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American Daimones
Feb. 26th, 2023 04:20 pm
Eros and the Daimones
In Neoplatonic thought, daimones are a class of spiritual beings intermediate between gods or angels and human beings. Diamonds come in many varieties. They include the classical nature spirits that are familiar to students of Greek mythology, such as nymphs saters and so on. They include malevolent spirits, such as the lamia memorably exercise by Apollonius of Tyana. They even include spirits of the human dead.
There is one class of daimones which are greater and more powerful than the others. We could call these daimones proper, though that coinage is unique to me. These are those mighty forces in the cosmos and in human society which we are unable to escape, with which we have to deal, but-- and this is the critical point-- we must not worship. You know it that you are dealing with one of these daimones if you have a cultural, natural, religious or other force which comes back no matter how hard you try to repress it, usually in destructive ways, but which is equally destructive if you wholly give yourself over to it.
The classic example of such a dime on and the one who makes an appearance in some of Plato's most important works is Eros-- that is, erotic love. Eros makes a good exemplar of the entire class. Anyone who was raised in the sort of fundamentalist religious tradition which attempts to repressed or deny a rose knows what happens. He returns, usually in a destructive fashion. Sometimes the person who has attempted to repress their own Eros-- meaning, of course, their own sexuality-- develops a dangerous or simply unfulfillable sexual fetish; sometimes if they repress it very deeply and end up lashing out at others who remind them of that part of themselves; sometimes there are worse results. On the other hand, the consequences of the enslaving oneself to Eros are also all around us in our society, in the epidemic of pornography addiction, Hollywood's culture of sexual exploitation revealed by the Me Too movement, and the abuse crisis in the Catholic church. Eros is a daimon; he makes a bad god, and a bad demon.
There are many other daimones, spiritual forces that we must neither ignore or worship, in the same class. There is Eros's opposite number Anteros. There are forces like money and the marketplace; the harmful consequences of either worshiping or trying to eliminate these daimones were on display throughout the Cold War. There are nature spirits, from those nymphs and dryads I mentioned before and their equivalent and other lands, to mighty forces like the winds, the oceans, and great forests. These are mighty powers. They deserve our respect, and they will have our attention; James Frazer documented the consequences of worshiping them.
The daimones come in many different forms. According to some traditional Chinese demonologists, there are 64,000 types, which is how the Chinese say "uncountable." But the human mind finds it easier to grasp things if it can categorize them, and the Seven Classical Planets provide a convenient way of doing this. Under the Moon we have family and ancestry, the mysteries of motherhood, intoxicants from alcohol to entheogens and even a cup of coffee in the morning. Under Mercury, the mysteries of the marketplace, and also magic. Under Venus, Eros himself of course, as well as most forms of arts and entertainment, and femininity generally. Under the Sun, the mysteries of fatherhood, and everything that falls under the category of identity and individuation. Under mars, Anteros, every form of sport and physical culture, and masculinity generally. Under Jupiter accumulated wealth, and political power, and also religion. Under Saturn, the powers of the land, of places, countries and cities, Death, and the Dead.
This list is not intended to be exhaustive; doubtless you can think of more examples. What it is intended to do is to provide an entry point into something I've wanted to discuss here for some time.
If you read Proclus's Elements of Theology, you will see that he starts by discussing the One, which is the highest term in Neoplatonic thought, and works his way downward through a series of theses concerning the succeeding terms, the Henads, Life, and Intellec, until finally concluding with a discussion of the descent of souls like yours and mine into generation. This was a common way of thinking in earlier times, to beginw ith the most exalted and abstract principles and work one's way downward into the concrete and quotidian. This is more or less the opposite to how modern people think, and it's one of the things that can make approaching ancient philosophy somewhat difficult. I would rather think more like an ancient than a modern, but I cannot help the era of my birth, and neither can my readers. But what I hope is that by beginning this discussion with the daimones, who are midway between humans and God, can act as a kind of compromise.
Ancestral Daimones
I know a man who is a high ranking officer in the United States army. He is also of Eastern European descent-- to protect his identity, we'll say he's Polish, but that isn't true. What he will tell you, though, is this: "My father was Polish. I'm American." In fact his father was forced to flee to the United States during World War II, after killing an invading Russian soldier. The result is that this man hates the Russia and supports the Biden Administration's current aggressive posture toward that nation. This post isn't about whether or not Biden is right, by the way. The point is only that this man, who is in a position to have at least some measurable influence on American foreign policy, is motivated in his attitudes by his Polish ancestry. On the other hand, if you ask him directly about it, he will insist that he is not Polish. His father was Polish.
The trouble is that his actions belie his words. Americans have never fought a war with Russians except in the context of the Cold War, which was against the Soviet Union, not Russia. Americans have no reason to have an emotional antipathy of that kind toward Russians-- but Poles do. In his attitude, he's a Pole.
I have a friend who married a girl from Germany. (That's not true either, and you'll probably be able to guess which country she's really from.) They had a baby and moved back to our home town here in the United States. Where we grew up, ethnic culture is very strong, and people identify as German, Polish, Italian or whathaveyou. My friend's wife is very upset by this, because she's having a hard time adapting to life in the United States, and it doesn't make it easier for her when Americans tell her "I'm German, too."
