CHRONOS & CHAOS 13 :: Seeking the Personal Daimon

Since starting Chronos & Chaos, I’ve been planning to publish parts of the dissertation I wrote for my certification in Hellenistic Astrology with Demetra George. Following my piece last month about the daimons of Taurus decan III as part of The Astrologers’ Co-op’s Journey Through the Decans, I thought this would be the perfect moment to share this essay about the Hellenistic understanding of daimons and the role they play as intermediaries between us and the gods, making the hard-determinism of fate more malleable. 

I don’t go into how to calculate your personal daimon here, but Demetra’s book Ancient Astrology Vol. 2 describes the elaborate process in Chapter 94: The Lord of the Nativity. I also do one-on-one consultations to identify your personal daimon and discover how to work with that planet’s energy, so if the paragraphs at the end that discuss ritual or creative practices for working with the personal daimon interest you, get in touch. 

I hope this piece will give more of a sense of what daimons are and why we would want to identify our own. 

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Seeking the Personal Daimon

What is a daimon and can it be found in the birth chart?

Discovering the personal daimon using the natal chart, though an ancient practice, has always been controversial among astrologers. The term daimon itself is multifaceted and challenging to understand in the contemporary moment, due to factors both preceding and proceeding the moment of Hellenistic astrology. The modern association of daimons (or demons) with only evil spirits reflects a Christianization of the concept, though earlier neoplatonist philosophers show a more dynamic use of the term that mixes Judeo-Christian theology with earlier Hellenic understandings of daimons; within the cosmologies of Plotinus and Iambluchus, for example, daimons were part of a hierarchy that also included angels and gods, rather than a complete binary separation into categories of good and evil (Greenbaum, 238). Earlier societies including Egyptian and Babylonian, also had a more ambivalent view of daimons, though neither use a single common umbrella term (such as “daimon”) for the various and varied demi-gods that closely resemble (and likely influenced) the Greek daimon. 

Digging deeper into the topic is not only helpful for learning the technical aspect of calculating the planet which indicates a person’s personal daimon and the context that informs those techniques, it also adds nuance to our understanding of fate and fatalism, and by extension free will, within Hellenistic astrology and philosophy. From this it’s possible to elaborate the ways that such concepts of fate versus free will can be developed into a contemporary approach to using the daimon in astrological consultation and ritual. 

To attempt a simple description of the figure within the context of Hellenistic culture: daimons are semi-divine beings that act as intermediaries between the gods and humans, and because of this personal connection, have the capacity to influence human behavior and potentially assist in altering or atleast inflecting their fate. They can be understood as guiding spirits or demi-gods (though this term can be confusing due to its likely origination with Ovid who used it to describe those who were born half from a god and half from a human, as well as a whole host of other spirits and mythical beings like dryads or nymphs). 

It was commonly believed that oracles did not connect directly with gods, but to daimons who serve as intermediaries or messengers, communicating worship and sacrifice to particular gods. This role for the daimon is even described in Plato’s Symposium: 

“They [daimons] are messengers who shuttle back and forth between [Gods and humans], conveying prayer and sacrifice from men to gods, while to men they bring commands from the gods and gifts in return for sacrifices…through them all divination passes, through them the art of priests in sacrifice and ritual, in enchantment, prophecy, and sorcery. Gods do not mix with men; they mingle and converse with us through spirits instead, whether we are awake or asleep”  (Plato, as cited in Manoussakis).

Dorian Greenbaum, in her indispensable book The Daimon in Hellenistic Astrology, quotes Plutarch who goes as far as to say this was the reason that daimons were born: “The gods themselves do not go into the bodies of the prophets and use them as instruments—for this was created the ‘race of daimons’ (τὸ τῶν δαιμόνων γένος), who are ‘ministers of the gods’ and ‘overseers of the sacred rites of the gods and prompters in the Mysteries” (20).

