On the Good Daimōn

The first three volumes of the Catharturgy Corpus built a map of the soul and taught its use. On the Good Daimōn turns to the traveler and the companion who walks the map beside the soul: the guardian angel of the Christian tradition, the daimōn of the Platonists, the Holy Guardian Angel of the Western magical tradition. The Corpus reads that companion as the soul's own highest nature, first perceptible at the heart, and neither simply outside the soul nor simply within it. To be eudaimōn, in the old word, is to be well-accompanied.

The book moves in seven parts. The first three follow the companion itself. The Guardian asks who the companion is, and follows the guardian angel and the daimōn through their histories to their meeting, with the doctrine and meditations by which it is approached and the purification the approach requires. The Adversary and the Work of Discernment asks what stands against the companion and how the two are told apart: the personal adversary and its doctrine, the intrusions of the disturbed mind, the doctrine of shells and judgments, and the seat of the witness. The Operation asks how the companion's knowledge and conversation are sought, through the Solomonic, Abramelin and Enochian traditions and the graded operation of an order.

The last four make the book the practical handbook of the Corpus. Ritual and Meditation gives the rituals and meditations of the twenty-six paths, the caduceus, the three channels, and the practices of the Tree held on the body. Healing: The Boundary Restored gives the census of the inner life and the practices that mend the line between the inner and the outer world, from the planted foot to the stages a mind builds on a misplaced boundary. The Life of the Soul reads trauma, solitude, love and self-governance, and Narratives retells the whole as sacred story.

An opening chapter, A Companion for the Way, places the volume in the arc of the Corpus. The practices described are offered for study and disciplined practice; they are not clinical guidance.