Everything about Daemon Mythology totally explained
The words
daemon,
dæmon, are
Latinized spellings of the
Greek δαίμων (
daimon), used purposely today to distinguish the daemons of
Ancient Greek religion, good or malevolent "supernatural beings between mortals and gods, such as inferior divinities and ghosts of dead heroes" (see Plato's
Symposium), from the
Judeo-Christian usage
demon, a malignant spirit that can seduce, afflict, or possess humans. This notion of the daemon as a spiritual being of a lowly order that's largely evil and certainly dangerous has its origin in
Plato and his pupil
Xenocrates; when the later connotation is read back anachronistically into Homer, the result is distorting: "To emancipate oneself from Plato's manner of speech is no easy matter",
Walter Burkert remarked. Daemons scarcely figure in
Greek mythology or
Greek art: like
keres their felt but unseen presence was assumed. There was one exception: the "Good Daemon"
Agathos Daemon, who was honored first with a
libation in ceremonial wine-drinking, and especially in the sanctuary of
Dionysus, and whose numinous presence was signaled in
iconography by a
chthonic serpent.
In
Hesiod Phaethon becomes a
daimon, de-materialized, but the ills of mankind released by
Pandora are
keres not
daimones. Hesiod connects the
daimones of the deceased great and good in relating how the men of the Golden Age were transmuted into
daimones by the will of Zeus, to serve as ineffable guardians of mortals, whom they might serve by their benevolence. In similar ways, the
daimon of a venerated
hero or a founder figure, located in one place by the construction of a shrine rather than left unburied to wander, would confer good fortune and protection on those who stopped to offer respect. Thus
daemones ("replete with knowledge", "divine power", "fate" or "god") were not necessarily evil.
The Greek translation of the
Septuagint, made for the Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria, and the usage of
daimon in the
New Testament's original Greek text, caused the Greek word to be applied to a Judeo-Christian spirit by the early 2nd century AD. Then in
late antiquity, pagan conceptions and
exorcisms, part of the cultural atmosphere, became Christian beliefs and exorcism rituals. The transposition has recently been documented in detail, in North Africa, by Maureen Tilley.
In Neo-Platonic philosophy
Daemons were important in Neo-Platonic philosophy. In Neoplatonism, a daemon was more like a
demigod rather than an evil spirit, as Eros was described as
in-between the gods and humankind. In the Christian reception of Platonism, the eudaemons were identified with the angels.
Cyprian was debunking the gods of the pagans as a
euhemerist falsehood in his essay
On the Vanity of Idols, but he'd this to say of
daemons:
The dæmons are real enough — "the principle is the same, which misleads and deceives, and with tricks which darken the truth, leads away a credulous and foolish rabble" — it's relying upon them that's deceptive. In this way the
dæmons passed easily into Christian "demons."
Plato and Socrates
Plato in
Cratylus (398 b) gives the etymology of
δαίμονες (
daimones) from
δαήμονες (
daēmones) (=knowing or wise). In Plato's
Symposium, the priestess
Diotima teaches Socrates that love isn't a god, but rather a good daemon. In Plato's
Trial of Socrates, Socrates claimed to have a
daimonion, a small daemon, that warned him against mistakes but never told him what to do or coerced him into following it. He claimed that his daemon exhibited greater accuracy than any of the forms of
divination practised at the time. The
Hellenistic Greeks divided daemons into good and evil categories:
Eudaemons (also called
Kalodaemons) and
Kakodaemons, respectively.
Eudaemons resembled the Abrahamic idea of the guardian
angel; they watched over mortals to help keep them out of trouble. (Thus
eudaemonia, originally the state of having a eudaemon, came to mean "well-being" or "happiness".) A comparable Roman
genius accompanied a person or protected and haunted a place (
genius loci).
After the time of Plato, in the
Hellenistic ruler-cult that began with
Alexander himself, it wasn't the ruler but his guiding
daemon that was venerated, for in Hellenistic times, the
daimon was external to the man whom it inspired and guided, who was "possessed" by this motivating spirit. Similarly, the first-century Romans began by venerating the
genius of Augustus, a distinction that blurred in time.
