Genius — the Genii

This is the older meaning of the word, and it is worth recovering exactly, for almost everything turns on it. Genius is a Latin word, and to the Romans it did not mean a clever individual. It meant a tutelary deity — a guardian spirit allotted to each person at the very moment of birth, who accompanied them through the whole of life and shaped their character and their fortune. Every person had one. The plural is genii. Places had them too — the genius loci, the presiding spirit of a grove, a threshold, a hearth. The word descends from the same root that gives us genesis and generate and genus: to be born, to beget, to bring forth.

A genius, then, was the bringing-forth spirit — the generative daemon present in a person from their first breath. To have genius was not to be cleverer than others; it was to be in living relation with the guiding intelligence one was born beside. And so to presence genius, in the full weight of the word, is to call that natal, tutelary intelligence across the threshold into the present: to help a person come into relation with the bringing-forth spirit that has been theirs since birth, and to do for another what a good genius does, which is to instruct them, gently, in how to proceed. We do not give anyone their genius. We presence it. It was always already there.