I sympathize with her, but the trouble is, the Americans in question are Germans, too. It's not just that German cultural identity is strong in the city in which they've settled, though it is. It is also quite simply that we have an enormous amount of evidence showing that no immigrant group to the United States ever fully "assimilates." Cultural and behavioral patterns persist generation after generation, even among those groups who explicitly reject their previous cultural heritage. Some things endure.
An academic named Jason Richwine has done good work on this issue. Here is a talk he gave at last year's National Conservatism convention, in which he discussed some of these issues, including the way that Donald Trump's support was strongest among Americans descended from the Scots-Irish. He also references a paper which you can read here, discussing civic participation among various European groups in the United States. Americans of Swedish and Danish descent have the highest levels of civic participation. Italians are much lower, Germans and English somewhere in the middle. Now much of this data comes from rural towns in the American Midwest, where everyone is "white" and everything is as American as can be. This suggests to me that, in the United States, ethnic ancestry is daimonic in exactly the sense I described above.
Ancestral Daimones
I know a man who is a high ranking officer in the United States army. He is also of Eastern European descent-- to protect his identity, we'll say he's Polish, but that isn't true. What he will tell you, though, is this: "My father was Polish. I'm American." In fact his father was forced to flee to the United States during World War II, after killing an invading Russian soldier. The result is that this man hates the Russia and supports the Biden Administration's current aggressive posture toward that nation. This post isn't about whether or not Biden is right, by the way. The point is only that this man, who is in a position to have at least some measurable influence on American foreign policy, is motivated in his attitudes by his Polish ancestry. On the other hand, if you ask him directly about it, he will insist that he is not Polish. His father was Polish.
The trouble is that his actions belie his words. Americans have never fought a war with Russians except in the context of the Cold War, which was against the Soviet Union, not Russia. Americans have no reason to have an emotional antipathy of that kind toward Russians-- but Poles do. In his attitude, he's a Pole.
I have a friend who married a girl from Germany. (That's not true either, and you'll probably be able to guess which country she's really from.) They had a baby and moved back to our home town here in the United States. Where we grew up, ethnic culture is very strong, and people identify as German, Polish, Italian or whathaveyou. My friend's wife is very upset by this, because she's having a hard time adapting to life in the United States, and it doesn't make it easier for her when Americans tell her "I'm German, too."
I sympathize with her, but the trouble is, the Americans in question are Germans, too. It's not just that German cultural identity is strong in the city in which they've settled, though it is. It is also quite simply that we have an enormous amount of evidence showing that no immigrant group to the United States ever fully "assimilates." Cultural and behavioral patterns persist generation after generation, even among those groups who explicitly reject their previous cultural heritage. Some things endure.
An academic named Jason Richwine has done good work on this issue. Here is a talk he gave at last year's National Conservatism convention, in which he discussed some of these issues, including the way that Donald Trump's support was strongest among Americans descended from the Scots-Irish. He also references a paper which you can read here, discussing civic participation among various European groups in the United States. Americans of Swedish and Danish descent have the highest levels of civic participation. Italians are much lower, Germans and English somewhere in the middle. Now much of this data comes from rural towns in the American Midwest, where everyone is "white" and everything is as American as can be. This suggests to me that, in the United States, ethnic ancestry is daimonic in exactly the sense I described above.
And that leads me to wonder the following: If my friend the military officer would simply spend one evening a month at the local Polish-American Society, or drinking beer every Friday night at Polish Hall-- that is, if he were to express his Polish-ness in a deliberate, conscious and contained sort of a way-- would it still come out the way it is now, as an inappropriate hatred for Russians?
Here is a personal example of the same thing. Over the last few years I've done a great deal of research into my own ancestry, and discovered some things which surprised me. My family is Catholic, as you may have surmised, and we have Irish and Italian ancestry. And I thought that that was the end of it. But as I looked into it, I discovered that many of the ancestors that I thought were Irish were actually German. And not just any Germans-- they were specifically Swabians, from a part of Southern Germany known for its Catholic culture. It's not, by the way, that I have one Irish line and one German line. Instead, the two ethnic groups appear to have been intermarrying in Pennsylvania for centuries. (So why did I think of myself for so long as Irish, but not German? I don't know, but I suspect that it became much more convenient to be Irish than German when that meant being in the same ethnic group as John F. Kennedy rather than Adolph Hitler.) In any case, since then, I've done a bit of research into Swabian culture. One of the things that I came across is this cultural trait, neatly summarized here:
Putzwut, literally meaning "cleaning rage", sums up the stereotypical excessive Swabian affinity for cleaning
"Cleaning rage" is something that literally everyone in my family does. Especially the women. And, well, me. Now, my tendency to start cleaning the house when I'm angry about something-- or just to suddenly fly into a rage at a minor mess and start cleaning!-- doesn't do much besides annoy my wife. But as I suggested above, the work of these ancestral daimones can have more serious consequences.
There are other American Daimones besides the ancestral. There are the spirits of the land, the spirits of our dead, the consequences of our wars. There is a natural American religion which is very different from the European, and there are spirits of the European (and other) religions which have followed us here. And in addition to American daimones, there are American demons-- and American angels. And there are American Heroes-- these are those humans who stand midway between ordinary men and the daimones themselves. I believe that all of this adds up to nothing less than an American Political Theology-- and that's what I want to explore in the posts that follow.
