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Daemon (classical mythology)

This article is about the semi-divine beings in classicalmythology. For other uses, see Daemon.

"Dæmon" is the   Latinized   versions of the   Greek

A painting (Herbert James Draper  , 1909) of  Lamia , the queen

of Libya, who, according to Greek mythology , became a daemon

"δαίμων" (“godlike power, fate, god”).[1] It is a word

used to refer to the daemons of  ancient Greek religionand mythology, as well as later  Hellenistic religion andphilosophy.[2]

1 Etymology

The word daemon is the Latin version of the first word(the originating word)  daimōn, originating in the Greeklanguage.[3][4]

2 Description

Daemons are benevolent or benign nature spirits, beingsof the same nature as both mortals and deities, similar toghosts, chthonic heroes, spirit guides, forces of nature orthe deities themselves (see Plato’s   Symposium).   WalterBurkert suggests that unlike the Christian use of  demon

in a strictly malignant sense, "[a] general belief in spiritsis not expressed by the term  daimon  until the 5th cen-tury when a doctor asserts that neurotic women and girlscan be driven to suicide by  imaginary apparitions, ‘evildaimones ’. How far this is an expression of widespreadpopular superstition is not easy to judge… On the ba-sis of Hesiod’s myth, however, what did gain currency

was for great and powerful figures to be honoured afterdeath as a daimon…"  [5] Daimon is not so much a typeof quasi-divine being, according to Burkert, but rather anon-personified “peculiar mode” of their activity.

In Hesiod’s  Theogony,  Phaëton becomes an incorporealdaimon  or a divine spirit,[6] but, for example, the illsreleased by  Pandora are deadly deities,   keres , not   dai-

mones .[5] From Hesiod also, the people of the GoldenAge were transformed into daimones  by the will of Zeus,to serve mortals benevolently as their guardian spirits;“good beings who dispense riches…[nevertheless], theyremain invisible, known only by their acts”.[7] The dai-

mon of venerated heroes, were localized by the construc-tion of shrines, so as not to restlessly wander, and werebelieved to confer protection and good fortune on thoseoffering their respects.

Characterizations of the daemon as a dangerous, if notevil, lesser spirit were developed by Plato and his pupilXenocrates,[5] and later absorbed in Christian   patristicwritings along with Neo-Platonic elements.

In the Old Testament, evil spirits appear in the book ofJudges  and in   Kings. In the Greek translation of theSeptuagint, made for the Greek-speaking Jews of Alexan-dria, the Greek ángelos  (ἄγγελος “messenger”) translates

the Hebrew word mal'ak , while daimon (or neuter daimo-nion (δαιμόνιον)) carries the meaning of a natural spiritthat is less than divine (see  supernatural) and translates

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2   4 CATEGORIES 

the Hebrew words for idols, foreign deities, certain beasts,and natural evils.[8] The use of daimōn in the New Testa-ment's original Greek text, caused the Greek word to beapplied to the Judeo-Christian concept of an evil spirit bythe early second century AD.

Satanistshave used the word demon to define a knowledgethat has been banned by the Church.

3 In mythology and philosophy

Carnelian gem imprint representing Socrates  , Rome, first century

BC - first century AD.

Homer's use of the words   theoí   (θεοί “gods”) and  daí-

mones  (δαίμονες), suggests that while distinct, they aresimilar in kind.[9] Later writers developed the distinc-tion between the two.[10] Plato, in Cratylus[11] speculatesthat the word daimōn (δαίμων “deity”) is synonymous todaēmōn (δαήμων “knowing or wise”),[12] however, it ismore probably  daiō  (δαίω “to divide, to distribute des-tinies, to allot”).[13]

3.1 Socrates

In Plato’s   Symposium, the priestess   Diotima   teachesSocrates that love is not a deity, but rather a “great dae-mon” (202d). She goes on to explain that “everythingdaemonic is between divine and mortal” (202d–e), andshe describes daemons as “interpreting and transportinghuman things to the gods and divine things to men; en-treaties and sacrifices from below, and ordinances and

requitals from above...” (202e). In Plato’s  Apology of Socrates , Socrates claimed to have a  daimonion (literally,a “divine something”)[14] that frequently warned him—

in the form of a “voice”—against mistakes but never toldhim what to do.[15] The Platonic Socrates, however, neverrefers to the daimonion as a daimōn; it was always an im-personal “something” or “sign”.[16] By this term he seemsto indicate the true nature of the human  soul, his new-found self-consciousness.[17]

Regarding the charge brought against Socrates in 399,Plato surmised “Socrates does wrong because he doesnot believe in the gods in whom the city believes, butintroduces other daemonic beings…" Burkert notes that“a special being watches over each individual, a  daimon

who has obtained the person at his birth by lot, is an ideawhich we find in Plato, undoubtedly from earlier tradi-tion. The famous, paradoxical saying of Heraclitus is al-ready directed against such a view: 'character is for manhis daimon'".[5]

Plato and Proclus In the ancient Greek religion, daimon

designates not a specific class of divine beings, but a pe-culiar mode of activity: it is an occult power that driveshumans forward or acts against them: since daimon is theveiled countenance of divine activity, every deity can actas daimon; a special knowledge of daimones is claimedby Pythagoreans; for Plato, daimon, is a spiritual beingwho watches over each individual, and is tantamount to ahigher self, or an angel; whereas Plato is called ‘divine’ byNeoplatonists, Aristotle is regarded as daimonios, mean-ing ‘an intermediary to deities’ – therefore Aristotle standsto Plato as an angel to a deity; for Proclus, daimones arethe intermediary beings located between the celestial ob-jects and the terrestrial inhabitants.

