The Daimonic Body - The Sanctification and Vivification of The Embodied Form
Animal body as materia and divine body as enchantment...
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Of Embodiment & Soul Forces
For those of us called to deeply cultivate both body and soul, in the here and now of 21st-century life, there is a gate we must pass through whose lock only responds to fire; a burning desire to overcome a narrative arc that divorces matter and spirit at the most fundamental levels.
This sundering story spreads like a root system of razor blades severing the connection points between the numinous and the corporeal at every level of culture.
Most are not even aware of it. Insidious, and hidden, it burrows into our somatic sense of the world.
Modern embodiment culture has emerged in part to address a layer of this. Bodies are numb, stiff, and ‘uninhabited’. For many of us, it feels like the lights on are, but there is nobody home.
The body becomes like an abandoned cave, with creatures lurking in the dark. In this world, wounds, discomfort, and pain peer through the cracks of your rocky body, and force us deeper into the burrows of avoidance.
I praise both the individuals and the cultures they are building who seek to reclaim a more inhabited sense of the body, with its discomforts and it’s aliveness.
For to ‘feel’ is to be.
Yet modern embodiment culture, while immensely valuable, is still emerging in a society that severs spirit from flesh, and unbeknownst to the people in this culture, it often misses what is pushing up against the walls of a human body.
Another reality nags and pulls at our awareness like a thirsty horse, needing the rich waters that spill forth when flesh and the spirit conjoin as one.
Nearly every alchemical, and indigenous tradition I have encountered understands this and seeks to bridge the physical and the divine in their own way.
Thus the challenge we have is twofold:
There is god shaped hole within modern embodiment culture, and there is a disembodied soul at the heart of most contemporary iterations of spiritual practice.
The great work is union.
Of Bodies & The Extraordinary
The ‘Daimonic Body’ is a model meant to help address this obstacle.
It’s an idea I have been cultivating in one iteration or another for many years. Functionally, it points in a particular direction but is not a thing in itself. I would treat it more like a verb than a noun.
The term 'daemon' originates from the Greek word ‘daimon,’ which means “deity, divine power; lesser god; guiding spirit, or tutelary deity” (and sometimes includes the souls of the dead).
This word stems from a verb meaning “to divide or distribute destinies,” indicating that the original sense was linked to the fate assigned to each individual.
Daimons were considered spirits that arose from the forces of nature and represented an entire ‘class of beings’ of the natural world. Originally many Daimons were felt to be Ancestors, or ‘mighty dead’, from a golden age of human existence.
These were humans whose lives were so aligned with the divine, that they became powerful spirits after death, capable of affecting the world.
They were often teaching spirits, muses, and powerful allies that could inspire or even consume us.
The Daimonic could also be the forces and beings that inhabit myth, stories and fairy tales. Centaurs, mermaids, and elementals could be Daimonic.
To say ‘Daimonic Body’ then, points to the body as a powerful guide, divine vessel, and destined pathway in itself. It also speaks of a body that offers habitat to mythological, energetic, and elemental forces. The body ensouled.
However, the word ‘demon’ comes from the word Daimon.
Why?
‘Christianity demonized all spirits, no compromises allowed. To be a Christian meant to deny other competing spirits; to fail to do so was a sin; the price: burning in Hell. As Christianity became a world power, this doctrine was carried all over Earth.
People were taught that spirits whom they had previously venerated had, in fact, tricked and fooled them. The Church didn’t deny that spirits delivered favors but interpreted these gifts as containing deceptive hidden costs: hellfire and damnation.’ Judica Illes
Thus the tradition of gnarly hell-razing spirits (which do exist), was conflated with the original idea of Daimon, and distinguishing the two is critical here.
The Daimonic realm of mighty dead, mythological beings, divine forces, and elemental powers can become demonic when they are repressed, suppressed, and rejected.
The Mysterious Soma
As we continue on our journey of the Daimonic, we might ask...what is a body?
