The words
dæmon and
daimôn are
Latinized spellings of the
Greek "δαίμων", a reference to the daemons of
ancient Greek religion and
mythology, as well as later
Hellenistic religion and
philosophy.
[1]
[edit] Description
Daemons are good or benevolent nature spirits, beings of the same nature as both mortals and gods, similar to ghosts,
chthonic heroes, spirit guides, forces of nature or the gods themselves (see Plato's
Symposium).
Walter Burkert suggests that unlike the
Judeo-Christian use of
demon in a strictly malignant sense, “[a] general belief in spirits is not expressed by the term
daimon until the 5th century when a doctor asserts that neurotic women and girls can be driven to suicide by
imaginary apparitions, ‘evil
daimones’. How far this is an expression of widespread popular superstition is not easy to judge… On the basis of Hesiod's myth, however, what did gain currency was for great and powerful figures to be honoured after death as a daimon…”
[2] Daimon is not so much type of quasi-divine being, according to Burkert, but rather a non-personified “peculiar mode” of their activity.
In
Hesiod's Theogony,
Phaëton becomes an incorporeal
daimon,
[3] but, for example, the ills released by
Pandora are deadly gods,
keres, not
daimones.
[2] From Hesiod also, the people of the
Golden Age were transformed into
daimones by the will of
Zeus, to benevolently serve mortals as their guardian spirits; “good beings who dispense riches…[nevertheless], they remain invisible, known only by their acts”.
[4] The
daimon of venerated
heroes, were localized by the construction of shrines, so as not to restlessly wander, and were believed to confer protection and good fortune on those offering their respects.
Characterizations of the daemon as a dangerous, if not evil, lesser spirit were developed by
Plato and his pupil
Xenocrates,
[2][dubious – discuss] and later absorbed in Christian
patristic writings along with
Neo-Platonic elements.
In the Old Testament, evil spirits appear in the book of
Judges and in
Kings. In the Greek translation of the
Septuagint, made for the Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria, the Greek
ángelos (άγγελος: "messenger") translates the Hebrew word
mal'ak, while
daimon (or neuter
daimonion) carries the meaning of a natural spirit that is less than divine (see
supernatural) and translates the Hebrew words for
idols, foreign gods, certain beasts, and natural evils.
[5] The usage of
daimon in the
New Testament's original Greek text, caused the Greek word to be applied to the Judeo-Christian concept of an evil spirit by the early 2nd century AD.
[edit] In mythology and philosophy
Carnelian
gem imprint representing
Socrates, Rome, 1st century BC-1st century AD.
Homer's use of the words
theoí (θεοί: "gods") and
daímones (δαίμονες), suggest that while distinct, they are similar in kind.
[6] Later writers developed the distinction between the two.
[7] In
Cratylus (398 b), Plato speculates that the etymology of
daimôn/
daēmones (δαίμονες: deity/daêmôn δαήμονες) is from knowing or wise, however, it is more probably
daiō (δαίω: "to divide, to distribute destinies, to allot").
[8]
In Plato's
Symposium, the priestess
Diotima teaches Socrates that love is not a god, but rather a "great daemon" (202d). She goes on to explain that "everything daemonic is between divine and mortal" (202d-e), and she describes daemons as "interpreting and transporting human things to the gods and divine things to men; entreaties 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")
[9] that frequently warned him - in the form of a "voice" - against mistakes but never told him what to do.
[10] However, the Platonic Socrates never refers to the
daimonion as a
daimōn; it was always an impersonal "something" or "sign".
[11] Regarding the charge brought against Socrates in 399, Plato surmised “Socrates does wrong because he does not believe in the gods in whom the city believes, but introduces 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 idea which we find in Plato, undoubtedly from earlier tradition. The famous, paradoxical saying of
Heraclitus is already directed against such a view: 'character is for man his daimon'”.
[2]
[edit] Categories
The
Hellenistic Greeks divided daemons into good and evil categories:
agathodaimōn (αγαθοδαιμων: "noble spirit"), 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, and in their humble efforts to help mediate the good and ill fortunes of human life, they resemble the Judeo-Christian guardian
angel and adversarial
demon, respectively, (see also, the
problem of evil).
Eudaimonia, the state of having a eudaemon, came to mean "well-being" or "happiness". The comparable Roman concept is the
genius who accompanies and protects a person or presides over a place (see
genius loci).
A distorted view of
Homer's daemon results from an anachronistic reading in light of later characterizations by
Plato and
Xenocrates, his successor as head of the
Academy, of the daemon as a potentially dangerous lesser spirit:
[2][12] Burkert states that in the
Symposium, Plato has “laid the foundation” that would make it all but impossible 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 actuality,
energeia… identical to its performance: ‘thinking of thinking’,
noesis noeseas… the most blessed existence, the highest origin of everything. ‘This is the god. On such a principle heaven depends, and the cosmos.’ The highest, the best is one; but for the movement of the planets a plurality of
unmoved movers must further be assumed… In the monotheism of the mind philosophical speculation has reached an end-point. That even this is a self-projection of man, of the thinking philosopher, was not reflected on in ancient philosophy.
