the artist is possessed

art is not safe

Follower of Maerten de Vos - The Nine Muses with Apollo trimming the wings of a Siren

“For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed.’ - Plato, Ion

Art has been a refuge for me since I was a child. I grew up carrying the weight of childhood abuse, a dark secret that set me apart from other kids, alongside undiagnosed autism that made the ordinary social world feel confusing to navigate. Art was a place to disappear into. A way of letting things move through me. A form of exorcism. At my darkest periods, through depression, addiction, and suicidal ideation, making art and music saved my life, over and over again, and continues to do so.

What I didn’t understand in my youth, and have spent years trying to articulate since, is what is actually happening in these moments. The force that moves through me when I make things feels like self-expression, but a self that is somehow larger than my ordinary one, and the expression itself only partially mine. It is me, and it is also something more. Something alien.

This is not a unique experience. Across cultures and centuries, artists, poets, musicians, and mystics have described the same phenomenon: that something makes through them. The creator must be emptied, hollowed of ego, self, and often sanity, so that an external or separate force can enter and speak. What occurs through this process is an ordeal of co-creation which the artist often struggles to understand or control. It exists outside of language. The study of this mystery also reveals a darker phenomenon: the force that makes great art can also remake or destroy the person it moves through, and the line between divine inspiration, possession, and insanity is a fine one, if it exists at all. I have touched on these ideas briefly in my previous pieces on Algol, and making talismans, but I wanted to give them a fuller treatment, as this phenomenon is so foundational to my experience as an artist and my own battles with mental illness.

on the fixed star Algol

how and why i make talismans

the daimon

The Greek word daimōn (δαίμων) likely derives from daíō, meaning “to divide” or “to distribute,” allotting fortunes or destiny.¹ In Hesiod’s Works and Days, blessed mortals of the Golden Age become daimones upon death, guardian spirits who “roam everywhere over the earth, clothed in mist, and keep watch on judgements and cruel deeds, givers of wealth.”² The daimon takes the form of an invisible companion, mediating presence assigned to human life.

Plato expands on this idea in the Symposium. Here the priestess Diotima defines Eros itself as a great daimon whose function is to interpret between gods and humans, “conveying and taking across to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and replies of the gods.” Diotima adds that whoever is wise about this intermediary function is a daimonios anēr, a daimonic man, and that all other wisdom is mean and vulgar by comparison. The daimonic, in Plato’s scheme, is the highest form of knowing.

Socrates claimed a personal daimon, to daimonion, “the divine sign,” a voice he had heard since childhood. He described it in the Apology as “a voice which comes to me and always forbids me to do something which I am going to do, but never commands me to do anything.”³ It functioned like a compass needle pulling away from false directions.

The Romans translated the concept into the genius, from gignere, “to beget.”⁴ Every person was born with a genius, a natal spirit embodying their vital force, moral character, and destiny.⁵ The genius was honored on birthdays through libations. Over centuries, the word became increasingly secularized, transforming from external spiritual companion to inner quality of character, to the modern meaning of exceptional intellectual talent. What was once a relationship with the sacred became relegated to a property of the ego.

The concept also underwent a Christian inversion. When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, daimonion was used to translate shedim, foreign idols, importing the concept into a monotheistic framework that had no place for intermediary beings.⁶ In the New Testament pagan daimones became evil spirits opposed to God. The force of divine guidance and inspiration was rebranded as demon, pure malevolence.

the soul’s code

An important modern recovery of the daimon concept comes from James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code. Hillman believed each person is born with a unique soul-image or destiny, much as an acorn contains the pattern of the oak. He referred to this as the acorn theory.

Hillman drew directly on Plato’s Myth of Er, in which souls choose their lives before birth, selecting a paradeigma, a basic pattern encompassing their entire destiny, and a daimon to carry them into the world. Upon arrival, the soul passes through the plain of Lethe and forgets everything. But the daimon remembers.⁷

Hillman catalogued the many names humanity has given this entity: “The Romans named it your ‘genius’; the Greeks, your ‘daimon’; and the Christians your guardian angel. The Romantics, like Keats, said the call came from the heart... For some it is Lady Luck or Fortuna; for others a genie or jinn, a bad seed or evil genius. In Egypt, it might have been the ‘ka,’ or the ‘ba.’” The persistence of this concept across cultures points to something universal in human experience.

For Hillman, the daimon explains the otherwise mysterious quality of creative compulsion, the fact that artists do not choose their art but are chosen by it. “A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may also possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim. The daimon does not go away.”

