering into shards, pieces, the scintilla of soul scattered to make the world, life, etc. These are myths of our own falling out of the unconscious world into the conscious (especially with the creation of language, our tool of thought). "Splitting off from nature," we framed it. Long, long ago it was sensed that we also bring that shattered Oneness back together. The cup of remembrance (Er, Mnemosyne ) from Plato, the rituals of ecstasy, the re-collection of the Mass (where priest and congregation are all part of the process... "do this in memory *with* me") -- all are symbolic rituals that draw their meaning from the process of individuation, "acting the process out" in varying degrees of consciousness. A movement, a process.
All of which gets lost in fundamentalism. In "pinning down" the ineffable, fleshing out the symbolic into "flesh".
When I speak of djinns and angels here, it's in reference to the inner dialogue, projections and transformation of the peace and drama we create from things floating around in us, both known and unknown, and the nets we cast as we draw the world inside us. Not literal, but -- like mythos and religion -- literary, poetic, sometimes deliberately psychologically protective and searching. It's playful, metaphorical, the voice of the psyche. It even hopes to be aligned with what we know about history. But I'm aware of all that. As aware as I can be. (Extra credit: McGilchrist.)
Often it's the Pat Robertsons I'm trying to speak to, because their psychosis and all it shapes is foisted on children. On adults who vote. Presently, it holds a whole nation hostage. I don't know how to make them better. I only know to try, because we live in a world that belongs and depends on the work of all of us. That it's only as whole and well as we are. What beats my heart, beats your heart. Beats everyone's heart. That's the heart I speak from, the only faith I know.
"The devil is a symptom of consciousness," Jung said. What in the hell did he mean by that? Jung, a doctor, Jung also an ancient historian.
Let's take a stab at it.
demonic links to explore:
http://www.brynmawr.edu/classics/redmonds/H11-CSTS212.html
http://haldjas.folklore.ee/folklore/vol9/plotinus.htm
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/psco/year25/
Agathodaemon
As a species, we see ourselves as the "eyes and ears of a planet." That phrase comes from Joseph Campbell, and it's a metaphor for simple human consciousness, that thing that scripture, read poetically, which is how it was originally written, claims makes us in (an equally poetic) god's image. It speaks of the psyche of creatures who use language, beings split off from unconscious nature into consciousness. In the lysis of current Western culture, the awareness of this split goes back to a mysticism perhaps expressed best perhaps by Philo -- the deep meaning of the logos. As Jung points out, a literal consciousness distorts that meaning, thinking itself the whole shebang. We thus have that business of a mutable and evolving relationship with the unconscious, seen as the daimon in all his guises -- be it simply as the benign voice of the unconscious, or Robertson's evil tempter, or the connection back to Self -- to wholeness. These thousand names for deity project our attitude towards the unconscious, an attitude that defines an individual's conscious orientation.
Some notes on concept demon:Diabolos: to throw across, accuse (from Greek: διάβολος diábolos "slanderer, accuser" wiki)
In the floods of life, in the storm of work,
In Ebb and flow,
In warp and weft,
Cradle and grave,
An eternal sea,
A changing patchwork,
A glowing life,
At the whirring loom of Time I weave
The living clothes of the Deity.
~Goethe, the Earth Spirit to Faust
Jungy bits:
The unconscious is not a demonical monster, but a natural entity which, as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste, and intellectual judgment go, is completely neutral. It only becomes dangerous when our conscious attitude to it is hopelessly wrong. To the degree that we repress it, its danger increases.
~C.G.Jung The Practical Use Of Dream Analysis, Collected Works Vol. 16
The psychic depths are nature, and nature is creative life. Whatever values in the visible world are destroyed by modern relativism, the psyche will produce their equivalents.
