Daemon (classical Mythology) - Categories

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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: 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. 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 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… speaks of ‘great and strong beings in the atmosphere, malevolent and morose, who rejoice in, 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 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”.

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. Similarly, the first-century Roman Imperial cult began by venerating the genius or numen of Augustus, a distinction that blurred in time.