Many artists are familiar with these ideas that simply will not leave until they are expressed. In my own experience this pressure escalates, becoming increasingly destabilizing the longer it goes unmet. When I finally acquiesce to the demand, the making often feels less like a relief and more akin to giving birth: violent, and begetting something of me but not fully mine.

theia mania: divine madness

Plato’s theory of theia mania (divine madness) describes what happens when the pull of destiny becomes all encompassing. In the Ion, Socrates disputes Ion’s claim to artistic skill by arguing that poetic power is a possession, a divine takeover.⁸

Socrates introduces here the metaphor of the magnet and the iron rings: “There is a divinity moving you, like that contained in the stone which Euripides calls a magnet... not only attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them a similar power of attracting other rings.” The Muse inspires the poet, the poet inspires the performer, the performer inspires the audience, forming a chain of divine transmission in which no one in the chain possesses the power independently.

The argument here is clear: The artist is not in their right mind when creating. “For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles.”

According to Plato, technique without divine possession produces nothing of lasting value. The sane, skilled craftsman is always surpassed by the one who has been emptied and filled.

the horse and the rider

In West African and Afro-diasporic religious traditions, spirit possession is a living, central practice. In these traditions, the possessed person is referred to as the “horse” that the spirit “mounts” or “rides.” The individual’s identity is temporarily displaced; their body takes on the attributes, voice, gestures, and desires of the spirit that inhabits it.⁹

Robert Farris Thompson, a scholar of African diasporic aesthetics, quotes Yoruba elders in his excellent work Flash of the Spirit: “When a person comes under the influence of a spirit, his ordinary eyes swell to accommodate the inner eyes, the eyes of the god.”¹⁰

In Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti filmmaker Maya Deren described the experience of possession as “a white darkness, its whiteness a glory, and its darkness, terror.” According to Deren, through the dance and drumming individuals are elevated through connection to the collective. “The individual participates in the accumulated genius of the collective, and by such participation becomes himself part of that genius, something more than himself. His exaltation results from his participation, it does not precede and compel it.”

the devouring daimon

Plato’s theory of divine madness carries an implication that the later Western tradition has been reluctant to follow to its conclusion: if the poet’s power comes from being seized by a force that displaces reason, then the state that produces great art is, by definition, a form of insanity. The creative state and the psychotic state share a common structure: the ordinary self is unseated, and something else speaks through the body. The question is whether these are two distinct phenomena or whether they are the same phenomenon viewed from different angles.

Rollo May, an existential psychologist who brought the daimon concept into clinical practice, believed they were the same. In Love and Will, May defined the daimonic as “any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person... The daimonic can be either creative or destructive, but it is normally both.”¹¹

His framework does not distinguish between healthy inspiration and pathological madness. The daimon that drives a person to create a masterpiece and the daimon that drives them to destroy themselves are the same entity, the same primal force of nature. When the daimon takes over without the person’s conscious participation, the result is psychosis, violence, or self-destruction.

This is the dark side to Hillman’s acorn theory: the daimon does not go away, but it also does not care about your survival. It demands expression, and the vessel that cannot contain it, breaks.

Vaslav Nijinsky embodied this paradox more completely than most artists in modern history. Considered the greatest male ballet dancer who ever lived, Nijinsky was known for his leaps that appeared to defy gravity, and for choreography so radical it caused riots. His Afternoon of a Faun scandalized Paris with its eroticism, and his Rite of Spring provoked one of the most famous audience uprisings in theatrical history.¹²

Vaslav Nijinsky, photographer unknown

By the age of twenty-nine, Nijinsky had stopped dancing, stopped speaking, and begun writing a diary in which he declared himself God.

The diary, kept over six weeks, is one of the most remarkable documents in the history of art and madness. The diary oscillates between lucidity and disintegration. “I am God. I am the spirit. I am everything,” Nijinsky wrote.¹³ But also: “My madness is my love towards mankind.” He knew something was happening to him but could not determine whether it meant he was divine or insane, or whether the voice speaking through him was God’s, or his own unraveling mind.

What makes Nijinsky’s story so compelling is the continuity between his genius and his madness. His art was itself a form of self-annihilation: the dancer’s body given over entirely to the role, and the choreographer shattering the conventions of classical ballet because the force moving through him did not recognize those conventions. The same dissolution of self that made him the greatest dancer in the world eventually dissolved him entirely.

While Nijinsky documented his own dissolution, Antonin Artaud attempted to theorize and reenact it. His Theatre of Cruelty, outlined in The Theatre and Its Double, called for a theater that would function as ritual possession: “violent physical images crush and hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator seized by the theatre as by a whirlwind of higher forces.”¹⁴ He drew on the trance-inducing Balinese ritual dance he had seen in 1931, seeking a form of performance that would bypass rational thought entirely.