This discussion of the metaphysics of daimons and oracles takes up a good portion of Plutarch’s De Defectu Oraculorum (1st Century CE), which can be translated as “The Obsolescence of Oracles.” It is primarily concerned with addressing the power of oracles and their cultural decline. Plutarch has a character named Cleombrotus provide a history of the daimon, going back all the way to Homer and Hesiod. Cleombrotus describes daimons as being ruled by passions, like human beings, though they have supernatural power:

"Xenocrates, the companion of Plato, employed the order of the triangles; the equilateral he compared to the nature of the gods, the scalene to that of man, and the isosceles to that of the demigods; for the first is equal in all its lines, the second unequal in all, and the third is partly equal and partly unequal, like the nature of the demigod, which has human emotions and godlike power.”

This attribution of passions to daimons is an important piece of this cosmology that includes both “good” and “bad” daimons, not as some inherent moral quality, but as the result of their own strong emotions which mirror those of human beings.  It’s this exact imperfection that allows humans to connect with daimons. This is my own speculative detour, but it also seems like a convenient way of re-introducing divine imperfection into a system that was somewhat sterilized by the dominance of Platonic redefinition of gods as inherently perfect and ontologically separated from human beings and our messy human bodies. The older understanding of the Greek deities as wildly passionate and blatantly flawed also made them deeply relatable, so the imperfect daimon might have had a particular appeal in the Hellenistic moment. Perhaps the daimon now can help to contest the harmful mind-body dualism that originates with Plato, extends to Descartes, and still has a powerful influence on new age astrology. 

Interestingly, the geometrical metaphors that Plutarch uses echo the astrological aspects: the trine is the most powerfully beneficial aspect because it forms an equilateral triangle which is described here as being in perfect balance like the gods. The isosceles triangle, which Plutarch compares to the daimon, could be either of two aspect patterns (called in modern astrology), a t-square or a “yod.” The t-square is a tense aspect pattern made up of two squares and an opposition. The yod is not a traditional aspect pattern since it’s made up of two planets that are in aversion to a third and therefore cannot “see” that planet to form an aspect. However, the Hellenistic optical metaphor of aversion is in fascinating accord with the way that daimons were said to make contact with human beings. We cannot “see” the demon directly; they come to those who are in marginal, mystical, or transient states such as dreaming or oracular trance.

As a contemporaneous example, Galen (2nd century CE), a highly influential Greek physician in Rome, discovered the mechanism by which our two eyes see one image, the optic chiasma (Costea), which he maintained was shown to him in a dream by his personal daimon (Greenbaum 33). It’s uncanny that diagrams of this scientific principle inevitably feature an isosceles triangle formed by our two eyes and the object of focus directly in front of the viewer. It’s precisely the connection between our two eyes (the human part of the triangle according to Plutarch) that form an isosceles triangle with whatever is directly in front of us (the two godlike parts of the triangle) that allows us to see a single complete image, an illusion of unity.  

The search for a personal daimon in the natal chart was not to identify the only semi-divine influence, but the best possible daimon to help guide the native to their highest potential of personal happiness and public success. This figure softens the hard determinism that is often ascribed to astrology and to various Hellenistic philosophical schools. While Plotinus and Iamblichus resist the idea that the personal demon can be calculated in the natal chart (in opposition to Porphyry who is one of the primary proponents and preservers of the technique) they also seem to believe in the existence of the personal daimon and it’s instantiation at birth, and ascribe a stellar connection to this embodiment based in Plato’s Myth of Er and Timaeus. In fact, it’s possible that Porphyry’s belief that the kurios, as a ruling planet, can reveal the personal daimon, comes from Plotinus’ interpretation of the Timeaus.(Greenbaum, 243)

Plotinus uses a common naval metaphor to describe the degree of free will and chance that moderate our fate (for which he uses the word heimarmenē). The “ship” we are born onto is fated but:

"…he is on the ship precisely in his own way. For everyone is not moved and does not will or act alike in the same circumstances. So different things happen to different people as a result of the same or different occurrences, or the same things to others even if the circumstances they encounter are different; for that is what heimarmenē is like" (244).

