The first time I played through Persona 1 (well, the Snow Queen quest at least) I thought Philemon was something that the writers for Persona had made up. As it turns out, I was wrong, mostly because I didn’t know about Jungian psychology.
Persona is heavily based on the works of Carl Jung, who invented “analytical psychology”, which is basically what happens when you combine one part science with six parts mysticism, pseudoscience, and also probably schizophrenia.
The concept of Philemon probably came from Jung reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which has a story in it called Baucis and Philemon about an old couple who take a disguised Zeus and Hermes into their home when none of their neighbors would and are rewarded by watching all of their neighbors die for the crime of not letting the gods in for dinner.
Anyway, back to Jung. Carl Jung was very into recording his dreams, to the point where he kept a number of journals chronicling them. One night in 1913, he has a dream about an old man with bird wings and bull horns who flies around with keys in his hand. Carl Jung immediately decides that he needs to draw this so that everyone can see it.
Honestly, flying around with a handful of keys sounds like something you’d see Danny DeVito doing in an episode of Always Sunny.
[Image Credit: Philemon Foundation]
Jung names this guy Philemon, and from this point on spends the next several years writing down every single thing that happens to him in something called the Red Book, which Wikipedia tells me was not actually published until 2008 due to interference by Jung’s estate (probably because it makes him look fucking crazy). This is when Jung develops his entire theory of analytical psychology, at a point where even he was pretty sure that he was schizophrenic.
Philemon kind of evolved from a strange dream figure to what Jung called an archetype of the collective unconsciousness: if you’ve ever played any of the Zero Escape games, that’s basically what the “morphogenetic field” that makes everyone psychic is. Jung’s theory on the collective unconsciousness is something along the lines of there being these archetypes that guide the development of the self, and that can’t be seen or understood except through imagery and metaphors and shit.
Among the archetypes is something called the “Wise Old Man”, which is basically what Jung assumed Philemon was - the archetype appearing to him in a dream through imagery. A lot of movies and other media have kind of latched onto the whole archetype thing: there are charts out there showing how Star Wars (at least, the original ones) and Harry Potter are largely based off Jung’s archetypes.
Anyway, that’s my explanation of where the name comes from. Whether the Philemon in Persona has anything to do with Carl Jung’s crazy old dream man will have to be seen.