The Greeks, a certain scholar has told me, considered that myths are the activities of the Daimons, and that the Daimons shape our characters and our lives. I have often had the fancy that there is some one myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought. -‘At Stratford-on-Avon’ [source - EI 107)
What marks upon the yielding clay? Two marks made by my feet - two by my daimon’s feet. But all confused because my marks and his are on the self same spot, his toes where my heels fell, for he and I, pausing a moment in our headlong flight, face opposite ways, my future being his past ["Images": Tableaux of Opposition]
In The Works of William Blake, published in 1893, Yeats notes that Blake ‘asserts that “the poetic genius,” as he calls the emotional life, “is the true man, and that the body or outward form of man is derived from the poetic genius. Likewise, that the forms of all things are derived from their genius, which by the ancients was called an Angel and Spirit and Demon”’ (WWB1 239), and it is evident that he was already acquainted with the notion of the classical Daimon, and had made the link, through Blake, with the concept of both poetic genius and the sincere emotional nature. He first uses the term ‘Daimon’ explicitly in The Savoy of April 1896, in his essay ‘Verlaine in 1894’, where he writes that: ‘One felt always that he had a great temperament, the servant of a great daimon, and fancied that, as one listened to his vehement sentences that his temperament, his daimon, had been made uncontrollable that he might live the life needful for its perfect expression in art, and yet escape the bonfire’ (UP1 399). Though the figure is used here more metaphorically than literally, the Daimon is seen as a controlling power and, as in the classical tradition of Plutarch, the great man is its servant: ‘of such as are obedient at the first, and presently from their very Nativity hearken unto their proper Daemon, are all the kinds of prophets and diviners, who have the gift to foretell things to come, likewise holy and devout men’, to which Yeats naturally added the vatic poet. It enables destiny, and the action of Verlaine’s Daimon in making the life and art cohere looks forward to Yeats’s formulation of antithetical and Daimonic Unity of Being.
While Yeats’s System is dominated by forms of duality, the dualism of human and Daimon is perhaps the most enigmatic and personal of all of the formulations, cutting across the divisions and categories of the geometry and representing the maverick element within the System. The Daimon’s relationship with the human being is capricious and unpredictable in a way that is aptly summed up in the symbol of the lightning flash.
If the schema of A Vision is founded in mechanisms of refelection and balance, the Daimon is their active controller, embodying all that least resembles the human, and enforcing awareness of this opposition, through crises which shock the individual into recognition of its otherness.
When Yeats discovered the gnomic fragment of Heraclitus, ‘Mortals are immortals and immortals are mortals, the one living the other’s death and dying the other’s life’, it is evident from his repeated quotation, partial quotation and paraphrase of it in his writing that he saw it as encapsulating the essential myth of his universe. In his last year Yeats summarised his outlook: ‘To me all things are made of the conflict of two states of consciousness, beings or persons which die each other’s life, live each other’s death’(L 918; 1938).
That a greater completeness is to be found in the image of man’s complementary opposite is the basis of Yeats’s earlier conception of the ‘mask’, which itself found a separate place in the System, perpetually set at the opposite point of the circle to the Will. While the idea of the ‘mask’ is that it is created or acquired from the archetypal elements of the imagination, Yeats seems to have found that the metaphor took on a more independent, mythic life, developing towards the idea of an ‘anti-self’, the inverse reflection of a man’s self that is evoked by lack and need from the Anima Mundi.
The idea that the anti-self was a separate being derives in part from the communications with the spirit Leo, which first started in 1909, when Yeats speculated that the opposite which man summons by antithesis might be a spirit of the dead, with therefore an existence independent of the human, and radically different from the synthetic creation of the mask, and, in Per Amica Silentia Lunae (published in 1918), he adopted for it the classical name of ‘Daemon’, speculating that ‘a strange living man may win for Daimon an illustrious dead man’ (Myth 335; the new spelling was adopted with A Vision A). How much Yeats regarded this being as real or metaphorical at the period of Per Amica Silentia Lunae is impossible to determine precisely, but both the association of the Daimon with a spirit of the dead and the Golden Dawn practice of summoning symbolic but real presences indicate that Yeats treated such matters less metaphorically than most of his readers, and also saw the distinction as not necessarily valid provided that the symbol itself reflected a supernatural reality.
In Per Amica Silentia Lunae Yeats describes how, ‘Each Daimon is drawn to whatever man . . . it most differs from, and it shapes into its own image the antithetical dream of man’ (Myth 362). The Daimon shapes the mask and the mask becomes less the goal in itself, than the means of evoking the anti-self: ‘By the help of an image / I call to my own opposite, summon all / That I have handled least, least looked upon’ (VP 367), while the Daimon actively comes to the human in search of its complement.
Yeats later discounted the idea that the Daimon was a spirit of the dead, and added a note to Per Amica Silentia Lunae in 1924, to distinguish between ‘the permanent Daimon and the impermanent’ (Myth 335n), and even this was discounted in the Automatic Script which made it clear that the Daimon does not come to man and choose him, but is bound to him through all the cycles of incarnation: ‘Daimon & man two beings interlocked for the 12 Cycles but once seperate Brought together by a wrong wrought & suffered’ (YVP3 187). This formulation implies some form of joint fall and shared guilt, and, though this is not pursued, it is of a piece with the intertwined themes of love and betrayal which Yeats had outlined in Per Amica Silentia Lunae where ‘there is a deep enmity between a man and his destiny’, yet ‘a man loves nothing but his destiny’ (Myth 336).
The ideas evolved and changed during the preparation of A Vision, and his Instructors upbraided him in September 1921 for ‘identifying the Daimon too exclusively with the anti-self’ (YVP3 96) and for other ideas which were either too simplistic or too much rooted in his old ideas, yet the concept of the Daimon remains recognisably founded on the poetic speculations which predate the System.
In A Vision A Yeats writes at some length concerning the Daimon, establishing at least part of the mechanism by which it intervenes in and affects human life, through control of the dark Faculties of Mask and Body of Fate, and the difference of its role in the lives of primary and antithetical incarnations. Yet he was still wrestling with the concept after the publication of AV A, and, following a Sleep in Rapallo in 1927, he writes of one of his Instructors, Dionertes:
He came last night - cross because I did not realize that the Daimon was perfect. He said all Daimons were of course one on a final analysis, & yet they were each unique each perfect. I said if they are different - there is something of the whole lacking in each & therefore it is not perfect. However he insisted. I must not say the Principles and Faculties expressed the Daimons[,] all man did was approach the Daimon.
Yeats’s frustration with such apparently contradictory statements is understandable, as he found himself still trying to comprehend the nature of the Daimon itself after more than ten years of effort and to see how it fitted in with the other elements of the System such as the Principles.
Naguales -Duality Totems
Nature of Reality - God Construct
The Importance of the Individual
The Separate Self
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