Steve Pressfield, in his book The Artist’s Journey:
The human race lost something, I believe, when it passed from the ancient world to the modern. The ancients understood the monstrous. They were not appalled by it, as we are. The legends of the ancient world are packed with monsters — Medusa, Cerberus, the Minotaur. Even the human characters — Medea, Agamemnon, Ajax, Clytemnestra — often embody the monstrous.
The ancients recognized that nature herself contains the monstrous. The world as the Almighty designed it is populated by monsters.
Note that this observation comes in the middle of a chapter of Pressfield’s book titled “Autobiography of the Daimon,” in which he lays out a list of the daimon’s characteristics to help you recognize the motions of your own and understand its core significance for your life. The above paragraphs appear as explication of the principle that “the daimon is monstrous.” Don’t miss the import of this insight for your own deep nature: Since “your daimon is closer to you than anyone in your life’ (Principle 6), and since “the meaning of your life is contained in your daimon” (Principle 9), which is immortal, divine, inhuman, and creative (Principles 1, 2, 3, and 5), you contain within your self, as the very ground of your nature as an individual identity separate from the totality of the cosmos, the ancient and primal principle of the monstrous.
This comes out pretty clearly in the commentary and explanation Pressfield provides for Principle 3, “the daimon is inhuman”:
Mother Teresa had a daimon. Martin Luther King had one. But so did Hitler. So did Stalin. And so do you.
There’s a reason why daimon looks a lot like demon. The concepts of right and wrong are foreign to the daimon. The daimon operates by higher laws. The daimon is nature. An oak will grow through solid concrete. A butterfly will cross hundreds of miles of open ocean.
And this, of course and in turn, leads to Principle 8:
Ignore the daimon and it will kill you. Are we nobler than our daimons? Are we “kinder”? “Better”? Perhaps. But our daimon is far more powerful.
Which makes the ninth and final principle all the more starkly arresting:
The meaning of your life is contained in your daimon.
Source: Steven Pressfield, The Artist’s Journey: The Wake of the Hero’s Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning (Egremont, MA: Black Irish Entertainment LLC, 2018), 152-154
For more about daimons in general, see my post The Greeks and Their Daimones, excerpted from my long essay about the iconic angel and demon of horror fiction and film. For a full exploration of the concept of the daimon/daemon in the context of authorial and artistic creativity, see my A Course in Demonic Creativity.