The root of the word genius is the Latin Geno Genere, which means to generate or to

father or to be get. It's a word that shows up in words like jeans, right?

This is a historian, there in Macbeth. It turns out that there's a kind of

link there because in Latin Genuse, or genius, was conceived as a kind of

guardian spirit that was born with you at creation and watched over you throughout

your life. It's the root of, in many ways, our modern or a more modern idea of

a kind of guardian spirit, guardian angel.

As Macma had explained, genius originally referred to the God of your birth.

Some sort of attending spirit among many, among billions that decided it was

time to extract your essence from the ether and then bring you into the realm of

mortals. Genus comes from the Latin verb Geno, or Genere, Geno, Genere, whoever

you'd like to pronounce that, which means bring into existence. It's the root of

generate and genes and genitals and so on. The Roman playwright, Plautus, once

wrote of regret. He regretted how when he realized he was dying in his old age as

a poor man, that he couldn't go on any more adventures or experience anything

new, and he said he had cheated himself, his animus, and his genius. Now, animus

means soul, so he was saying he had fallen short of itself, his soul, and the

spirit who brought him into the world from across the veil, the space between

mortals and those who are more than the place where gods and spirits attend to

the matters of the divine.

In the description for this episode, right there on your podcast player, right

there, on your phone, on your computer, whatever you're using to listen to this,

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