Divine Madness: A Psychobiography of the Daemon
“The best things we have come from madness” Socrates says, “when it is given by a god.” The Greeks, for all their manifest flaws, gave a good amount of space to madness: offering grace, reverence, awe, a whole ritualistic enterprise, and which reads today—in an era where madness is shunned, drugged, and incarcerated—as a provocation. We should be so provoked. The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) by E.R. Dodds, is a highly engaging work of scholarship on this regard, and reads like a kind of psychobiography of the daemon, that strange entity, neither god nor man, who delivers passions where they are most wanted and least expected.
Dodds is quick to note that pathos, for the Greeks, was mysterious and frightening, a possession, something that happens to you. The Greeks recognized a feature of mind that was other-than, and gave it an imaginal personification. Like when Agamemnon steals Achilles’ girlfriend in the Illiad: “Not I” he says. “not I was the cause of this act but Zeus and my portion and the Erinyes who walks in darkness.” The “God made me do it” line is a typical excuse—or boast—in the west to this day; but don’t be fooled: that which is termed god, demon, or angel, is merely a wandering feature of the repressed psyche. For what really “walks in darkness” is Agamemnon’s desire.
When Freud described repetitious behavior as “some demonic power” we are clearly not so far removed from this archaic world of exogenous force. What interests me about the demon and the daemon both is their gothic style; this is the imagination working in the high eldritch mode. It is an aesthetic aid by which we may deal with an unthinkable reality. That the figure of the daemon has served this function for nigh on 3500 years gives testimony, not to its facticity, but rather to the continual enchantment it holds on our imagination. Why are we so bewitched by the figure of the demon? Is the other really so other that they must always be demonized? Yes. But it’s when the other appears inside of you that leads to an imaginative excess, expressed time and again in all our horror movies of haunting and possession. See for example, The Shining.
These days the Daemon, as representative of genius, or supernatural vital energy (as opposed to the evil demon) is having something of a renaissance, whether in the His Dark Material series, or invoked in creative writing workshops that promise to unleash the daemon. And it is no great cultural observation to see that AI functions as a kind of synthetic daemon: possessing supernatural omniscience, ready with an answer at your beck and call. It little matters that the answer is often wrong, or that repeated AI dialogue causes mental breakdown; it’s the new ritual madness. Look out for the “AI made me do it” excuse coming soon. Or even worse: if the AI murders someone, who will be tried in court? So the daemon becomes a demon once more. A demonic entity we have invented, pressed into service at great ecological expense, and quickly disowned once it acts out; as when a tesla kills its owner—with increasing frequency, I might add. But I digress.
Madness, Greek style, is always divine; the transitory visitation of a daemon or god. Madness is invoked in ritual. The nighttime festivals of the mystery cults were supposed to produce a kind of ritual madness, a telestic madness that, according to Socrates, is meant to provide relief for “the guilt of ancient crimes;” and that was performed collectively by dancing in an ecstatic state, and was meant to stave off outbreaks of hysteria.
The muses bequeath a form of madness that results in poetry. Prophecy is a madness (the curious difference between the mantic and the manic) and as Dodds claims “the dividing line between common insanity and prophetic madness is in fact hard to draw.” But the greatest madness of all is that of eros; that transitory insanity cast by the beautiful boy, upon which Socrates speaks, in the Phaedrus, at great length.
Dodds reads Socrates as the last expression of the irrational in classical Greece. Plato, though he acknowledges gifts of madness—through his teeth as it were—will always defer to reason, the true emanation of the solar deity; for Plato, reason is the greater daemon. That’s probably a better way to think about the rational, as an external—and insomniac—force, than as some ideal or default mode of human thought. In fact, these days we may identify any number of external—and perfectly “rational”—forces that exert continual pressure on our psyche and society, whether it is racism, sexism, ecocide, general xenophobia (projecting the demon over there), or, less rationally, that most triumphant demiurge, Father God, supreme final cause and trump card for so many well-defended believers.
This gets us down to a feature of psyche that the Greeks couldn’t think of: less a divine madness than the madness of divinity; religious prohibition and dogmatic faith—the unitary illusion—is its own madness, a doomed and hallucinatory logic that runs the spectrum from ambulatory to catatonic. This may be the great lesson of the Schreber case (not to mention modernity): religion should be judged from the standpoint of psychosis, and not the other way around.
