The arts of the “daimon” : in search of a lost poetics

Abstract

Starting from the hypothesis of the existence, in the human being, of a non-material counterpart called spirit (pneuma) or soul (psyché), and the consequent presupposition of its survival from the death of dense bodies – idea based on ancient and modern philosophical, scientific and religious conceptions formulated by mankind –, the study views to investigate the performance of this element, (also known in ancient Greek culture under the enigmatic and polyssemic name of daimon) in the production of works of art, whether it appeals to the “unconscious” (here understood as repository of knowledge localized in the psychism of the artist himself ), or in the incidence of external influences (arising from personalities strange to this same psychism). Such performance, which becomes present in the history of the poiesis as inspiration, was classified according to two chief kinds: the former, as the endogenous one and the latter, as the exogenous one. In Western art, several examples of the inspirational or intuitive phenomenon in the artistic genesis field are reported. Once this fact is found out, then there is a vehement protest against the  eduction/compression of the dimensions of reality, followed by an instigating suggestion of widening those same dimensions which configure what is real, starting from the concrete possibility of the validity of another level of reality, parallel to the tangible level, whose contours open up new interpretative possibilities of the “poietic” phenomenon. The text settles the intersection of literary, esthetic, philosophical, psychological, scientific and religious disciplines, carrying out in practice, some interdisciplinarity, which has as objective, the highlighting of a specific source of work of art – what allows us to consider it, as far as it proposes a different description of the creative process provided at once, a work having a “genetic” character, on which the fundamentals of a pneumatic or mediumistic origin in the artistic production are established.