Merely a collection of parts labeled by Latin names, that function properly or don’t?
A mere bag of bones acting as nothing more than a ‘flesh suit’ for the mind, whose only destiny is to become worm food and fertilizer, or can it be something ‘more’?
Bodies as Sensation
In some senses, the notion of a ‘body’ is innocent & instinctual; the small little nothings that generate sensual experiences like a wisp of the wind brushing over leg hairs, or the rumblings of urgent need that everyone in a body feels daily.
We each know this layer of experience, from hunger that is sweetly satiated with a savory burst of flavor rippling on the tongue, to the uncomfortable stabbing intimacy of pain that accompanies a cut or broken bone.
These raw, simple and immediate experiences of the body living day to day are shared by most of us. We know them so well, that they often go subtly unnoticed.
In other senses, the body’s capacities, stirrings and nuances extend far beyond these simple drives, yet in modern civilization, many of these ‘extended’ longings are stored away in the broom closet.
Bodies also desire intense communion with the divine, peak states of ecstasy, shape-shifting, raw impact, the swells of ocean waves, the taste of sexual fluids, close encounters with spirits, reverberating ritual vocalizations, the raw burn of deep physical work and in some instances, even death.
Bodies as Mirrors
Beyond these desires, the bodies also have another wonderful and frustrating quality...they mirror what is occurring in other layers of our being.
Bodies carry ancestral karmas that may arise as pain, illness, or dysregulation, as if possessed by a familial ghost.
Bodies hold onto wounds and stories from the past, becoming sedimented in time, wearing their pains like a cloak.
Bodies get sick, purge, and heal in response to both internal and external conditions, like a phoenix.
Bodies evolve, mutate, and are always seems to be changing.
Bodies can feel like they are being torn apart, or stitched back together, whole or fragmented.
And what has been understood by countless traditional and indigenous cultures before us, is that bodies are a universe onto themselves, and offer access to the whole universe itself within them.
Bodies as Cauldrons & Vessels
Outside of what is considered ‘normal’ in our culture are practices the world over that step into the Daimonic, such as the Tibetan tradition of Chod where a person visualizes (and feels) their body being dismembered, cooked and offered to hungry spirits, or the purposeful ritual protocols of indigenous cultures that lead to deep states of spirit possession.
In the Ifa and Orisa traditions of Africa, entire cultures invoke and evoke a wide variety of gods to become more like them: divine.
There are protracted and potent rituals that call gods, not just forth, but within.
This allows the practitioner to resonate with and as the deities. At the heart of these practices is not just worship, but to become more god and goddesses like, while still in the body.
Chinese Daoism possesses a vast wisdom of the body as Daimon, from the mammoth traditions of the martial arts to the practice of internal alchemy, which turns the body into a cauldron; finding within it everything from ancestral forces to galaxies, to god.
As J.C. Cooper says in Chinese Alchemy: The Taoist Quest for Immortality, ‘the whole work of alchemy can be summed up in the phrase ‘To make of the body a spirit, and of the spirit a body’. Here the body acts as a ‘second placenta’, giving birth to an immortal being.
I ask you once again then, what is a body?
The Mechanical Body – A Body with No Light
Speaking of bodies...the primary scientific narrative which dominates popular culture tells us that bodily experience is all that exists, for you are nothing but a physical body.
Your sense of self emerges from your brain, and any notion of disembodied consciousness, such as those found in phantoms, ghosts, and ghouls are superstitious nonsense.
None of that is for the ‘enlightened’, who vehemently claim that you are just meat.
In this paradigm you end at your skin, and when your skin ends, so do you.
Oddly enough, in an extremely dissonant turn, this same philosophical tradition also believes that your ‘brain generated consciousness’ can be digitally uploaded into a computer like a horseshoe crab changing shells.
Not only does that not track with the notion that you are your body...it is a sense of the body that is fundamentally inanimate; lacking in the vital essence of the embodied form.