~C.G.Jung, Modern Man in Search Of a Soul
In addition to technical processes of personality transformation, a natural individuation process is described as involving a spontaneous maturing of the personality. Natural transformation is evidenced in dreams symbolizing rebirth and in the intercourse between consciousness and some inner voice; this latter phenomenon, commonly described as talking to oneself, is seen as meditation in the alchemical sense. The inner voice is generally regarded as nonsense or as the voice of God; its real nature considered to be an unconscious counterpart to the ego. It is felt that if this psychic partner is recognized by the ego consciousness, the conflict between the two can have a positive effect. In alchemy, in ancient cults and in religion this inner presence is found personified as an external being such as Mercurius or Christ. ~CGJUNG, in CW v.9.1: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (abstract, p. 130-134).
***
Late Classical:
Macrobius (b. A.D. 360) explains the role of the Greek daemon (analogue to the Roman genius) in the process of the individual’s conception, birth, and destiny in the Saturnalia, a valuable source of information concerning pagan beliefs. Each human being, according to the Egyptians, is the product of the conjunction of Eros, Necessity or Fate, a daemon (related to the zodiacal position of the sun at the individual’s birth), and a tyche (related to the position of the moon at the individual’s birth). Macrobius etymologizes “daemon” as either “knowing of the future” or “burning, sharing”; the latter etymology links it with the sun, mens mundi, the regulator of the planets and pivot of the other eleven zodiacal signs (as it always occupies the remaining twelfth sign). When the sun passes through a particular sign of the zodiac at the time of an individual’s birth, it designates a temperament or daemon for him, and establishes, through its position in relation to the moon, his fortune or tyche. Contingent upon the season in which a man is born, i.e., a warm or cold one, indicating the extent of the sun’s warming power and its relationship to other planets and signs, his daemon or genius will be warm or cold, good or bad, jovial or saturnine. ~from The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Jane Chance Nitzsche
Late Antique thought stressed their (the demonic) ambiguous and anomalous nature. To Plutarch, writing at the beginning of our period, it was benign ambiguity: the demons were an "elegant solution" for the incongruities that arose from joining heaven and earth. In later centuries their role changed. From intermediate beings, they became an active source of falsehood and illusion in the human race. They gave dramatic intensity to doubts about how heaven and earth could be joined and made such doubts a permanent ingredient in the late Antique universe. The demons were an order far from perfect, one might even say "anomalous," beings. Their presence in the "earthly" regions introduced a constant element of indeterminacy and confusion into the clear structure that linked the rightful agents of the supernatural to their heavenly source. A few men were linked directly to the higher, stable regions of the universe; most men, however, partook of the incomplete, ambiguous quality of the demonic. Thus, with demons, Late Antique men found themselves flanked by an invisible society that shared with them all the incongruities and the tensions of their own visible
world." ~Peter Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity.
Plato:
Symposium (my favorite)
And now, she said, haven't I proved that you're one of the people who don't believe in the divinity of Love?
Yes, but what can he be, then? I asked her. A mortal?
Not by any means.
Well, what then?
What I told you before—halfway between mortal and immortal.
And what do you mean by that, Diotima?
A very powerful daimon, Socrates, and daimons, you know, are halfway between god and man.
What powers have they, then? I asked
They are the envoys and interpreters that ply between heaven and earth, flying upward with our worship and our prayers, and descending with the heavenly answers and commandments, and since they are between the two estates they weld both sides together and merge them into one great whole. They form the medium of the prophetic arts, of the priestly rites of sacrifice, initiation, and incantation, of divination and of sorcery, for the divine will not mingle directly with the human, and it is only through the mediation of the spirit world that man can have any intercourse, whether waking or sleeping, with the gods. And the man who is versed in such matters is said to have spiritual powers, as opposed to the mechanical powers of the man who is expert in the more mundane arts. There are many daimons, and many kinds of daimons, too, and Love is one of them.
(I assume the trans is Ben Jowett, perhaps the same one Oscar Wilde would have read or -- indeed! -- Thomas Taylor's... who influenced Keats )