daimonn.

1852 H. D. Thoreau Love in Lett. to Various Persons (1865) 73 It is the same daimon, here lurking under a human eyelid.

1875 E. C. Stedman Victorian Poets (1876) 154 The Laureate..is his own daimon,—the inspirer and controller of his own utterances.

1903 J. Buchan Afr. Colony xix. 393 The faults of..[Cecil Rhodes'] methods..did not impair that legacy of daimonic force which he left to his countrymen.

1941 R. Turner Great Cultural Traditions I. ii. 92 Early man conceived of the universe as a host of intangible and invisible beings who worked good and evil for man outside of, contrary to, and in spite of physical forces and circumstances... As a view of the organization of the world in which man lives, they may properly be designated the daimonic universe.

1957 J. S. Huxley Relig. without Revelation (rev. ed.) iii. 50 God hypotheses are part of a more general theory, the daimonic theory as it is usefully called, according to which supernatural spiritual beings, good, bad, or indifferent, and of very different degrees of importance, play a part in the affairs of the cosmos.

1978 Washington Post 14 Apr. b4/1 The ego has to be very strong. And if the wild forces—the daimonic forces—are too strong, the person may go mad. Hence the closeness of genius to lunacy.