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{{short description|Lesser divinity or personified abstract concept in classical Greek mythology}}{{Hatnote|This article is about the semi-divine beings of Classical Greek mythology. For the evil beings associated with the word today, see Demon. For other uses, see Demon (disambiguation) (includes daemon disambiguation) or Daimon (disambiguation).}}File:Gold ring with relief sitting goddess and genii Mycenaean, NAMA 6208 080858.jpg|thumb|Gold ring with Sitting Goddess and row of Minoan Genius figures bearing offerings, found in context from Mycenaean Greece, but probably made in Minoan Crete, NAMA]]The Ancient Greek: , pronounced daimon or daemon (meaning “god”, “godlike”, “power”, “fate“),A. Delahunty, From Bonbon to Cha-cha: Oxford Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases (p. 90), Oxford University Press, 2008 {{ISBN|0199543690}}J. Cresswell, Little Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins (p. 146), Oxford University Press, 2014. originally referred to a lesser deity or guiding spirit such as the daimons of ancient Greek religion and mythology and of later Hellenistic religion and philosophy.daimōn “δαίμων”. A Greek–English Lexicon. The word is derived from Proto-Indo-European daimon “provider, divider (of fortunes or destinies),” from the root *da- “to divide”.“Demon”, Etymology Online Daimons were possibly seen as the souls of men of the golden age acting as tutelary deities, according to entry at Liddell & Scott.2323243 Perseus Tufts Consulted 2017-05-05 See also daimonic: a religious, philosophical, literary and psychological concept.

Description

{{See also|Tutelary deity#Near East and Mediterranean}}Daimons are lesser divinities or spirits, often personifications of abstract concepts, beings of the same nature as both mortals and deities, similar to ghosts, chthonic heroes, spirit guides, forces of nature, or the deities themselves (see Plato’s Symposium). According to Hesiod’s myth, “great and powerful figures were to be honoured after death as a daimon…” A daimon is not so much a type of quasi-divine being, according to Burkert, but rather a non-personified “peculiar mode” of their activity.{{Citation needed|date = May 2021}}In Hesiod’s Theogony, Phaëton becomes an incorporeal daimon or a divine spirit,“ποιήσατο, δαίμονα δῖον”; Hesiod, Theogony 991. but, for example, the ills released by Pandora are deadly deities, keres, not daimones. From Hesiod also, the people of the Golden Age were transformed into daimones by the will of Zeus, to serve mortals benevolently as their guardian spirits; “good beings who dispense riches…[nevertheless], they remain invisible, known only by their acts”.Hesiod, Works and Days 122-26. The daimones of venerated heroes were localized by the construction of shrines, so as not to wander restlessly, and were believed to confer protection and good fortune on those offering their respects.One tradition of Greek thought, which found agreement in the mind of Plato, was of a daimon which existed within a person from their birth, and that each individual was obtained by a singular daimon prior to their birth by way of lot.In the Old Testament, evil spirits appear in the book of Judges and in Kings. In the Septuagint, made for the Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria, the Greek ángelos (, “messenger“) translates the Hebrew word mal’akh, while daimónion (; pl. daimónia ()), which carries the meaning of a natural spirit {{Citation needed|date = March 2023}} that is less than divine (see supernatural), translates the Hebrew word shedim (; singular: ) as well as the word se’irim () in some verses and words for idols (foreign deities), and describes the being Asmodeus in the Book of Tobit.BOOK,xtf.lib.virginia.edu/xtf/view?docId=DicHist/uvaBook/tei/DicHist1.xml;chunk.id=dv1-79, Demonology, Dictionary of the History of Ideas, 2009-12-02, Trimpi, Helen P, Wiener, Philip P, 1973, Scribner, 0-684-13293-1, The use of daimōn 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 second century AD.

