The Demon and the Daimon

A few days ago, I introduced a very important psycho-therapist who devoted three entire books on the subject of human evil which he related to the Christian idea of sin. Today I shall introduce another writer who approached the problem of evil by clarifying three concepts which might have caused a great deal of confusion in the mind of a non-Westerner. The confusion might have arisen from the use of words which look remarkably similar to each other: "devil", "demon" and "daemon" or "daimon". The meanings of these words might have changed in the course of history. Stephen A Diamond clarified this for us in an  article called "Redeming Our Devils and Demons."

According to Diamond, the concern of psychologist on the problem of evil is not new at all. Freud dealt with it. So have a number of others like C G Jung, Erich Fromm, Rollo May, Menninger, Robert Jay Lifton and more recently M Scott Peck. Whilst Freud thinks that  there is an eternal battle between two instincts, a good life instinct which he terms Eros and an evil death instinct which he terms Thanatos, with evil ever dominating this tragic duel, Jung prefers to use the term "shadow" to distinguish it from the traditional individual moral evil and the evil in collective morality. Based on Swiss-Protestant tradition of individual conscience, Jung thinks that only when the individual conscience takes moral commandments and social prohibitions as absolutes and ignores all other impulses of the psyche does it become pathological, negative and evil. For May, evil has become a determinant social reality and can no longer be dissmssed from the world by a circumlocution. But he distinguishes concept of the daimon from the traditional Judeo-Christian symbol of cosmic evil. He thinks that the concept of the devil is unsatisfactory because "it projects the power outside the self and opens up the way for all kinds of psychological projection.". Peck too draws a distinction between human evil and demonic evil. He sees human evil as a "specific form of mental illness" a chronic, insidious kind of "malignant narcissism" but in his later writings like Glimpses of the Devil : A Psychiatrist's Personal Accounts of Possession, Exorcism and Redemption (2005) he saw evidence which compelled him to think of "demonic evil" as supernatural in origin and as the result of a direct possession by minor demons or by Satan for which exorcism is the necessary treatment.

In the opinion of Diamond, Jung's concept of the "shadow" and May's model of the "daimonic" have helped to pave the way for "a more progressive psychology of evil". Evil has long been personified by what has been called "the Devil/devil" which Freud thought was the entity upon whom we have projected our hostility and to whom we associate the spirit of persons not long dead. But historically the demons have served as the "scapegoats" and repositories for all sorts of unacceptable or threatening human impulses and emotions, especially those surrounding inescapable death. But once confronted and integrated by the mourners, these evil demons were "revered as ancestors" to whom one appealed for help in times of stress.

But May adopted from existentialist theologian Paul Tillich the Medieval concept of the "daimonic" to rival the concept of the "devil".To him, the term "devil" is "unsatisfactory because it projects the power outside the self and opens the way for all kinds of psychological projection." "Demons are nothing other than instruders from the unconscious, spontaneous irruptions of the unconscious complexes into the continuing of the conscious process, Complexes are comparable to demons which fitfully harass our thought and actions." According to the Wikipedia, "in religion and mythology and occultism, a demon is a supernatural being that is generally described as a malevolent spirit...but the original neutral connotations of the Greek word daimon does not carry the negative ones which were later projected on ot it, as Christianity spread.". The negative evil connotations first began with the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible, later inherited by the Koine text of the New Testament. Some scholars believe that large portions of demonoloyg of Judaism which influenced Christianity and Islam were derived from Zoroastrianism and were later adopted by the Jew during the Persian Era. For this reason, extreme neurotic disturbance were conceived of as "demonic possession". In the Medieval Europe, such emotional disorders were thought to be the work of demons flying about in the night to possess the soul of its unfortunate vicitms. This kind of imagery still survive today in the paranoid's '"certainty" of being influenced by aliens in flying saucers and in such expressions as "having bats in the belfry". But since Descartes, the mind has been separated from the body, the subject from object, and only those human experience which can be measured or quantitied are considered "real". Whilst this new conception helped to rid the world of superstition, witchcraft and the whole host of mythical creatures, both evil and good, like fairies, elves etc, it had also the unfortunate result of "disenchanting" the world and of leaving us out of tune not only with Nature but with ourselves as well. 

Jung spent his entire life examining archetypal forces of the unconscious and concluded that they "possess a specific energy which causes or compels definite modes of behavior or impulses" and that under certain circumstances, may have a "possessive or obsessive force (numinosity)" which he thought was "in accord with their nature" as "daimonia". To May, the daimonic is "any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person. Sex and eros, anger and rage, and the craving for power are examples. The daimonic can be either creative or destructive and is normally both. When this power goes awry, and one element usurps control over the total personality, we have 'daimon possession', the traditional name through history for psychosis. The daimonic is obviously not an entity but refers to a fundamental, archetypal function of human experience--an existential reality."