In Plato there is an incipient tendency towards the
apotheosis of
nous… Such philosophical coolness will mean little to the ordinary man who is hard pressed by everyday cares. He needs a closeness and availability of the divine which is offered neither by the stars nor by metaphysical principles. Here a name emerged to fill the gap, a name which had always designated the incomprehensible yet present activity of a higher power,
daimon”. Daemons scarcely figure in
Greek mythology or
Greek art: they are felt but their unseen presence can only be assumed, with the exception of the
agathodaemon, honored first with a
libation in ceremonial wine-drinking, especially at the sanctuary of
Dionysus, and represented in
iconography by the
chthonic serpent.
Burkert suggests that, for Plato, theology rests on two
Forms: the Good and the Simple; which “Xenocrates unequivocally called the unity god” in sharp contrast to the poet's gods of epic and tragedy.
[2] Although much like the gods, these figures were not always depicted without considerable moral ambiguity:
“On this account, the other traditional notion of the daemon as related to the souls of the dead is elided in favour of a spatial scenario which evidently also graduated in moral terms; though [Plato] says nothing of that here, it is a necessary inference from her account, just as Eros is midway between deficiency and plenitude… Indeed, Xencrates… explicitly understood daemones as ranged along a scale from good to bad… [Plutarch] speaks of ‘great and strong beings in the atmosphere, malevolent and morose, who rejoice in [unlucky days, religious festivals involving violence against the self, etc.], and after gaining them as their lot, they turn to nothing worse.’… The use of such malign daemones by human beings seems not to be even remotely imagined here: Xenocrates' intention was to provide an explanation for the sheer variety of polytheistic religious worship; but it is the potential for moral descrimination offered by the notion of daemones which later… became one further means of conceptualizing what distinguishes dominated practice from civic religion, and furthering the transformation of that practice into intentional profanation… Quite when the point was first made remains unanswerable. Much the same thought as [Plato's] is to be found in an explicitly Pythagorean context of probably late Hellenistic composition, the Pythagorean Commentaries, which evidently draws on older popular representations: ‘The whole air is full of souls. We call them daemones and heros, and it is they who send dreams, signs and illnesses to men; and not only men, but also to sheep and other domestic animals. It is towards these daemones that we direct purifications and apotropaic rites, all kinds of divination, the art of reading chance utterances, and so on’… This account differs from that of the early Academy in reaching back to the other, Archaic, view of daemones as souls, and thus anticipates the views of Plutarch and Apuleius in the Principate… It clearly implies that daemones can cause illness to livestock: this traditional dominated view has now reached the intellectuals”.[13]
In the
Hellenistic ruler cult that began with
Alexander the Great, it was not the ruler but his guiding
daemon that was venerated. In the
Archaic or early
Classical period, the
daimon had been democratized and internalized for each person, whom it served to guide, motivate and inspire, as one possessed of such good spirits.
[14] Similarly, the first-century Roman
Imperial cult began by venerating the
genius or
numen of Augustus, a distinction that blurred in time.
[edit] See also
- ^ Entry daimon (δαίμων) at Liddell & Scott).
- ^ a b c d e f Burkert, Walter (1985). Greek Religion. Harvard University Press. pp. 179–181,317,331,335. ISBN 978-0-674-36281-9. LCCN 84025209. http://books.google.com/books?id=sxurBtx6shoC&lpg=PA179.
- ^ Hesiod, Theogony 991.
- ^ Hesiod, Works and Days 122-26.
- ^ Trimpi, Helen P (1973). "Demonology". In Wiener, Philip P. Dictionary of the History of Ideas. ISBN 0-684-13293-1. http://xtf.lib.virginia.edu/xtf/view?docId=DicHist/uvaBook/tei/DicHist1.xml;chunk.id=dv1-79. Retrieved 2009-12-02.
- ^ As par example in Hom. Il. 1.222 í̱ d᾽ Oúlympon dé veví̱kei dó̱mat᾽ es aigióchoio Diós metá daímonas állous (ἣ δ᾽ Οὔλυμπον δὲ βεβήκει δώματ᾽ ἐς αἰγιόχοιο Διὸς μετὰ δαίμονας ἄλλους: "Then she went back to Olympus among the other gods [daimones]").
- ^ p. 115, John Burnet, Plato's Euthyprho, Apology of Socrates, and Crito, Clarendon 1924.
- ^ "daimōn", in Liddell, Henry and Robert Scott. 1996. A Greek-English Lexicon.
- ^ Plato, Apology 31c-d, 40a; p. 16, Burnet, Plato's Euthyprho, Apology of Socrates, and Crito.
- ^ pp. 16-17, Burnet, Plato's Euthyprho, Apology of Socrates, and Crito; pp. 99-100, M. Joyal, "To Daimonion and the Socratic Problem", Apeiron vol. 38 no. 2, 2005.
- ^ p. 16, Burnet, Plato's Euthyprho, Apology of Socrates, and Crito; p. 63, P. Destrée, "The Daimonion and the Philosophical Mission", Apeiron vol. 38 no. 2, 2005.
- ^ 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 was taken up again by F.A. Wilford, "DAIMON in Homer" Numen12 (1965) pp. 217-32.
- ^ Ankarloo, Bengt; Clark, Stuart (1999). Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: Ancient Greece and Rome. Witchcraft and magic in Europe. vol. 2. University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 226. ISBN 978-0-8122-1705-6. LCCN 99002682. http://books.google.com/books?id=C80ooPNa0nEC&pg=PA226.
- ^ W. W. Tarn, "The Hellenistic Ruler-Cult and the Daemon" The Journal of Hellenic Studies 48.2 (1928), pp. 206-219.
[edit] External links
