The Daemon in Exile: A Cultural History
Chapter Three of "Writing at the Wellspring"
Dear Living Dark reader,
“What is the ultimate and final benefit of embracing your genius, meeting your muse, aligning with your daemon? It is simply that you heal this epic rift by owning up to what is really true of your personal experience, what is really true in a deeply human sense. You account for a missing part of yourself that, if you are at all a typical member of the culture in which and to which I am speaking, you have not been given an adequate set of concepts and attitudes for recognizing. The polar opposite of the demon-haunted life we have been living together for over a century can be seen in the case of those writers and artists who have learned to commune and collaborate with the nightside of their psyche, and whose lives have been blessed because of it.”
Today we continue with the serialization of my new (and presently unpublished) book, Writing at the Wellspring. The paragraph above is from Chapter Three, whose topic is the historical trajectory, fate, and fortunes of the daemon or daimon in modern Western culture, where the scientific revolution and the Age of Enlightenment occasioned a wholesale ejection of humanity’s visionary nightside from the mainstream intelligentsia, thus unintentionally unleashing a collective demonic fury and generating a global hellscape of physical and psychic violence. In the course of arguing, explaining, and illustrating this point in the chapter, I refer to a variety of historical and cultural matters and figures, including twentieth-century warfare, the Freudian psyche, the message of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for an age of material science, and Ray Bradbury’s relationship with his daemon muse.
In the total environment of the book, this chapter provides historical and cultural context for the other chapters, which are more focused on articulating practical guidance and philosophical perspectives for enriching your writing (or any other creative art) and linking it to the unfolding of your life’s purpose through a focus on your daemon muse and nonduality.
Before handing you off to the chapter, I’ll remind you that I’m teaching a course this fall at Weirdosphere, the online learning platform/community from the creators of the Weird Studies podcast—and that Living Dark subscibers will receive a discount on the price. Like my new book, the course is titled “Writing at the Wellspring,” and its content represents a fusion of this new book with my earlier one, A Course in Demonic Creativity: A Writer’s Guide to the Inner Genius. It starts in a couple of weeks. I hope you’ll join me.
Warm regards,
The Daemon in Exile: A Cultural History
Chapter Three of Writing at the Wellspring: Creativity, Life Purpose, Nonduality, and the Daemon Muse
by Matt Cardin
I begin this chapter with a word of advice: You can skip it, if you prefer, as it is not strictly necessary. Your understanding of the book’s overall flow of thought and argument will not be negatively impacted if you just move on to the next chapter. However, the subject that I explore in this one does add background and context to our consideration of the muse and the daemon by looking at their current status in the collective consciousness of modern culture and society, especially in the West. The chapter briefly traces the ejection and exile of the daemon muse from what came to be considered respectable intellectual discourse in the age of science, rationality, and technology, and it suggests some truly awful consequences, both personal and civilizational, that have flowed from this unintelligent act. So, if such things interest you, please read on.
Also please bear in mind that my perspective and approach here is forthrightly personal and idiosyncratic. Even when I adopt a tone of ostensible objectivity, and even when I talk about matters of factual history spanning the past few centuries, I am still speaking subjectively and offering my deeply personal and impressionistic take on things. This means my account freely foregrounds and magnifies some things while reducing or even ignoring many others that would validly form a part of the picture someone else might paint. I am aware that this may seem a dubious approach for talking about matters of objective history and collective import, and I tell you this in the spirit of full disclosure and forewarning, to help you receive these thoughts in the right way. But then, the approach I’m describing is not really different from the one I have adopted throughout the whole book. It’s just that the specific subject matter here gives my subjective statements the sound of objective pronouncements. This is a mere artifact of language.
Consider what follows a kind of visionary history of the past several hundred years, viewed from a highly and specifically inflected angle. For me, this angle sheds light (and also creates shadows) in a way that truly illuminates. Maybe it will for you, too.
The Enlightenment’s Shadow
The daemonic muse model of creativity holds that it is eminently reasonable and helpful to regard creativity as an independent force that emerges through you, as opposed to a quality or power that you possess or a feat that you are able to perform. Importantly, this ancient model of creativity is also a model of consciousness in general. It is a model of the nature and status of the self within the wider context of psychological life as a whole, human life in general, and the world at large.