What if becoming wiser requires a relationship with a "divine double" within you?
In episode three of the series, John and Harvard's Charles Stang move on from Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes to Apuleius' 2nd-century text On the God of Socrates, which imagines philosophy as a kind of daimonology that begins and ends with two daimons: the daimon that is your soul and the daimon that is your double. Apuleius presents daimons as intermediaries between dispassionate gods and passionate humans, translating the gods' care into the language of emotion, and then complicates his own taxonomy: human souls are themselves daimons, the air is populated by the formerly embodied dead, and some daimons were never embodied at all and attach themselves to our souls as guides.
Along the way, John and Charles compare daimons with biblical angels and connect the daimonic to internal family systems, grief-time encounters with the dead, dialogical rationality, the future self, and intuition as non-conscious pattern detection that needs dialectic as a check. John speaks openly about a waking vision and a dream of Hermes, before Charles previews Porphyry's story of an Egyptian priest summoning Plotinus' daimon at the temple of Isis in Rome.
Charles Stang is Professor of Early Christian Thought at Harvard Divinity School, Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard, and the author of Our Divine Double. In this episode, he guides John through Apuleius' On the God of Socrates and its vision of philosophy as knowing your own daimonic soul and cultivating a relationship with its divine double.
John Vervaeke is a cognitive scientist and philosopher whose work explores cognition, meaning, wisdom, and the meaning crisis. In this conversation, he brings 4E cognitive science, the dialogical self, and research on intuition to bear on Apuleius' account, and shares his own encounters with Hermes.
Study the daimon with Charles: Daemons in Divinity on The Lectern
Charles Stang's Web
On the God of Socrates - Apuleius
Our Divine Double - Charles M. Stang
Symposium - Plato
Divination and Human Nature - Peter T. Struck
Divination and Theurgy in Neoplatonism - Crystal Addey
On the Life of Plotinus - Porphyry
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