Originally, daimons could be both good or evil, constructive and destructive e.g in pre-Hellenic Greece and in Egypt. It was an "undifferentiated, impersonal, primal force of nature" and could be a source of creative spiritual guidance as well as of destruction e.g Eros was a daimon. However during the Hellenistic and Christian eras, the split between the good and evil side of daimon became more prounounced, angels being allied to God and devils to Satan. To May, there might have been an expectation that with this split, "it would be easier for man to face and conquer the devil.". To Diamond, "we can never hope to conquer our so-called devils and demons by destroying them; we must learn instead to acknowledge and assimilate what they symbolize into our selves and our daily lives."

For most of us today, the devil has been reduced to a lifeless concept, a sign, not a true symbol, of a rejected, unscientific, and superstitious religious system. But now, evil appears everywhere in the form of pathological anger, rage, hostility, vicious interpersonal savagery and senseless violence. The reason might be that we are now living in a period of unprecedented rapid change and stress and because of a lack of a new "pyschologically accurate, integrating and meaningful myth", some have already seized upon the timeworn symbol of the devil "to express their distubring encounter with the destructive side of the daimonic." as evidenced by the proliferation of Satanic cults. To Diamond, this is a desperate attempt to find "some personal signficance", to seek to "belong" to "the transpersonal realm". What is needed now is a new or renewed concept of that realm represented by the devil which shall include the creative as well as the destructive side of that elemental power.

For May, the word "devil" comes from the Greek word "diabolos" (the diabolic) which literally means "to tear apart" (dia-bollein) which is the antonym of "symbolic" (sym-bollen which means "to throw together')  or to unite. May says: "The symbolic is that which draws together, ties, integrates the individual in himself and with his group; the diabolic, in contrast, is that which disintegrates and tears apart. Both of these are present in the daimonic." Whilst there are many similarities between May's concept of the daimonic and Jung's concept of the shadow, there are also notable differences. There is a danger that the Jungian shadow may project evil not onto some external entity such as the devil, but to a "relatively autonomous 'splinter personality' deep within us, the compensatory "shadow", "the stranger", "the other"as if it were not a legitimate part of the self. May wishes to emphasize the role of the self to work for or against the integration of the self. To him the daimonic becomes evil or demonic only when we try to suppress, deny, or otherwise try to exclude it from consciousness and thereofore potentiates in the process the violent eruptions of anger, rage, social destuctiveness we do not wish to see. But if "we choose instead to constructively integrate the daimonic into our personality, we participate in the metamorphic process of creativity". Another difference is that whilst May's daimonic includes and incorporates Jung's "shadow" and "Self", as well as the archetype of anima and animus and whilst Jung differentiates the shadow from the Self, the "personal shadow" from the "collective and archetypcal shadow", May makes no such distinctions. To him it is "a great mistake" to "relate some of these 'souls' or 'daimons' to the Jungian concepts of the shadow, anima, animus and Self" and "to suppose that the shadow, the anima (or animus) and the Self appear separately in a person's unconscious, neatly timed and in definable order...If we look for personification of the Self among the daimons of antiquity, we see that certain daimons are more like a mixture of shadow and Self, or of animus-anima and Self, and that is , in fact, what they are. In other words, they represent the still undifferentiated 'other' unconscious personality of the individual."

Whatever might be the differences between Jung and May, there can be little doubt that facing and assimilating our shadows will make us realize that the totality of our personal psyche consist of both good and evil, the rational and the irrational, the masculine and the feminine, the conscious and the unconscious polarities. By bravely voicing our inner "demons" or those tendencies within ourselves we most fear, flee from and hence are obsessed or haunted by, we "transmute" them into our "helpful allies" in the form of the "newly liberated, life-giving psychic energy, for use in constructive acitivity" To Diamond, it is during this process that we will "discover the paradox that many artists perceive: That which we had previously run from and rejected turns out to be the redemptive source of vitality, creativity and authentic spirituality.".

This exploration of the realms of the shadow, the Self, the devil, the demonic, the daimonic, the archetype has confirmed a conviction that I have long held viz  that man is neither wholly good or wholly evil, but partly both and that whilst it may as a result of the necessity of having to make numerous pressing pragmatic decisions within a short timeon whether to do or refrain from taking action in the specific existential conditions of our everyday lives as a human being, having to eat, to find things to eat, to grow, to mate, to procreate, we may have to formulate certain rules of thumb and for such purposes have to make distinctions between what is self, what is not self, what is subjective, what is objective, what is beneficial and what is prejudicial, what is "good" and what is "bad" or "evil", what pertains to our body and what pertains to our "soul" or "spirit" etc, we may have forgotten that most of our decisions are "unconscious" or semi-automatic, and that we only  make use of our conscious awareness when what appears to our immediate experience do not correspond to the rough and ready categories we have built up from our previous experience and that because we are not aware of how our unconscious works silently beneath the surface of our awareness or consciousness to influence our choices including our moral choices, we may have alienated one part of our selves with the other which we have polarized as "bad" or "evil" and therefore become a "stranger" to that other part which is equally important for our survival and which in the proper contexts may prove to be the source of our own salvation!  Thanks to the psycho-analysts and the researchers of our consciousness and of our unconcious and sub-conscious, we now have a much better understanding of our "selves". There is no other way that we can help ourselves and others except through knowledge. That is why I must never cease to learn and to share what I have learned with those who may not have the time, the inclination or the perseverance to do so.