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Contributor
Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: London UK
Posts: 16,024
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Daemons
Seems they have morphed into guardian angels!
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On the Cessation of Oracles is a dialogue, discussing the reasons why divine inspiration seemed to be withdrawn from the old seats of prophetic lore. The real reason of their decline in popularity is probably very simple; when the Greek Cities became Roman provinces the fashion of consulting oracles fell off, as unsuited to the more practical influences of Roman thought and Roman politics. The question is discussed whether there are such intermediate beings as daemons, who according to Plato communicate the will of the gods to men, and the prayers and vows of men to the gods.
The possibility of a plurality of worlds is entertained, and of the planets being more or less composed of the essence of the five elements, fire, ether, earth, air and water (f 37). The whole treatise is metaphysical, but it concludes with remarks on the exhalations at Delphi having different effects on different people and at different times. The ancient notion doubtless was that the vapour was the breath of some mysterious being sent up from the under-world.
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(Isn't Delphi a source of poisonous volcanic fumes?)
http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/P/PL..._OF_ATHENS.htm
http://www.theandros.com/daemon.html
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The focus of this paper will be to explore origins and various ideas concerning the Daemon as recorded in works of Philosophers, mythographers and astrologers. The time frame of our search will span almost two thousand years.
The Greek Philosopher Plotinus (205-270C.E.) is located almost right in the middle of this search for understanding of the Daemon. Homer and Hesiod would be at the beginning and we find Proclus, Michael Psellus and George Gemistos known as Plethon near the end of this search.
Plotinus starts his discussion of the guardian daemon in Ennead 3.4. He is concerned in resolving an immanence-transcendence dilemma. Is the daemon operating in man’s innermost mind like conscience or is the daemon as a transcendent being and in no sense as a force innate in and the property of the human soul. Plotinus’ solution rests on Unity, upon the principal that the soul contains the whole intelligible world- in fact that we are "each of us an intelligible cosmos (ordered whole)." From the perspective of Unity we are our own daemon which may be us at a more refined level. The contrast that Plotinus is writing about is between Plato’s Phaedo 107d where the daemon is represented as an individual entity:
For after death, as they say the daemon of each individual, to whom he belonged in life, leads him to a certain place in which the dead are gathered together, whence after judgement has been given they pass into the world below, following the guide, who is appointed to conduct them from this world to the other: and when they have received their due and remained their time, another guide brings them back again after many revolutions of ages. (Phaedo 107d)
In Timeaus 90A of Plato it is identified with the highest part of the human soul. Somewhat implying that our guardian daemon is the level in the hierarchy of being next above that on which we habitually operate on. Hence, though immanent within us, it is yet transcendent to our normal life.
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Immediate reaction was that there were not clear cut distinctions between the spiritual and physical worlds, what with daemons living within us and xian texts about bodies being the temple of the Holy Spirit.
Is Jesus a more embodied daemon? Why should there not be a continuum, an ecology of living and spiritual things?
Like the many half men half beasts, is Jesus a mythical half man half god?
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Professor Rose on daimones:
"But to return to Plutarch, and those who thought with him; they were probably many. Despite his optimisic view concerning the gods generally, he could not but see that there were not only myths representing some of them as behaving in a way quite inconsistent with any developed ideas of deity, but rites which seemed to aim at propitiating unfriendly powers and inducing them, not to do any good, but simply to refrain from doing harm. He, and many others, found a solution for this difficulty in the conception of daimones. This word, which to begin with seems to have been merely a vaguer quivalent of "gods", had tended from Hesiod onwards to signify superhuman beings of something less than divine rank, and by the time Plato was an old man, i.e., about the middle of the fourth century BC, it was taking on a quite different meaning.
Plato perhaps, his immediate followers and successors certainly, elaborated a new doctrine concerning these beings. Their proper abode is neither heaven, which belongs to the gods, nor earth, which is the home of men and lower animals, but the air, which lies between heaven and earth. Corresponding to this intermediate dwelling-place is their intermediate nature. They are superior to men, inferior to gods. A god is morally perfect, but a daimon is not necessarily so; he may be good or bad, and in any case he is subject to passions, somewhat as men are, and therefore capable of doing unreasonable things, of departing from strict justice to serve some personal end, of being angry or amorous, and so forth.
According to some at least of the elaborators of this theory, a daimon is not, or not always, an immortal being, nor is he bodiless. Once such a belief gained credence, as it seems to have done early, and not only in philosophic circles, it inevitably grew and ramified, all manner of further complications being introduced, until it passed into the angelology and demonology of Christian speculators, such as the ingenious author who wrote under the assumed name and personality of Dionysios the Areiopagite, St. Paul's Athenian convert.
But long before that, or before Christianity began, it served the pious by providing a way out of difficulties. If a myth, authoritive through its age or its association with venerable rites, was morally unpleasing, it might still be accepted and the believer's conscience rest undisturbed, by the simple assumption that it referred to daimones, not to gods proper. The former might indeed, being ethically imperfect, fight one another, make love to mortal women, be banished from the society of their kind for their offenses, or even die, none of which things is becoming to divine majesty. The Apollo who killed the Kyklopes because they had made the thunderbolts which slew his son Asklepios was not a true god, but a daimon bearing the god's name. If his oracles ceased, as for a while, they showed signs of doing, the reason was entirely to his credit, for he was becoming so exalted that contact with matter was no longer possible for him. If rites of aversion existed, they were aimed at daimones of an inferior order, who had yielded, as a man might do, to their own baser impulses, and so did harm or must be bribed into going away. Magic, also, became explicable. The sorcerer did not really influence gods by his charms, but it might be that he was powerful enough to press daimones into his service and make them help him in his not always worthy purposes.
So convenient a theory was almost universally accepted, and when the long controversies between Christian apologists and the supporter of the old religions arose, both sides made use of it, the Christians maintaining that all daimones were evil and thirsted to destroy and mislead men; hence the meaning of "demon" in modern languages." (pp.109-110, H.J. Rose. Religion in Greece and Rome. New York. Harper Torchbooks. Harper & Row, Publishers. 1959, pbk)
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http://www.bibleorigins.net/Demons.html
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01-25-2006, 03:36 PM