In Early Christianity
The specific motivation for the rush of inspired destruction of Greek and Roman sculpture unleashed at the end of the 4th century, as soon as Christianity was in secure control, is revealed here: the images were inhabited by demons. As in all such destruction, the faces were especially attacked, literally "defaced."
In the process of Christianizing Roman populations in the official Christianity from the late 4th century, theologians, hermits and monks, and the bishops and presbyters who influenced individuals, had their own repertoire of ideas, which were derived from Scripture and from the ambient culture of Late Antiquity. Within the Christian tradition, ideas of "demons" derived as much from the literature that came to be regarded as apocryphal and heretical as it did from the literature accepted as
canonical.
In North Africa
The North African
Apuleius summed up their character in the
On The God of Socrates (2nd century AD): "For, to encompass them by a definition, dæmones are living beings in kind, rational creatures in mind, susceptible to emotion in spirit, in body composed of the ær, everlasting in time. Of these five points I've listed, the first three are shared with us, the fourth is their own, the last they've in common with the immortal gods; but they differ from them in their capacity to suffer" The Hellenic and Roman gods were increasingly seen as immovable, untouched by human sorrows and suffering, existing in a perfect heavenly sphere (compare
Epicurus,
Lucretius). The
dæmones were earthbound, passion-tormented, and in Late Antiquity, loremasters were separating them into the noble kinds and troublemaking kinds. The gnostic followers of
Valentinus multiplied the circles of dæmons and gave them oversight in various areas of concern to people: oracles, animals, and, interestingly, as "patron dæmons" of nations or occupations (compare
Principalities and
Patron saint).
In Hermeticism
The lore of
Hermes Trismegistus is a source both for pagan and Christian conceptions of dæmons, for in the
Corpus Hermeticum, they functioned as the gatekeepers of the spheres through which souls passed on their way to the highest heaven, the
Empyrean. The Early Medieval
St. Gall sacramentary testifies to the continuity of this belief of
dæmones in the oldest extant prayer for anointing the dying:
» "I anoint you with sanctified oil that in the manner of a warrior prepared through anointing for battle you'll be able to prevail over the aery hordes."
In modern literature
Dæmons are a key element in
Phillip Pullman's "
His Dark Materials" trilogy (
Northern Lights (also known as
The Golden Compass),
The Subtle Knife, and
The Amber Spyglass). Pullman's books portray the dæmons as shape-shifting animal forms representing the souls of the humans they accompany from childhood, and which finally settle into their true form when the humans reach maturity. The form which the dæmon settles upon is representative of the human's personality -- servants typically have a dog or domestic animal dæmon, signifying their servility and humility, while powerful characters have more exotic dæmons such as leopards or snakes, signifying characteristics of strength or cunning. This is only the case in the world of protagonist
Lyra, and some others. In the parallel universes represented in the book, the daemons are absent, with the soul of the characters lacking a physical manifestation.
In computer terminology
In
Unix and other computer
multitasking operating systems, a
daemon is a
computer program that runs in the
background, rather than under the direct control of a user. This is related to the mythological concept of a daemon being an intermediary between the gods (the Computer) and humans (the User).
In modern parapsychology
In his book
Is There Life After Death, The Extraordinary Science of What Happens When You Die, British writer
Anthony Peake suggests that the dæmon is a very real aspect of human consciousness and suggests that this being is directly involved in the phenomenon known as
near-death experience. He also argues that this dæmonic presence may explain the 'voices' experienced by creative individuals such as writers, poets and artists and, in extreme cases,
schizophrenics. In the Freudian sense, The Dæmon is a powerful network of the Id and Superego together.
In modern fiction
In the
Warhammer 40,000 universe, Dæmons are formless beings that inhabit
The Warp and serve the dark gods or
Chaos Gods. They may be summoned forth in battle to take physical form and serve a Chaos Army or a
Daemonlord.
Further Information
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