---
slug: von-franz-daimon-bc0e772c
title: "von Franz on Daimon"
author: "Marie-Louise von Franz"
work: "Dreams: A Study of the Dreams of Jung, Descartes, Socrates, and Other Historical Figures"
section: ""
year: "1998"
tradition: post-jungian
themes:
  - daimon
fragment: |
  Through him subsist all divination, and the science of sacred things as it relates to sacrifices, and expiations, and disenchantments, and prophecy and magic. . . . These daemons are, indeed, many and various and one of them is Love!
lead_in: ""
reflection: |
  The daemon is not a figure you summon. It subsists — holds itself under everything already happening, the divination, the sacrifice, the disenchantment, the magic. Plato's Diotima is making an ontological claim here, not a poetic one: between the mortal and the divine there is a middle region, and what moves through it moves in both directions at once, carrying human longing upward and divine address downward. The soul is not the source. It is the site where this traffic occurs.
  
  And then the turn: one of them is Love. Not the highest daemon, not the exemplary one — one of the many and various. Eros as a specific logic of transit rather than as the name for the whole phenomenon. What this does is prevent the familiar inflation, the move that makes love synonymous with the divine and therefore with the end of longing. If Eros is one daemon among many, then desire's failure to deliver you is not a failure of love — it is the nature of daemonic mediation. The middle region does not resolve into either shore. What subsists there subsists in the tension, not in its release.
reflection_v0_3: |
  The list is worth slowing down inside: divination, sacrifice, expiation, disenchantment, prophecy, magic — and then, almost as an aside, Love. Plato places Eros at the end of that series not to diminish him but to reveal the company he keeps. Eros is not a sentiment; he is a functional daemon, the same order of being as the forces that carry messages between worlds. Von Franz reads this in service of her larger claim that the dream operates by the same intermediary logic — it is the medium through which the daemonic communicates, neither fully divine nor fully human, always in transit. What Hillman would later call the "soulful" register has its Greek charter precisely here: soul as the between-space, not the destination. The thought that follows you out of this: if Love belongs to the same class as prophecy and disenchantment, then to be in love is already to be in a condition of translation.
parent_id: vonFranz_1998_Dreams_A_Study_of_the__par0017
source: oracle-v3-retrieve
generated: 2026-04-17
regenerated: 2026-04-18
prompt_version: v2.7
status: draft
---

Franz writes:

> Through him subsist all divination, and the science of sacred things as it relates to sacrifices, and expiations, and disenchantments, and prophecy and magic. . . . These daemons are, indeed, many and various and one of them is Love!

— Marie-Louise von Franz

The daemon is not a figure you summon. It subsists — holds itself under everything already happening, the divination, the sacrifice, the disenchantment, the magic. Plato's Diotima is making an ontological claim here, not a poetic one: between the mortal and the divine there is a middle region, and what moves through it moves in both directions at once, carrying human longing upward and divine address downward. The soul is not the source. It is the site where this traffic occurs.

And then the turn: one of them is Love. Not the highest daemon, not the exemplary one — one of the many and various. Eros as a specific logic of transit rather than as the name for the whole phenomenon. What this does is prevent the familiar inflation, the move that makes love synonymous with the divine and therefore with the end of longing. If Eros is one daemon among many, then desire's failure to deliver you is not a failure of love — it is the nature of daemonic mediation. The middle region does not resolve into either shore. What subsists there subsists in the tension, not in its release.

---

Marie-Louise von Franz · *Dreams: A Study of the Dreams of Jung, Descartes, Socrates, and Other Historical Figures* · 1998