4 Categories

The Hellenistic Greeks divided daemons into good andevil categories:   agathodaimōn   (ἀγαθοδαιμων “noblespirit”), from   agathós   (ἀγαθός “good, brave, noble,moral, lucky, useful”), and  kakódaimōn   (κακοδαίμων“malevolent spirit”), from   kakós   (κακός “bad, evil”).They resemble the jinn (or genie) of Arab folklore, andin their humble efforts to help mediate the good and

ill fortunes of human life, they resemble the Judeo-Christian guardian angel and adversarial demon, respec-tively.  Eudaimonia, the state of having a eudaemon, cameto mean “well-being” or “happiness”. The comparableRoman concept is the  genius  who accompanies and pro-tects a person or presides over a place (see  genius loci ).

A distorted view of   Homer's daemon results from ananachronistic reading in light of later characterizationsby Plato  and Xenocrates, his successor as head of theAcademy, of the daemon as a potentially dangerous lesserspirit:[5][18] Burkert states that in the  Symposium, Platohas “laid thefoundation”that would make it allbut impos-

sible to imagine the daimon in any other way with Eros,who is neither god nor mortal but a mediator in between,and his metaphysical doctrine of an “incorporeal, pure ac-

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tuality,  energeia… identical to its performance: ‘thinkingof thinking’, noesis noeseas … the most blessed existence,the highest origin of everything. ‘This is the god. On sucha principle heaven depends, and the cosmos.' The high-est, the best is one; but for the movement of the planets aplurality of unmoved movers must further be assumed…

In the monotheism of the mind, philosophical specula-tion has reached an end-point. That even this is a self-projection of a human, of the thinking philosopher, wasnot reflected on in ancient philosophy.

In Plato there is an incipient tendency toward theapotheosis of nous . He needs a closeness and availabilityof the divine that is offered neither by the stars nor bymetaphysical principles. Here a name emerged to fill thegap, a name which had always designated the incompre-hensible yet present activity of a higher power,  daimon".Daemons scarcely figure in  Greek mythology or Greekart: they are felt, but their unseen presence can only be

presumed, with the exception of the agathodaemon, hon-ored first with a libation in ceremonial wine-drinking, es-pecially at the sanctuary of Dionysus, and represented iniconography by the chthonic serpent.

Burkert suggests that, for Plato, theology rests on twoForms: the Good and the Simple; which “Xenocrates un-equivocally called the unity god” in sharp contrast to thepoet’s gods of epic and tragedy.[5] Although much likethe deities, these figures were not always depicted with-out considerable moral ambiguity:

“On this account, the other traditional no-tion of the daemon as related to the souls ofthe dead is elided in favour of a spatial sce-nario which evidently also graduated in moralterms; though [Plato] says nothing of that here,it is a necessary inference from her account,just as Eros is midway between deficiencyand plenitude… Indeed, Xencrates… explic-itly understood   daemones   as ranged along ascale from good to bad… [Plutarch] speaksof ‘great and strong beings in the atmosphere,malevolent and morose, who rejoice in [un-lucky days, religious festivals involving vio-lence against the self, etc.], and after gain-ing them as their lot, they turn to nothingworse.’… The use of such malign daemones byhuman beings seems not to be even remotelyimagined here: Xenocrates’ intention was toprovide an explanation for the sheer varietyof polytheistic religious worship; but it is thepotential for moral descrimination offered bythe notion of daemones  which later… becameone further means of conceptualizing what dis-tinguishes dominated practice from civic reli-gion, and furthering the transformation of that

practice into intentional profanation… Quitewhen the point was first made remains unan-swerable. Much the same thought as [Plato’s]

is to be found in an explicitly Pythagoreancontext of probably late Hellenistic composi-tion, the Pythagorean Commentaries , which ev-idently draws on older popular representations:‘The whole air is full of souls. We call themdaemones  and heros, and it is they who send

dreams, signsand illnesses to men; and not onlymen, but also to sheep and other domestic ani-mals. It is towards these daemones  that we di-rect purifications and apotropaic rites, all kindsof divination, the art of reading chance utter-ances, and so on’… This account differs fromthat of the early Academy in reaching back tothe other, Archaic, view of  daemones  as souls,and thus anticipates the views of Plutarch andApuleius in the Principate… It clearly im-plies that  daemones   can cause illness to live-stock: this traditional dominated view has now

reached the intellectuals”.[19]

In the Hellenistic ruler cult that began with Alexander theGreat, it was not the ruler, but his guiding  daemon  thatwas venerated. In the Archaic or early Classical period,the daimon  had been democratized and internalized foreach person, whom it served to guide, motivate, and in-spire, as one possessed of such good spirits.[20] Similarly,the first-century Roman imperial cult began by venerat-ing the   genius  or  numen  of Augustus, a distinction thatblurred in time.

