Eros as Daimon

In Plato’s plato-symposium, Diotima teaches Socrates that Eros is not a god (theos) but a great spirit (daimōn megas), an intermediary between mortal and immortal — born of Poros (Resource) and Penia (Need) and reflecting in his nature the parentage of his birth: always lacking, always seeking, never self-sufficient. He is the bridge across which messages, prayers, sacrifices, and oracles travel; without him, “the universe would not be one” (Symposium 202d–203a, paraphrased through Diotima).

karl-kerenyi places this figure beside Hermes the psychopompos: “It is not necessary to point out that we are dealing here with the great δαίμων of Plato’s Symposium. The myth is told by Socrates, who is supposed to have heard it from the wise priestess of the Arcadian Mantineia, diotima. This source reference is certainly not without basis and meaning… Plato’s genius here brings forth a genuine mythologem” (Kerényi 1944). Eros and Hermes share the structure of intermediation; both are figures of the threshold between worlds.

The depth tradition takes this daimōn as the prototype of the personified intermediate agency that the soul must follow. james-hillman‘s “acorn theory” in The Soul’s Code — the daimon that selects the life and accompanies it through the world — descends directly from the Eros of the Symposium and from the disembodied soul-choices of the myth-of-er. The Jungian transcendent function, the personifications of active-imagination, the autonomous figures of the dream — all are inheritors of Plato’s claim that the soul moves by the agency of figures that are neither it nor the gods, but the bridges between.

Relationships

• daimon
• divine-madness
• hermes
• active-imagination

Primary sources

• plato-symposium (Plato, c. 385 BCE)
• kernyi-hermes-guide-souls (Kerényi 1944)