786. Genius is the originary-archaic. "According to the traditional mythical belief of the Romans, every human being has his personal tutelary or protecting spirit; the Romans called this tutelary spirit the ‘genius’. This genius accompanies the individual throughout his life, and so Horace calls it ‘comes’, a companion or an escort (Epistles, 2, 2, 187). It was also called one’s ‘tutela’, or patron. The genius is sometimes related to what the Romans called ‘anima’ or ‘animus’, in other words, the soul. And yet it is much more than just the individual’s soul. It is also his character, or fate, in a positive as well as a negative sense. The genius is primarily responsible for how a human individual develops, for what he becomes, and for when he dies. Hence the genius could also be called the spirit of one’s destiny; or, as the classical philologist Theodor Birt called it, one’s ‘spirit of becoming’ (Werdegeist). Gignere means ‘to produce’ or ‘to beget’, ‘to bring forth’, ‘to give birth to’. Thus the genius is a productive spirit that gives birth to something or brings something into being. It is an independent and (sometimes) autonomous divine being, that can act out its own intentions. It is to this divine being that the Roman would pray and make offerings (for instance, on birthdays or on the occasion of important family celebrations). Moreover, this divine being can, principally in the form of a snake or serpent, appear outside the individual human being and act independently of him. These non-venomous serpents, which many Romans kept as if pets or tolerated in their houses as ‘co-habitees’, were often seen as the embodiments of the geniuses of the people living there or as geniuses of the place (as the ‘good spirits of the house’). They were treated with respect, offerings were made to them, plates of food were set out for them. The main feast-day of the genius was considered to be the individual’s birthday. On this day the particular genius was hailed by the Romans as Natalis, and by the Greeks as daímon genéthlios - in both cases as the spirit or god of birth. Offerings of flowers and wine were made as well as offerings of incense. At the moment of birth, the genius joined the individual and bound itself to him or her for the individual’s entire lifespan, and for this reason (even after the death of the individual) would be celebrated on the individual’s birthday and treated to food and drink. Similarly, on anniversaries of the family or the household, offerings were made to the genius – specifically, the genius of the father of the family and the head of the household (‘pater familias’) – at the fireplace or in the private shrine or chapel (the lararium). A wall painting at Pompeii gives us a good impression of such a sacrificial offering. It was also the custom to swear by one’s genius. One did not simply swear – as was the custom since the days of Augustus – by the genius of the emperor but also by the genius of one’s friend, one’s master or one’s patron. In Aristotelian terms, the genius as the originary principle is the télos of the human being (in the sense of ‘goal’ as well as of ‘limit’), the individual’s ‘entelechy’. In the genius as the tutelary spirit that determines the individual’s fate and (trans)forms his life, the persistent effect of the archaic becomes clear. "The beginning is always what is greatest,’ Heidegger declares. Arche functions in Heidegger’s work as the name designating the twofold character of the beginning: on the one hand, it names the origin as such as the source of all emergence or incipience; on the other, it designates the power that comes to presence in the origin itself. Arche, in this sense, is the ‘ruling origin’ of being. Arche is not a temporally prior point of origination or a historically discoverable past. Rather, the arche derives its power from, or rather unfolds its power as, something futural. As Heidegger expresses it in his lectures 1937–1938: "The futural is the beginning of all happening. In the beginning there lies everything sheltered. Even if what has already begun and what has already become, appear to have advanced beyond their beginning, yet the beginning... remains in power and abides and everything futural comes into confrontation with it. In all authentic history, futurity is decisive..."." [Paul Bishop, The Archaic]
Posted on: Sat, 08 Jun 2013 09:00:19 +0000
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