It’s all so murky here.
The genius was a sort of tulpa. Each place had a genius, and so did powerful objects—volcanoes, rivers, mountains. There was the genius of the theater, the genius of vineyards, the genius of festivals. These were not mere abstractions but spirits tethered to specific aspects of life, woven into the structure of society.
The concept extended to units of civilization: houses, doors, gates, districts, tribes. The hierarchy of gods consisted of genii for each individual family. For men, their genius was their spirit, their divine presence. For women, it was their Juno, embodying the feminine divine. The patriarch, in contrast, aligned with Jupiter.
Genii were protective spirits. When Octavius triumphed at the Battle of Actium, his genius was officially recognized. He took the name Augustus, and from this arose the Genius Augusti—the divine spirit of the emperor. This was the beginning of the Roman imperial cult, where the genius of the imperator was venerated, his spirit entwined with the state itself. Once an emperor died, his genius was deified, worshipped as divus, an immortal presence in the Roman pantheon. The genius of Rome itself became the personification of the Roman people.
There was also the genos, a lineage, a social group claiming common descent. The Sanskrit gana shares the same root—a collective of those bound together, sometimes alien to the surrounding world. Some say the gana were beings unlike men, devoted to Shiva, of whom Shiva himself was one.
Nietzsche spoke of genius excessively. In Twilight of the Idols, he described the explosion of it, how the milieu shapes it, how it is an eruption of force…