Daemon (mythology)
For the evil spirits of the Christian religion, see DemonThe words
daemon and
daimon, sometimes
dæmon, are distinctively Hellenizing or Latinate spellings of δαιμων, used purposely today to distinguish the daemons of
Greek mythology, good or malevolent "supernatural beings between mortals and gods, such as inferior divinities and ghosts of dead heroes", from the
Judeo-Christian usage
demon, "a malignant spirit that can possess humans". 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 (see Links).
For Greeks and Romans, daemons ("replete with knowledge", "divine power", "fate" or "god") were not necessarily evil.
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 daimon 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).
In Plato's
Symposium, the priestess
Diotima teaches Socrates that love is not a god, but rather a good daemon.
Daemons were important in Neo-Platonic philosophy. 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 had this to say of
daemons:
The daemons 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 is relying upon them that is deceptive. In this way the
daemons passed easily into Christian "demons."
The specific motivation for the orgy 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: "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 even heretical as it did from the literature accepted as
canonical.
The North African
Apuleius summed up their character in the
Golden Ass (2nd century AD): "The daemones have an animal nature, a rational mind, a soul subject to passions, an aetherial body and they are immortal." 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
daemones 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 daemons and gave them oversight in various areas of concern to people: oracles, animals, and, interestingly, as "patron daemons" of nations or occupations (compare
Patron saint).
The lore of
Hermes Trismegistus is a source both for pagan and Christian conceptions of daemons, 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
daemones 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 will be able to prevail over the aery hordes."
In the
1st century BCE, the
Arabian city
Eudaemon (usually indentified with the port of
Aden) was a transshipping port in the Red Sea trade. (The city and surrounding country are the Latin
Arabia Felix. It was described in the
Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (probably
1st century CE) as if it had fallen on hard times. Of the auspiciously named port we read that
Eudaemon Arabia was once a fully-fledged city, when vessels from India did not go to Egypt and those of Egypt did not dare sail to places further on, but came only this far.The new development in trade during the 1st century CE, avoided the middlemen at Eudaemon and made the courageous direct crossing of the
Arabian Sea to the coast of
India.
*
Phillip Pullman used daemons in his
His Dark Materials trilogy. The books are largely set in
parallel worlds in which most people have a
personal daemon in the form of an animal. See witches'
familiar.
*
Maureen A. Tilley, "Exorcism in North Africa: Localizing the (Un)holy" explores the meanings of
daimon among Christians in Roman
Africa and exorcism practices that passed seamlessly into Christian ritual.
*
Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol V: Cyprian, "On the Vanity of Idols" e-text Daemons inhabiting the images of gods
*
Nabataean Travel: trade on the Red Sea*
Kakodaemons on Theoi.com (listed under 'demon'; no mention of eudaemones)
