How I Met My Daimon

Anyway that last bit was preamble; this is what I want to talk about, really. I got a comment recently on a post from last year about The Daimonic asking,

I would love, if you feel comfortable, to learn more on how you connected with your Daimon...I find this interesting and as a Pagan, exciting!

Well okay then. Let's see.

I've known there was something there, some male presence there in the back of my mind, if that's the right word, since I was a teenager. Which makes sense; my experience of the (my) daimon is that he is very much connected to the libido. Which of course is the Life Force, encompassing sex and desire and art and travel and anything that is different that your heart leaps at and oh you want want want! Oh, yes, oh yes yes yes that is him, all right. Oh holy holy.

I had a bit of an image of him then as a lanky skinny art boy with long curly dark hair and dark eyes. (His eyes are always, always dark.) Why he rather looked like this:

Why goodness me that boy might just be the archetype of my type, so to say. Though without the heroin and Jack Daniels for breakfast, thanks.

He would show up occasionally in dreams; but it was years and years before I put much of anything together. For a while there, probably about fifteen years ago now, I could feel something there, something made of longing and desire, but buried where I couldn't get to it. It was like being in a ship on the ocean, and below me was this dark, very large something that I could feel was there; the sonar was sure pinging off it but I couldn't See it at all.

It was about then that I learned to visualize. Like I said in the last post I was very much into Tarot around then, and so I was doing exercises where you mentally enter the card to get to know it better, and to see what I could see. It took a bit of work, and of course, I started with the Fool, which, really, is pretty much my daimon right there. Well, mostly.

So I started trying to talk to my daimon in similar visualizations. But it was slow going. For all that I am obviously and very certainly a really really visual person, it took a fair amount of practice. But it can be learned, I think.

But he wouldn't say anything. It might have had something to do with the fact that I was very much on a Harpo Marx kick at the time; who knows. But he just sat there smiling at me.

So what I did was I sat down with him one day in a visualization, and told him, I hear you. I am listening. I hear you.

That turned out to be key. I could ask all I wanted, tell him to talk to me, and it didn't mean a damned thing until I told him I hear you. I am listening.

About that time I had a dream. It was a long and ridiculous story, but there was a man there who was trying to make me laugh. At one point he took my hand, and it felt like I was putting my one hand into my own other, though in the dream it was his and mine.

He did connect with me then, finally, and I smiled, finally, at what he was saying. I smiled in my body, too, for the movement began to wake me, but not before he smiled back at me and said, Ah, there we go in a voice of warm, vibrant kindness. I can still hear it. I literally brought something to consciousness that morning. I'm not sure I can articulate exactly what, but it worked.

After that I was very much aware of him. Very, very much. During that time I (we, I suppose) used automatic writing. I would write a question, and then just let my mind go kind of blank, and then he would write an answer. I'm not sure of any other way to describe it. His handwriting, incidentally, was very different from mine. I kept at that until I got better at visualizing, and then one summer about four years ago it suddenly got much easier. He changed appearance, as he likes to do (or as I like to do) and was much more talkative, and much more I guess visible. And we've been at it long enough that now we just talk, like any one else I know. I ask, he answers, or he asks, and I answer, and the conversations are long and detailed and quirky and he has a voice that is very very much his own, though it's true it does depend on a few things, like who he's looking like at the moment. Englishmen, for example, do have English accents and use words Americans don't, that sort of thing.

This experience is, I suppose, ridiculously detailed for me, but then I do rather favor ridiculous detail in things, so I am not, really, surprised.

So my advice for someone wishing to communicate with their daimon is basically to use a form of divination, whatever works best for you. I do like Tarot, but for this I find it too vague, too open to interpretation; then again I am lucky in the detail I can see, or See I suppose. I mean the look in his eyes, the body language, the shape of his thumbs, the timbre of his voice, the way he pronounces his words, that exasperated look he gets when I am once again not being kind to myself, the way he rolls his eyes or blinks or the thousand varieties of laugh he has. I am very, very, very lucky. And very probably crazy. But I'll take it. My life is much, much richer for him.

As for now, he has returned, somewhat, though I have been so very busy with the little niggling things that I haven't been grounded enough to See much of him (for I must be grounded to See him). He has once again changed his appearance, and holy cow who he looks like now ai yi, all energy and thumbs and twitchiness and funny face and bow ties, yikes. But he is here again now, not that he ever goes away really, and if he does it's usually on my end. Not that my art, which is of course intimately tied into all of this, has returned in a manifest way, anyway; I can feel it changing, though given all I'm going through in my life right now it may be a while before it feels safe enough to manifest it. We'll see, I guess.