5 See also

•   Agathodaimon

•   Kakodaimon

•  Dæmon (His Dark Materials )

•   Daimonic

•   Demon

•   Eudaimon

•   Eudaimonia

•   Fravashi

•   Fylgja

•   Genius (mythology)

•  Holy Guardian Angel

•   Hyang

•   Jinn

•   Kami

•  Shoulder angel

•   Yaksha

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4   7 EXTERNAL LINKS 

6 Notes

[1] From the  Proto-Indo-European  root   deh2-(i-)   “cut, di-vide"; see  R. S. P. Beekes,  Etymological Dictionary of 

Greek , Brill, 2009, p. 297.

[2]   daimōn "δαίμων".  A Greek–English Lexicon.

[3] A Delahunty - From Bonbon to Cha-cha: Oxford Dictio-nary of Foreign Words and Phrases (p.90)  Oxford Uni-versity Press, 23 Oct 2008 ISBN 0199543690 Retrieved2015-04-24

[4] J Cresswell -  Little Oxford Dictionary of Word OriginsRetrieved 2015-04-24

[5] Burkert, Walter (1985). Greek Religion. Harvard Univer-sity Press. pp. 179–181, 317, 331, 335.   ISBN 978-0-674-36281-9. LCCN 84025209.

[6] "ποιήσατο, δαίμονα δῖον"; Hesiod, Theogony 991.

[7] Hesiod, Works and Days  122-26.

[8] Trimpi, Helen P (1973). “Demonology”. In Wiener,Philip P. Dictionary of the History of Ideas . ISBN 0-684-13293-1. Retrieved 2009-12-02.

[9] As par example in  Hom. Il. 1.222: ἣ δ᾽ Οὔλυμπονδὲ βεβήκει δώματ᾽ ἐς αἰγιόχοιο Διὸς μετὰ δαίμοναςἄλλους: “Then she went back to Olympus among theother gods [daimones]".

[10] p. 115,   John Burnet,   Plato’s Euthyprho, Apology of 

Socrates, and Crito, Clarendon 1924.

[11]   “Because they were wise and knowing (δαήμονες) he

called them spirits (δαίμονες) and in the old form of our 

language the two words are the same”  - Cratylus 398 b

[12] Entry δαήμων) at LSJ

[13]   “daimōn”, in Liddell, Henry and Robert Scott. 1996.   A

Greek-English Lexicon.

[14] Plato,   Apology   31c–d, 40a; p. 16, Burnet,  Plato’s Eu-

thyprho, Apology of Socrates, and Crito.

[15] pp. 16–17, Burnet,   Plato’s Euthyprho, Apology of Socrates, and Crito; pp. 99–100, M. Joyal, "To Daimo-

nion and the Socratic Problem”,  Apeiron   vol. 38 no. 2,2005.

[16] p. 16, Burnet, Plato’s Euthyprho, Apology of Socrates, and 

Crito; p. 63, P. Destrée, “The  Daimonion and the Philo-sophical Mission”, Apeiron vol. 38 no. 2, 2005.

[17] Paolo De Bernardi,  Socrate, il demone e il risveglio, from“Sapienza”, no. 45, ESD, Naples 1992, pp. 425-43.

[18] Samuel E. Bassett, "ΔΑΙΜΩΝ in Homer”  The Classical 

Review 33.7/8 (November 1919), pp. 134-136, correcting

an interpretation in Finsler, Homer  1914; the subject wastaken up again by F.A. Wilford, “DAIMON in Homer”Numen12 (1965) pp. 217-32.

[19] Ankarloo, Bengt; Clark, Stuart (1999).   Witchcraft and 

Magic in Europe: Ancient Greece and Rome. Witchcraftand magic in Europe. vol. 2. University of Pennsylva-nia Press. p. 226.   ISBN 978-0-8122-1705-6.   LCCN99002682.

[20] W. W. Tarn, “The Hellenistic Ruler-Cult and the Dae-mon”  The Journal of Hellenic Studies   48.2 (1928), pp.206-219.

7 External links

•   Maureen A. Tilley, “Exorcism in North Africa: Lo-calizing the (Un)holy” explores the meanings of dai-

mon  among Christians in Roman Africa and exor-cism practices that passed seamlessly into Christianritual.

•  Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol V: Cyprian, “On the Van-ity of Idols” e-text Daemons inhabiting the imagesof gods

•   Kakodaemons on Theoi.com (This Bestiary list per-tains to minor gods and monsters of the Underworldand not to daemons in general.)

•   Abstract Personifications (a list of daimones ofGreek mythology)

•  The Daemon Page

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