Dictionary Thesaurus Word Dynamo Quotes Reference Translator Spanish

Daemon (mythology)

The words daemon, dæmon, are Latinized spellings of the Greek δαίμων (daimôn), 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.

In Hesiod's Theogony, Phaëton 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 classical and Hellenistic philosophy

Though in Homer the words θεοί (gods) and δαίμονες (divinities) were practically synonymous, later writers like Plato developed a distinction between the two. Plato in Cratylus (398 b) gives the etymology of δαίμονες (daimones) from δαήμονες (daēmones) (=knowing or wise), though in fact the root of the word is more probably daiō (=to distribute destinies). 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") that frequently warned him - in the form of a "voice" - against mistakes but never told him what to do. However, the Platonic Socrates never refers to the daimonion as a daimōn; it was always an impersonal "something" or "sign".

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).

The notion of the daemon as a spiritual being of a lowly order that is 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.

After the time of Plato, in the Hellenistic ruler-cult that began with Alexander himself, it was not 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 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 had this to say of daemons:

They are impure and wandering spirits, who, after having been steeped in earthly vices, have departed from their celestial vigour by the contagion of earth, and do not cease, when ruined themselves, to seek the ruin of others; and when degraded themselves, to infuse into others the error of their own degradation. These demons the poets also acknowledge, and Socrates declared that he was instructed and ruled at the will of a demon; and thence the Magi have a power either for mischief or for mockery, of whom, however, the chief Hostanes both says that the form of the true God cannot be seen, and declares that true angels stand round about His throne.
These spirits, therefore, are lurking under the statues and consecrated images: these inspire the breasts of their prophets with their afflatus, animate the fibres of the entrails, direct the flights of birds, rule the lots, give efficiency to oracles, are always mixing up falsehood with truth, for they are both deceived and they deceive; they disturb their life, they disquiet their slumbers; their spirits creeping also into their bodies, secretly terrify their minds, distort their limbs, break their health, excite diseases to force them to worship of themselves, so that when glutted with the steam of the altars and the piles of cattle, they may unloose what they had bound, and so appear to have effected a cure. The only remedy from them is when their own mischief ceases.

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 is relying upon them that is deceptive. In this way the dæmons passed easily into Christian "demons."

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 have listed, the first three are shared with us, the fourth is their own, the last they have 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 will be able to prevail over the aery hordes."

In modern literature

Dæmons are a key element in Phillip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy

In Neal Stephenson's 1992 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, daemons are computer-controlled avatars that perform simple tasks in the Metaverse such as bouncing.

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 tabletop wargame, Dæmons are formless beings that inhabit The Warp. They can be summoned by a player for a variety of purposes. Storywise, these Daemons are actually much more similar to the malign spirits from Christian lore than to the Daimons of Greek myth.