Antonin Artaud, Le Theatre de la Cruaute, 1946

Artaud believed that civilization had made humans “sick and repressed creatures” and that theater’s true function was to liberate each individual’s instinctual energy. Artaud spent nine of his last eleven years confined in psychiatric institutions. In 1937, he traveled to Ireland believing he was returning St. Patrick’s walking stick and preparing to bring on the apocalypse. He was deported back to France in a straitjacket.¹⁵ He passed through a series of asylums before arriving at Rodez, where Dr. Gaston Ferdière subjected him to approximately fifty-two electroshock treatments.¹⁶ The early days of electroshock were brutal: Artaud fractured a vertebra from the convulsions, and by the end of treatment his teeth had fallen out. He wrote that the treatment “plunges the shocked person into that death rattle with which one leaves life.”¹⁷

Ironically it was during this time that Artaud produced his most extraordinary work. He filled over 400 school exercise books with poetry, drawings, spells, curses, and glossolalia. After his release in 1946, Artaud wrote Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society, a scathing essay that was as much about his own experience as about the painter. Artaud argued that society had invented psychiatry “to defend itself from the investigations of certain superior lucidities whose faculties of divination disturbed it.” The essay contains Artaud’s most devastating line about the relationship between madness and creation:

Nobody has ever written or painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except to get out of hell¹⁸

Foucault, writing fifteen years after Artaud’s death, argued in Madness and Civilization that the modern world had silenced the voice of unreason by medicalizing it, reducing an entire dimension of human experience to a set of diagnostic categories. In the Renaissance, madness had been understood as possessing its own form of wisdom. The Enlightenment stripped that recognition away: the mad were no longer carriers of dangerous truths but simply ill, objects of clinical management. Foucault saw Artaud, alongside Goya, Nietzsche, and de Sade, as artists through whom unreason continued to speak despite medicine’s attempts to silence it.

the authors are in eternity

William Blake provides an account of art as spiritual dictation. In a letter to Thomas Butts in 1803, Blake wrote of his poem Milton:

“I have written this Poem from immediate Dictation twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time without Premeditation & even against my Will; the Time it has taken in writing was thus render’d Non Existent, & an immense Poem Exists which seems to be the Labour of a long Life all produc’d without Labour or Study.” ¹⁹

In another letter, he states: “I may praise it, since I dare not pretend to be any other than the secretary; the authors are in eternity.”²⁰

W.B. Yeats explored poetic creation through the use of automatic writing, based on the experiments of his wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees.²¹ Over three years, they produced approximately 4,000 pages of automatic script from various spirit communicators.²² When Yeats proposed devoting his life to assembling the fragments, the spirits delivered their famous reply: “We have come to give you metaphors for poetry.” The result was A Vision, Yeats’s elaborate cosmological system.²³

In Per Amica Silentia Lunae, Yeats developed his concept of the Daemon as the anti-self, an opposite that feeds on what the person lacks: “The Daemon comes not as like to like but seeking its own opposite, for man and Daemon feed the hunger in one another’s hearts.” He acknowledged the creative uncertainty this produced: “as I write the words ‘I select,’ I am full of uncertainty not knowing when I am the finger, when the clay.”²⁴

The Surrealists secularized spirit possession into aesthetic method. André Breton’s First Surrealist Manifesto defined Surrealism as “pure psychic automatism by means of which one intends to express... the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason.” Scholar Tessel Bauduin has demonstrated that Surrealist automatic techniques “were primarily drawn from contemporary Spiritualism, psychical research and experimentation with mediums,” though the Surrealists eventually discarded the theology.²⁵

The Swedish painter Hilma af Klint, on the other hand, attributed her work entirely to spirit entities.²⁶ As she describes the process, “The pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings, and with great force. I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict; nevertheless, I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brush stroke.”²⁷

Walking along the cliffs of Duino Castle on the Adriatic, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke heard a voice in the wind speaking what became the first line of the Duino Elegies: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?” He completed the First Elegy that night.²⁸ It wasn’t until a decade later that inspiration returned as a physical storm at the Château de Muzot. In a matter of days, he completed all remaining Elegies and composed the entire Sonnets to Orpheus. He wrote to Lou Andreas-Salome: “All in a few days, it was an indescribable storm, a hurricane of the spirit... every fibre and tissue cracked within me, any thought of food was out of the question, God knows who fed me.”

Jackson Pollock described a parallel experience in Possibilities magazine: “When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It is only after a sort of ‘get acquainted’ period that I see what I have been about. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.”²⁹

John Coltrane conceived A Love Supreme as prayer in the form of song. In his liner notes, Coltrane wrote: “During the year 1957, I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life.” His prayer-poem contains the line: “God breathes through us so completely... so gently we hardly feel it... yet, it is our everything.”³⁰

Bob Dylan, in his 2004 60 Minutes interview, described his early songwriting in terms of lost access to a mysterious source: “All those early songs were almost magically written... There’s a magic to that, and it’s not Siegfried and Roy kind of magic. It’s a different kind of a penetrating magic.” When asked if he could do it again, he answered simply, no.³¹

