by Charlie Huenemann
“A genius is a god under whose protection each person lives from the moment of his birth.” This is the opinion of Censorinus, a Roman rhetorician of the third century CE. Censorinus tells us that our birthday celebrations are not really about us. Instead, they are banquets of gratitude for our spiritual guardians, or the beings known by the Romans as geniuses. Everybody has one: they are the spirits who make sure we are born, that we survive, that we are protected, and that we flourish. Censorinus writes that our genius “has been appointed to be so constant a watcher over us that he never goes away from us even for a second, but is our constant companion from the moment we are taken from our mother's womb to the last days of our life.” As the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk observes, this makes every birth in fact a double birth – one for us, and one for our guardian genius.
These Roman geniuses are not unique to humans. They also watch over animals, places, households, and even ritualized celebrations like the original Olympics. Exactly how to count them up is hard to say, since each genius is usually one among many different aspects of a god, another face that is shown to a newcomer. And as each god has multiple faces or concerns, each face serves as a different genius for different occasions – as guardians of individuals, their homes, their marriages, their savings, their harvests, and so on. But set the counting issue aside. On our birthdays, according to Censorinus, we are to show particular gratitude to our own genius, the one who has brought us safe thus far:
A Genius is a god under whose protection each person lives from the moment of his birth. Whether it is because he makes sure we get generated, or he is generated with us, or he takes us up and protects us once we are generated, in any case, it is clear he is called our “Gen-ius” from “gen-eration.”… And so we offer special sacrifice to our Genius every year throughout our lives….
This notion of genius is precisely the one to have in mind when we read Emerson: “I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim.” In calling upon “whim,” he's certainly not writing about dodging family responsibilities when he feels like waxing philosophical. He is writing about being under another's guidance, like experiencing a kind of demonic possession – though in Emerson's case the demon is reliably good-natured.