The soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we are born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live on earth. This soul-companion, the daimon, guides us here; in the process of arrival, however, we forget all that took place and believe we come empty into this world. The daimon remembers what is in your image and belongs to your pattern, and therefore your daimon is the carrier of your destiny. As explained by the greatest of later Platonists, Plotinus (A. D. 205-270), we elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belong to its necessity. This suggests that the circumstances, including my body and my parents whom I may curse, are my soul's own choice-and I do not understand this because I have forgotten. So that we do not forget, Plato tells the myth and, in the very last passage, says that by preserving the myth we may better preserve ourselves and prosper. In other words, the myth has a redemptive psychological function, and a psychology derived from it can inspire a life founded on it. The myth leads also to practical moves. The most practical is to entertain the ideas implied by the myth in viewing your biography-ideas of calling, of soul, of daimon, of fate, of necessity, all of which will be explored in the pages that follow. Then, the myth implies, we must attend very carefully to childhood to catch early glimpses of the daimon in action, to grasp its intentions and not block its way. The rest of the practical implications swiftly unfold: (a) Recognize the call as a prime fact of human existence; (b) align life with it; (c) find the common sense to realize that accidents, including the heartache and the natural shocks the flesh is heir to, belong to the pattern of the image, are necessary to it, and help fulfill it. A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently mussed. It may also possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim. The daimon does not go away.
— James Hillman
Hillman's daimon is seductive precisely because it converts every wound into evidence. The difficult parent, the accident, the wrong turn — all of it gets folded into necessity, into the soul's own pre-natal choosing. There is genuine relief in this reading, and that relief is worth naming for what it is: the longing to learn that suffering was not arbitrary, that the heartache belonged to something, that the life adds up. That longing is very old, and Hillman knows it. He is not naive about it — he borrows Plotinus and Plato deliberately, not because neo-Platonic metaphysics is true in the literal sense, but because the myth performs something that argument cannot. It asks you to stand inside your biography differently.
The risk is that "the daimon does not go away" becomes a consolation rather than a pressure. If every detour is retroactively authorized by the pattern, the daimon becomes a permission-structure — a way of being reconciled to what happened rather than responsive to what is still making its claim. Hillman probably intends the opposite: the daimon as an insistence that has not yet been met, a necessity still pressing forward. The myth's redemptive function, as he calls it, works only if it sharpens the question — what has not yet been answered? — rather than softening it into the comfortable feeling that everything, including the failures, was somehow meant.
James Hillman·The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling·1996