Greenbaum adds her own helpful metaphor in interpreting this passage:

"Human heimarmenē, then, is composed of both nature and the body (the moving ship) and human desires, creating a unique and not totally preordained destiny (just as different actors can play the same part in a play in many different ways; they must stay within the structure of the play and the lines they are given, but the interpretation is their own)."

If our personal daimon can aid us in altering our fate, and the freedom we have is in the way we react to and make meaning from fated circumstances, how then do we work with our semi-divine guide towards this end? 

One approach is to synthesize ritual, mystical, or ecstatic practices with calculation of the personal daimon, using that figure as a guiding archetype whose details are filled in either by one’s existing spiritual belief/practices or, for those who don’t already have such a practice, as a jumping off point to envision and develop relationship to a guiding spirit. Bringing in correspondences or sympatheia, this can mean identifying the ruling planet and then working with the person to find a particular animal, mineral, object, or concept that feels powerful for them to propitiate or communicate with. Whether people see this process of developing an intimate relationship to a personal daimon as a theurgic practice or just an imaginative exercise, it allows us to step out of the suffocating confines of rational materialism and tell different stories about ourselves that have a meaningful impact on our lived experiences. 

It’s vital that the figure of the daimon in no way obviates or trivializes fate; instead it turns it from a dictate into a negotiation, and tells you that you have freedom, not through control, but through a combination of acceptance of and response to the immediate moment. This is fundamentally different from new age notions of “manifestation” that position us all as cosmological dictators, able to control everything in the world if we can only control our own minds, what we visualize, or the words we think. This is toxic in the way it inherently ascribes fault to anyone who is suffering—since they manifested those horrible circumstances with their omnipotent minds—encouraging an obsession with control and self-monitoring of negative thoughts (essentially a willful repression of one’s entire unconscious and sanitization of any difficult or deep emotions). At the same time, it mirrors capitalist meritocracy, telling the story that those who are successful are so because they’ve made some “choice” to be that way or have more effectively exercised their willpower, obscuring the obvious reality that the most powerful and wealthy in society ended up that way through their own or an ancestor’s ruthlessness and violence. 

In opposition, the figure of the daimon does not eliminate fate, it helps us understand it, observe our own natures and behaviors, and develop reverence, awe, and an openness to intuitive knowledge. In place of the total abstraction of a god, the daimon can give us a concrete figure to imagine or evoke and work with to change our relationship to our circumstances (and therefore, eventually, change our circumstances). Because of the richness of the symbolic/material correlations that are deeply embedded in the astrological system, identifying a ruling planet as daimon allows for an abundance of possible access points through all five senses; various possible cross-cultural god/demi-god figures; body-part correlations for use in anchoring/grounding-based meditation traditions; dance and movement arts; mythic autobiography or tactical storytelling; or innumerable visual or sound art practices. The list of possibilities is endless once we situate the personal daimon in its cosmological history and begin to think dynamically about its value as a spiritual technology that can help to reconcile binary notions of free will and fate. 

WORKS CITED

Costea, Claudia Florida; Turliuc, Şerban; Buzdugă, Cătălin; Cucu, Andrei Ionuţ;  

Dumitrescu, Gabriela Florenţa. Sava, Anka; Turliuc, Mihaela Dana. The history of optic chiasm from antiquity to the twentieth century. Springer Nature. 2017. 

George, Demetra. Ancient Astrology Volume 2. Rubedo Press. 2022. 

Greenbaum, Dorian Gieseler. The Daimon in Hellenistic Astrology. Brill. 2016.

Manoussakis, John Panteleimon. Edited by Keane, Niall & Lawn, Chris. The Blackwell Companion to Hermeneutics. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2017. 

Plutarch. Trans. Babbit, Frank Cole. Moralia Vol. 5. Loeb Classical Library. 1936.