In mythology and philosophy

File:SocratesCarnelianGemImprintRome1stBCE1stCE.jpg|right|thumb|250px|Carnelian gem imprint representing SocratesSocratesHomer’s use of the words theoí (, “gods“) and daímones () suggests that, while distinct, they are similar in kind.As par example in Hom. Il. 1.222: : “Then she went back to Olympus among the other gods [daimones]”. Later writers developed the distinction between the two.p. 115, John Burnet, Plato’s Euthyprho, Apology of Socrates, and Crito, Clarendon 1924. Plato in Cratylus“Because they were wise and knowing () he called them spirits () and in the old form of our language the two words are the same” – Cratylus 398 b speculates that the word daimōn (, “deity“) is synonymous to daÄ“mōn (, “knowing or wise“);Entry δαήμων at LSJ however, it is more probably daiō (, “to divide, to distribute destinies, to allot“).“daimōn” {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110807043158archimedes.fas.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/dict?name=lsj&lang=el&word=dai%2fmwn&filter=GreekXlit |date=2011-08-07 }}, in Liddell, Henry and Robert Scott. 1996. A Greek-English Lexicon.

Socrates

In Plato’s Symposium, the priestess Diotima teaches Socrates that love is not a deity, but rather a “great daimōn” (202d). She goes on to explain that “everything daimōnion is between divine and mortal” (202d–e), and she describes daimōns 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 daimōnion (literally, a “divine something“)Plato, Apology 31c–d, 40a; p. 16, Burnet, Plato’s Euthyprho, Apology of Socrates, and Crito. that frequently warned him—in the form of a “voice“—against mistakes but never told him what to do.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. The Platonic Socrates, however, never refers to the daimonion as a daimōn; it was always referred to as an impersonal “something” or “sign”.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. By this term he seems to indicate the true nature of the human soul, his newfound self-consciousness.Paolo De Bernardi, Socrate, il demone e il risveglio, from “Sapienza”, no. 45, ESD, Naples 1992, pp. 425–43. Paul Shorey sees the daimonion not as an inspiration but as “a kind of spiritual tact checking Socrates from any act opposed to his true moral and intellectual interests.”The Republic, volume 2, p. 52, note, italics added.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 daimōn 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{{’“}}.

Categories

{{overquotation|section|date=December 2023}}File:Woman mirror tambourine MBA Lyon L631.jpg|thumb|230px|Winged genius facing a woman with a tambourine and mirror, from southern Italy, about 320 BC]]The Hellenistic Greeks divided daemons into good and evil categories: agathodaímōn (, “noble spirit“), from agathós (, “good, brave, noble, moral, lucky, useful“), and kakodaímōn (, “malevolent spirit“), from kakós (, “bad, evil“). They resemble the Arabic jinni (or genie), and in their humble efforts to help mediate the good and ill fortunes of human life, they resemble the Christian guardian angel and adversarial demon, respectively. Eudaimonia () 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:BOOK, Walter, Burkert, 1985, Greek Religion, Harvard University Press, 978-0-674-36281-9, 84025209,archive.org/details/greekreligion0000burk, registration, 179–181, 317, 331, 335, 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. 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 noeseos is 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 a human, of the thinking philosopher, was not reflected on in ancient philosophy. In Plato there is an incipient tendency toward the apotheosis of nous. ... He needs a closeness and availability of the divine that 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 presumed,{{Citation needed|date=June 2020}} 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. Although much like the deities, 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, Xenocrates ... 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 discrimination 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 heroes, 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.BOOK, Bengt, Ankarloo, Stuart, Clark, 1999, Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: Ancient Greece and Rome, 2, University of Pennsylvania Press, 978-0-8122-1705-6, 99002682,books.google.com/books?id=C80ooPNa0nEC&pg=PA226, 226, 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.{{Citation needed|date=May 2023}} Similarly, the first-century Roman imperial cult began by venerating the genius or numen of Augustus, a distinction that blurred in time.

See also

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• Anito
• Anthelioi
• Eudaimon
• Fravashi
• Fylgja
• Hyang
• Kami
• Koalemos
• Moral imperative
• Shoulder angel
• Unclean spirit
• Xian (Taoism)
• Yaksha

{{div col end}}

Notes

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External links

{{Wiktionary|daemon}}{{Commons category}}

• 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
• Abstract Personifications (a list of daimones of Greek mythology)

{{Greek religion}}