Alice Walker described moving from New York to rural Northern California so that the characters of The Color Purple, whom she described as spirits, would feel comfortable enough to visit her. She experienced the novel’s creation as collaborative, working alongside spiritual presences who chose her as their vessel.³²

Keith Richards wrote “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” in his sleep: “I had no idea I’d written it, it’s only thank God for the little Philips cassette player.” Playing back the tape, he found thirty seconds of the riff followed by forty-five minutes of snoring.³³

I experienced a similar phenomenon while working on my devotional album to the goddess Babalon. The entire album was created almost entirely in the course of one weekend that I have almost no recollection of. I have also occasionally discovered music files on my computer I have no memory of making. I am often impressed by the quality of this work which usually feels above my level of skill.

the duende

Federico García Lorca’s 1933 lecture “Play and Theory of the Duende” approaches creative possession from a darker angle. Lorca distinguishes three sources of artistic power: “Angel and Muse come from outside us: the angel brings light, the Muse form…While the duende has to be roused from the furthest habitations of the blood.”³⁴

Named for a mischievous class of spirit from Iberian folklore akin to a goblin, the duende is a dark, earthy force rooted in the body, in death, in the most ancient culture.

With idea, sound, gesture, the duende delights in struggling freely with the creator on the edge of the pit. Angel and Muse flee, with violin and compasses, and the duende wounds, and in trying to heal that wound that never heals, lies the strangeness, the inventiveness of a man’s work.

Duende has little to do with skill. An artist with perfect technique and no duende is empty. What makes the duende unique among theories of creative possession is its insistence on proximity to death: “The duende won’t appear if he can’t see the possibility of death, if he doesn’t know he can haunt death’s house.”

the mystery at the heart of creation

Through these cross-cultural frameworks and testimonies we begin to see the mystery take form: the ordinary self is displaced, a force enters that exceeds the individual, and the resulting work belongs to something larger than its creator. This same force has the capacity to unmake the maker. It cares not for whether we survive the encounter.

The artist’s task, then, is to stay in relationship with the force, to keep the channel open without being consumed by what flows through it, to ride the horse without being thrown. To perpetually dance on the edge of madness.

This dance is not without cost, but it is one I choose to pay willingly, over and over. To refuse the demand, to keep a safe distance from “the edge of the pit,” is its own kind of death.

Whether we call the force daimon, genius, lwa, duende, or insanity, one thing remains clear: authentic creation is an act of surrender, and surrender is never safe.

1. Daimon: Etymology, Origin & Meaning, Etymonline.

2. Hesiod, Works and Days, Theoi Classical Texts Library. Lines 121–126.

3. Plato, The Apology of Socrates, Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard. 31c–d.

4. Genius etymology, Merriam-Webster.

5. Genius (mythology), Wikipedia.

6. The Evolution of the Demon from Antiquity to Early Christianity, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

7. James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling (Random House, 1996).

8. Plato, Ion (Jowett translation), MIT Internet Classics Archive.

9. Haitian Vodou, Wikipedia.

10. Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy( Vintage Books, 1984).

11. Rollo May and Existential Psychology, Social Sci LibreTexts. See also Daimonic, Wikipedia.

12. The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky: A Document of Creativity, Desperation, and Psychosis, The Examined Life. See also Nijinsky the genius of dance and his legendary diary, Rome Central.

13. The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky, Internet Archive

14. Theatre of Cruelty, Wikipedia

15. Antonin Artaud: The Asylums and After, Jacket2.

16. The ‘Madness’ of Antonin Artaud, Essential Drama.

17. Repositories of Black Magic, Frieze.

18. Van Gogh le suicidé de la société, The Funambulist Magazine.

19. Blake letter to Thomas Butts (25 Apr 1803), WIST Quotations.

20. William Blake (Symons), Wikisource.

21. Yeats and the Occult Imagination, JSTOR Daily.

22. W.B. Yeats’ Live-in “Spirit Medium”, JSTOR Daily.

23. A Vision, Wikipedia

24. Per Amica Silentia Lunae, Project Gutenberg.

25. The ‘Continuing Misfortune’ of Automatism in Early Surrealism — Tessel Bauduin, communication +1, UMass.

26. Hilma af Klint: Seances and Spirits, The Thread.

27. The Story of Hilma af Klint, James McCrae, Substack.

28. Duino Elegies, Wikipedia.

29. Possibilities magazine, Winter 1947–48.

30. A Love Supreme (liner notes), Album Liner Notes.

31. The Classic Bob Dylan “60 Minutes” Interview with Ed Bradley, Born To Listen.

32. Men Are Not The Center Of Alice Walker’s Universe, NPR.

33. “Satisfaction” Comes to Keith Richards, HISTORY.

34. Garcia Lorca, Play and Theory of the Duende, 1933 (full text), Literary Movements // Manifesto to the Millennium.