9 - The Daimon: Opposition and Essence

Summary

Overview

As a symbol of complete opposition, the Daimon expresses the system’s fundamental duality but does so with a mythic vividness and autonomous life that is lacking elsewhere. Perhaps because of this, it does not quite fit into the same categories as the Faculties and Principles, or even the Thirteenth Cone, and, though Yeats at various stages attempted to identify it with one or other element, such neat assignments were never satisfactory. Furthermore, it developed over time to be viewed as the essence or archetype which the human being only partially expressed, opposite because it contains all the rest that is not expressed in this incarnation.

As the concept of the Daimon changes over the course of the years, it is not always easy to discern what Yeats is envisaging in a given context. Yeats was fully aware of the term's complex, classical antecedents, and he adopted the concept of the “Daemon” as part of his own thought in Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917), as a form of the anti-self linked to the spirit of a dead person. This evolves in the automatic script into a reconfiguration of the human Faculties in a different dimension, a reflected inversion, yet the Daimon is also a supernatural spirit guide, becoming in A Vision the human's amoral “guardian angel,” the stage-manager of human life that presides over the critical moments that shape a person's destiny, particularly affecting human passion and sexual love. It is also an expression of the soul's higher or ultimate self, and elsewhere Yeats writes of it as the archetype or Leibniz's monad. All these ideas overlap to some degree, but not all of them pertain at the same time or work within the same framework.

To summarize and over-simplify slightly, in both versions of A Vision, the Daimon is a supernatural being, paired with its human counterpart, paradoxically both the human's opposite in every respect and also an expression of the soul's more complete essence. The dualistic aspect dominates in A Vision A, while the archetypal aspect dominates in A Vision B, but many of the problems that Yeats struggled with in trying to understand the Daimon come from the tension and frequent incompatibility of these two elements.