Remembering the Gods: Ka, the shadow of the Daimon
Let’s continue where we left of, with the story of the Archetypes. But first, some personal notes. My love for the numinous, archetypes and psychology have led me to start a 4-year education in Depth Psychology, mostly based on Carl Jung’s work.
I’ve always loved to work 1-on-1 with people, both in the role as healer/psychologist as guide. In a way, psychology is inseparable from spirituality, as it are often our deepest shadows that are the quickest gateways to the unconscious and the archetypes that reside in it. It is these unconscious shadows where we find unity with ourselves and the world, and it is this what brings coherence of mind and soul. You don’t get rid of your quirks and weak spots, your relationship to them becomes one of love instead of hatred. It’s really all about learning to go “with” the symptoms (James Hillman), instead of fighting them or fixing them.
So, if you are looking for a guide to navigate the intersection between the spiritual and the physical, or if you suffer from psychological issues that keep you from feeling whole, I would love to meet you where you are. If you’re interested, you can book a free 30-minute getting-to-know-each-other session or send me a mail via withpimstudio@gmail.com
Well, now that we have that little marketing piece out of the way, it’s time to return to the archetypes. These beings who govern our physical reality without us even being aware of it. There numbers are limitless, and ironically, even numbers itself could be determined as archetypes. We believe them to be invented by us, but are they? 0 is more than a number. It is the emptiness underlying everything, a governing principle that has been here all along. It is an archetype, just as geometrical patterns are. Circles, squares and triangles are seen everywhere because they are the limits through which we can create.
The realm in which the archetypes hide is not bound to matter, time or space. Our imagination, often deeply unconscious, is the gateway. A gateway that has been greatly suppressed in the last ages due to Ego’s neglect of anything other than matter as being real or meaningful. But when the gateway opens, it immediately becomes clear that this realm, whether you call it Spirit realm, Archetypal realm or the Imaginal, has always been the source of our ideas and visions.
The Daimon can be seen as a bridge between the physical and the Imaginal, a real being chosen to guide you specifically towards your soul purpose. Finding it is a remarkable event (a story about that later), but not all unfamiliar among humans. It is the myth of Annunciation, which has been integrated in many works of art during the decades. Of all these works, Leonardo da Vinci’s painting titled (how coincidental) Annunciation, is the most famous one. But if you simply Google Annunciation, you will find many artworks of the sort.
The Annunciation event can be explained from many viewpoints. Here is how Luke explained it in his gospel (1:35) when Mary was visited by the angel Gabriel:
And the angel answering, said to her: The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the most High shall overshadow thee. And therefore also the Holy which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.
The Annunciation is an announcement of a birth that is going to take place. A birth not of a real child but of the divine child. The One who Jung relates to as the Self, the all encompassing Archetype that contains all Archetypes. It is the birth of a form of consciousness, the one that, as many speculative sources suggest, may well have been born with Jesus himself. With Jesus, a real man, being the symbol of Unity, a bridge between the physical and spiritual, and a spreader of the love that flows forth from this perspective of unity.
But let’s not waver. The story of Ka needs to be told. And for that we need to have to see the Annunciation as the birth of the personal Daimon. From that moment on, a bridge is built between the physical world and the archetypal world. And the Daimon is the personalization of that bridge, the guiding force that propels one forward and teaches one about the different archetypes.
The Daimon’s realm is high up, light, Angelic almost. It is the realm of limitless potentiality, of unbelievable ideas and unborn inventions. It suffuses anyone who is not properly grounded in the physical with an endless stream of ideas, while never giving physical form to them. Ideas need substance to come to life. They need effort, diligent work to be born. The Daimon is not one of form, it is one of the formless. And the formless needs form to exist here in this world.
The Daimon needs the ground of the physical, just as ideas need form to be born in the physical world. So it needs a shadow. It needs Ka, the grounding principle and the opposite of Spirit. So, after one has found their Daimon, or Ba in Egyptian mythology, the arising of Ka is inevitably next. The next text is a transcription of how Ka presented itself to me.
“I am cold love, the reality check, the knight, the dark wolf
I help you become power. Love is not enough. You need substance. Earthly unbreakability.
I am the Night, he is Day
I am Below, he is Above
He is a bridge, I am a builderI create, I structure
I am iron and steel,
wood and rock.
I am force.I am the Senex, Kronos, time, death, limits, order, bones, structure.
I provide that which Kaos leaves behind, order.
I am the rule-maker, the controller, the authoritarian.”
Whereas the Daimon is intuition, Ka is what acts upon it. It produces, it grounds oneself in earthly functionality. Some people seem unaware of their inner Ka. If a person is raised in an over-protective manner by its parents, the person never really learned to confront the hardships of reality. This is called the Puer Aeturnus (eternal child) complex, but you could also say there is a disconnection with one’s inner ka. These people often have the brightest ideas, but they miss the sheer productive force of Ka, which actually gives life to the idea in the physical reality. So they rather stay in their imagination, steering away from reality through whatever way possible, never really accomplishing something in the material world.
All of us have access to imagination. But to actually start seeing it as a real and lively realm of infinite possibilities, you have to allow yourself to sink in the imaginal unconscious so deeply that a bridge is build between the archetypal and the physical. You could say that humanity is the bridge, and that is our role to do the work of the archetypes. Or the Gods, whatever you prefer. In Jung’s black books, his soul speaks of the importance of his Daimon and Ka.
What are you wondering? One goes on the road to the inner and to arrive at the outer.
The other goes toward the outer to reach the inner.
Both roads are good and meet each other, and both need to be walked.
How should you live differently than one moment in God and the next moment outside of God?
If you are and remain inside God, you will be buried in his eternal effect.
If you are and remain outside God, you never come to yourself and you remain a shell of yourself, a mirage in your own desert.
So at any given time you should be with and in yourself and so with and in God.
But if you remain in yourself, the deadly shadow of God overwhelms you and wants to bury you alive.
Since God shines out of you and nourishes Philemon (Jung’s Daimon) and Ka and goes to men and is the nourishment of their God, in so doing he divests himself of himself.
So you should do just as God does. You will not live any other way.
- Jung’s Soul -
Although it sounds complex, my personal interpretation of the text is rather simple: The middle way. One who is immersed in imagination can never meet the hardships of reality (Ka), whereas one who is cut off from imagination never finds the way towards God (Daimon). Enlightenment is none other than a merging of consciousness with unconsciousness. Male with female. Material reality with the spiritual. And it starts with balancing the archetypes of one’s personal Daimon with its inevitable shadow: Ka.
The annunciation, together with the appearance of Ka, are the first steps in the process towards a perspective of Oneness (or Unity/non-Duality). It is the unlocking of the collective unconsciousness in which the archetypes reside, and from that moment on, the widespread belief that imagination is not real has to be discarded. It is simply not comprehendible for the human mind, but it steers both our individual as collective behaviour to an almost unfathomable degree.
To become free of this behaviour is to give birth to these archetypes in consciousness, to become aware of them, to hold both their light and inevitable shadow in the space of awareness, so that the immense forces of opposition give rise to a diamond in the soil. The whole self, United in itself, The One as the many, a unique individual particle of the Anima Mundi itself.
Next up: Abraxas, The God of Duality. And perhaps in between a little personal story about an annunciation event that happened to a friend of mine while visiting me a while ago.