Several thousand people have now downloaded my free e-book A Course in Demonic Creativity: A Writer’s Guide to the Inner Genius (formerly available at Demon Muse, which I have now shut down because of repeated hacks and security breaches). There’s obviously a widespread interest in the idea, experience, and practice of what feels like inner creative communion and collaboration with a guiding muse, daimon, genius, Holy Guardian Angel, pick your metaphor. My personal intuition tells me the whole subject is bound up with the zeitgeist itself, as anybody who has followed this blog for very long will already know.
Something I didn’t talk about in the e-book, but that I’ll probably mention in its possible future reincarnation as a thoroughly expanded and revised version of itself, is the rich and deeply significant connection between this subject and the I Ching. If you’re unfamiliar or only distantly familiar with this classic, civilization-shaping Chinese book of divination and cosmic wisdom, then please hear me when I say that you’re well-advised to become better acquainted with it, because the discipline of learning to consult, interpret, and apply the I Ching to your life, psyche, and circumstances can complement and intensify the Western view of the daimon muse with a powerful alternate inflection.
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NOTE: You can read the rest of this piece in my 2023 ebook Transmitting Vision: Essays on the Writer’s Path, where it has now been collected alongside six other essays on writing and creativity.
I will have to find that book!
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from David Gordon White’s Sinister Yogis,
the following song, which opens the performance of the pandav lila, a dramatization of the Mahabharata epic, in a small sub-Himalayan village in Garhwal:
O five Pandavas, for nine days and nights
the rhythm of the season will sound through these hills.
We have summoned our neighbors, and the faraway city dwellers.
O singers and listeners, we have summoned the five gods
to this gleaming stone square.
I bow to the netherworld, the world, and the heavens,
to this night’s moon, the world of art.
The gods will dance in the square like peacocks.
They will dance their weapons in the square until dawn,
when they will be absorbed by the rays of the sun.
“In the beginning, the emitted beings were greatly afflicted with hunger. Then Savitr [the sun], out of compassion, [acted] like their true father. Going to its northern course, and drawing resins of effulgence (tejorasan) [of the earth] upward with his rays, the sun, having now returned to his southern course, entered into the earth. When he [the sun] had become the field, the Lord of Plants [i.e., the Moon], condensing the effulgence of heaven (divastejah), engendered the plants with water. Sprinkled with the resins of effulgence of the moon, the sun that had gone into the earth was born as the nourishing plants of the six flavors. He [the sun] is the food of living creatures on earth. Yes indeed, solar food is the staff of life of every living being. The sun is the father of all beings. Therefor, take refuge in him!”
– Mahabharata
This concept, of the sun’s power to give, take, and transform life with its rays is so pervasive in South Asia as to constitute a cultural episteme. At the elite end of the cultural spectrum, the Rauravagama, in its account of the transformative power of initiation (diksa), explains that
[j]ust as darkness quickly vanishes at sunrise, so too after obtaining initiation one is freed from merit and demerit. Just as the sun illuminates these worlds with its rays, so too god shines with its energies in the mantra of sacrifice. . . When ritually yoked these [energies] pervade practitioners’ bodies, just as the sun with its rays removes impurities from the ground.
The I Ching is one of the very, very few books I have read that left no impression on me; it is near impenetrable, with an almost limitless hermeneutical horizon. I cannot seem to find my copy now and I am not sure if it is the ‘standard’ English translation, but if I were to offer any sort of advice to someone contemplating reading the damn thing, it would be this: get some sort of heavily annotated edition that puts the text in perspective, by relating it to both Chinese thought and the western philosophical tradition. Be also aware that there is no such thing as a ‘translation’ of the I Ching [ I would go as far as to say it would be impossible to translate it adequately into modern Mandarin, with simplified characters. I lived in China for years and I know enough Mandarin to understand that few specialists inside and outside of the country can approach the text with any sort of confident authority about its language and meaning]. If you get a bilingual edition you will notice how a couple of characters get translated into a line or two in English, so really, we are talking about interpretation rather than translation.
Even for a contemporary scholar from China, the I Ching is weirdly alien, since it is the relentlessly practical Confucianism that dominated in the last 25 centuries. I am also highly skeptical of any approach to the I Ching that originates with hippies and/or the 60s, but that is just me, I feel strongly regarding things tainted by association.