Perseid and the Flight of the Daimons

While leaving for my lunch break on Thursday, I was standing by Ash when a customer’s bill totaled twenty dollars and twelve cents. In my bag at the time, or, to be more specific, my black laptop satchel, was a copy of Daniel Pinchbeck’s highly acclaimed novel, “2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl”. When I got to my desired reprieve-zone, Starbucks, I opened the book to a chapter on daimons. This was an intriguing moment for me.

In Greek mythological parlance, a daimon is a being who dwells betwixt realms. The daimon “…takes pleasure in upsetting our logical categories, sabotaging our sciences, and collapsing our belief systems.” Does this mean that they purposefully try to undermine our epistemologies and philosophies in order to push their own inexplicable agenda upon us? Or do they simply like to be tricksters of the nether regions behind the pines and our neurotransmitters?

Our transit through the Perseid meteor shower must be enthralling for the daimons. They must be having their own festivities, parties, shindigs, and rituals. Maybe they venerate drifting space rocks? Did they pull out their telescopes and flock to their observatories? Maybe not. This is a projection of my culture upon theirs. This is probably something they would reproach. At the same time, it is the only way I can approach the reality of the daimon. My imagination must be launched from the cultural mind-matrix so it can wend its way through the nether.

During this Perseid meteor shower period, Ash and I also finished season two of “True Blood”. In the final episode, Sam Merlott murders Maryann. Maryann was a maenad who wanted to get married to the lord of intoxication and debauchery, Dionysus. The wedding ceremony was undermined when Sam, the crafty shape-shifter, beguiled Maryann by pretending to be a white bull, or a phantasmic form of Dionysus himself. After tricking her, he stabbed her with his horn and impaled her heart.

Sam and Maryann are daimons, in my opinion. They are liminal beings who go between realms with ease. They partake in our world and fancy it to a certain degree, but they don’t need it like we do. They can jettison the secular world like a snake can cast off its skin.

I think this transit through the Perseid meteor shower has activated a “daimonic complex” in my psyche. Mind, matter, and event are held before my eyes in a state of simultaneity and synchronicity. The anima mundi has come alive. A bejeweled profusion of soul-stuff extrudes from the cracks and shadows in this world. It destroys what is not true. The culture we think is sacred and inviolable is not what it appears to be. Culture is already like bones beneath the grass. The daimons have already brought down our monuments and replaced them with theirs.

Daimons 1- Humanity 0
Perseid was the revelry referee.