It is a horror show of physical experience that leads people to chop off and freeze their heads in cryogenic vats hoping to live forever; not realizing they are already dead.
Perhaps there is no better example of the type of life that leads one to become a ‘hungry ghost’, which is a dead person with unfinished business who feeds off the living.
It orientates towards the physical like a biological ‘puppet maker’, who blindly stitches together disparate mechanical parts with random sequences of genetic thread.
Even if someone does not overtly hold this stance, the medical-industrial complex does, and the modern conception of the body is characterized by how doctors describe them.
Consider that outside the context of contemporary anatomy and physiology, medical terminology and chemistry there are no satisfactory models of the body in the West, though these alternative models do exist in tribal and traditional cultures.
Most modern people cannot even conceive of the notion that there could be a different way of describing the ‘body’, other than medically.
This idea even infiltrates into ‘psychology’, which attempts to establish a vision of the psyche, relationships, and life that are characterized by medical cares, and concepts.
While I am not negating the value of modern medicine in a certain context, what I am saying is that this creates mythos that infuses itself into the embodied experience.
Which is morbidity. If your body is but a series of nuts and bolts, then it is no different than a clock.
Is it any wonder that one of the most staunch materialists of our times Richard Dawkins named his most celebrated book on genetics and evolution “The Blind Watchmaker”.
This is the view of body (and self) as machine.
This feeds into one’s sense of the body and tends to create mechanical ways of moving, orientating, and being; stiff, repetitive bodies isolated from a felt sense of the life force.
The Transcended Body – A Body of Blinding Light
Another dominant narrative, views the body as a ‘beast of burden’, holding down the pristine soul like an earthly ball and chain.
It has needs that must be tended to (barely) but on the whole, it’s more of a distraction from spiritual experience, than an essential part of the path.
The ‘flesh is weak’ they would say.
It is dirty, smelly, oily, sinful, horny, hungry and then dies.
What good is the body then?
Not only that, but this frail aspect of self draws one into all kinds of trouble that tarnishes spiritual development.
The body is an animal, and thus lowly, primitive, and unworthy of praise.
This is the attitude held by a variety of Eastern, Abrahamic and New Age traditions, and their primary orientation towards the body would be better served by suicide than by being tethered to the mortal coil.
At its extremes:
This is the devout priest flagellating themselves to atone for their sins
This is the emaciated ascetic who denies himself all pleasures (even food)
This is the new age ‘breatharian’, getting high on starvation while trying to ‘ascend’ to 5D reality
At lesser extremes:
It creates a mythos that values the psychology over bodily experience.
It calls us to prioritize the intellect over embodiment.
It subtly segregates the spiritual from bodily sensation and places the former over the latter.
These are by no means the ‘only’ narratives that exist in modernity about bodies, but they are the dominant ones, and they do breed together creating offspring that have characteristics of both.
Hybrid narratives, where ‘enlightened souls’ treat the body like a digital avatar.
Within these two primary narratives (and their offspring) lies a deep wounded sense of what it means to be a body.
These narratives tell a decisive story: the body is a demon, not a Daimon.
The Daimonic Body – Animal Body as Materia, and Divine Body as Enchantment
The Daimonic body walks us down a path of embodied spiritual cultivation, beckoning us along a trail that is both corporeal and numinous.
It is not a materialistic version of embodiment practice that ignores spiritual forces, nor is it a transcendent path seeking to escape the vicissitudes of matter.
It is a fusion of spirit and matter within lived experience; a unio corporalis. This is similar to a magical enchantment, or a spell, where the physical vessel that holds it, acts as a sanctified and vivified ground for the subtle currents of energy that fill it with causal power.
The Animal Body
This is a body which is grounded, sensitive, and rippling with the life force.
She is supple and responsive...capable of both laughter and tears.
The animal body sings with the wisdom of deep time, it’s bones and belly resonating like biological a tuning fork.
