The "Daemon"... Spiritual Guide and Inspiration, Part I

The Daemon/Daimon is a subject of study within Paganism that presented itself to me in the year of 2007, one of the darkest times of my life. And it is a subject that I find is rarely addressed or discussed within our circles but it fascinates me just the same. There is one book that discusses this in detail, Phyllis Curott's The Love Spell in which I will be using excerpts from to compose my thoughts here. I love her writings; she's one of the very few Wiccan writers out there who seem to live within the realm of normality. I'm no longer strictly Wiccan but she still has blessed me with a wealth of knowledge.

The Greeks called the distant voice within us, that higher source of inspiration and enlightenment, a person's daemon. It is also a Greek term for a divine being. In Curott's book someone describes the daemon as a manifestation of God. A more in depth explanation from the book: "A daemon awakens a woman to her sexuality. He's the power that connects eroticism and spirituality. He may come to you in dreams, in synchronicities, and use whatever's appropriate, whatever will reach your heart, your soul - myths and stories, poetry, symbols, music, movies, real men. He's not a mortal male but it's common to project his image onto a real man. And he'll shape-shift - move from one figure to another, change as you change."

When I was growing up I had friends that had celebrity crushes (still do). Of course I had them too (still do) but they always felt "different" for me. In high school my friends would write fan fiction about New Kids on the Block with graphic sex scenes involving them and their crushes. For me my celeb crushes were partly sexual but I usually had no desire to write about or imagine lovemaking with them. It was always that I felt more that somehow they were a part of me, not in a creepy fan way, but that somehow this actor/singer/whoever had something to teach me that I otherwise could have never figured out for myself. And through the years they did change (something I'll probably ramble on about in another post). In 2001 I discovered the world of Harry Potter (along with most everyone else) and from the moment Alan Rickman portrayed seemingly cold and hateful Professor Snape on the screen I was drawn to the character, but it was not until 2007 that he took on "daemon" form for me. And it was in that year of many personal deaths in my life (literal and figurative) that he (the Daemon as Severus Snape) taught me much about death when the seventh (and final) Harry Potter book was released and his character was killed in what turned out to be a noble death. Now with last week's final installment of HP being brought to the big screen (along with his death) it is all being brought back home to me.
Again from The Love Spell: "I had told Nonna my stories, my worry that I had fallen in love with a dead movie star ('character'), and the dawning realization was that it was not him, but the energy, the archetypal energy, that I was responding to."

More to come in future post.