It fully embraces its ancestral heritage as a creature of the Earth, and because of this, she yearns to spend time in nature with her bare-feet upon the soil. She lies bare-chested on large stones, climbs trees, and swims in wild bodies of water.
This body is deeply physical; for it dances, expresses, shakes, and quakes.
She can flow with the life force even if wounded, for she knows all living creatures experience wounds and illness.
In line with its animal birthright, she is attuned to the environment and the other animals around her like the ears of a jackrabbit.
She can notice the nuanced subtle shifts in the behavior of the birds by reading their body language, or smell rain on the wind.
The Daimonic body carries an animal presence that can be felt by others, like inaudible hum or growl. One could say that she has the somatic equivalent of antlers, hooves, and a tail, for this body echoes forth through time like a satyr.
She carries the knowing of the ancestral of animals within her.
This body allows itself to experience ecstatic sexual pleasure, for it can relish in sensual delight, yet it can also be tough, working hard when called to.
It can be a soft animal or a force of nature, opening its arms in embrace or to fight with animal ferocity.
The Daimonic body is not afraid of emotions, such rage, anger, desire, impulse, sadness, grief, depression or any other human state, for it allows itself to feel it’s whole experience.
The Divine Body
This body evervesses with a sense of the sacred, and the god force itself. To her, ‘energy’ is as real and palpable as the electricity flowing through a power socket.
She feels beyond the five senses, and her heart both sings in awe and aches for the state of the world.
This body can resonate with stars, divine forces, and the luminosity of the soul.
It is a body infused with mythological, elemental and spiritual forces, for the Daimon is a divine force, a ‘lesser god’.
In truth, her body is a crossroad, a world tree that acts as channel for archetypes, spirits and deities, even if just on subtle levels.
She is grounded in the sense of a cosmic stage, for while she owns her animal body, she knows human life is but a momentary flicker in the grand scheme of things, and that creation swells with colossal scope.
This body is not resist of the possibility of past lives, multidimensional experiences or heavenly mandates, knowing that eternity itself may live on in her bones.
Her body can enter into states of deep meditation, trance, and flow states, as she surfs on the pulsations of pure consciousness.
Here the god-shaped hole in the heart that each person carries, is full of a direct, ongoing & loving connection to god or gods.
This body can crave ritual, ceremony, and/or communion with the numinous.
She can feel the ‘power’ that flows from the earth, heavens, and environment that surrounds her, experiencing both her agency and how permeable she is to the forces around her.
She is intimate with the spiritual forces that she chooses to work with, and can transmit them into the world because her body is ‘open’ to the spirit, like a straw.
Here one can engage in an embodied sense of occult, esoteric or indigenous teachings because they move beyond intellectualization to reach actualization.
The head trip of philosophical debate becomes embodied spiritual realization instead.
Thus, this is an alchemical body moving through continuous phases of death and rebirth, so that it may stay malleable and attuned to the mystery.
Like the Daimons of the past, here the body becomes a cherished guide, a wise teacher, a shamanic agent conspiring for the growth of the immortal soul within.
In this way, illness, psychosomatic disruptions and depressions are ‘potential’ signals pointing towards unintegrated aspects of self, karmic layers asking to be addressed, or omens telling that some kind of course correction is called for.
Health challenges become alchemical teachers, that either allow greater health to emerge, or ask us to face our mortality in a more integrated way, so that we both live and die with health.
Regardless of clinical definitions of health, this body, imbued with the spirit, is vital enough to accomplish its worldly destiny.
This body becomes a source of ‘truth’, for when faced with deception, and false authority, it is the body that speaks like an oracle, showing you the way.
Body as Daimon
This is a body that acts as a living enchantment; the physical materia for the magic of the soul.
It calls for an interweaving of body and spirit so that a greater embodied reality emerges. It is both animal and divine, for it goes to a deeper reality that is beyond these dichotomies.
This is the place where the primordial, flows into the primal, and loops back in on itself in a never-ending cycle like the serpent that eats its own tail.