Principles of Paganism, Lesson 4
Lesson 4: Daimones
Daimon. This Greek word has a long history, and the surer people became as to its meaning, the further they were from its original senses. In Homeric or archaic times (ca. early 8th century BCE) it seems to have had two primary meanings: a being higher than a human but less than a god or goddess (nymph would perhaps be an approximate female equivalent); and an expression meaning ‘some god or other,’ where the identity or name of the spiritual agency is unknown.
Daimoni in Homer is an adjective meaning ‘strange’. The presence of a daimon or a spirit was uncanny, and the sign of a spirit’s presence was a sudden change in consciousness. Psychoactive substances (including the wines of antiquity, which often contained psychoactive herbs) were believed to contain spirits or to open the door, so to speak, to spirits (we still use the word ‘spirits’ in this sense metaphorically). Any sudden happening that seemed mysteriously significant, such as a sneeze in council, was believed to be a communication from ‘some god,’ i.e., a daimon. Of such were omens.
Hesiod says that the men (humans) of the Golden Age, the long first phase of the current world-cycle, when they had died became daimones who made it their business to help living mortals. [1] This resembles the Vedic teaching that the most advanced souls are reborn at the beginning of a new cosmic cycle as divine sages.
The Latin term genius, which originally meant inherited sexual vigor, was later conflated with the Greek belief in a personal daimon, acquired at birth and serving as a guide through life for its human host. The personal daimon was thus a messenger from, or link with, the gods. [2]
Pythagoras and his school believed that by following school teachings one could, after a certain number of reincarnations, become a daimon and thereafter cease to reincarnate in a gross material body. Initiates into the Bacchic and Orphic Mysteries likewise expected an apotheosis after death, transformation into a sort of daimon after a life lived carefully according to certain precepts covering rituals, diet, hygiene and ethics. [3] There are several possible sources for this religious innovation, none of them traditionally Greek.
When Cyrus the great conquered Croesus’ Lydian kingdom, the way was opened to the Greek cities of Ionia, along the western coast of present-day Turkey. These were absorbed, not without revolts and upheavals, into the Persian Empire, and gradually influences from Zoroastrian and Mesopotamian religion filtered into the Greek world in Europe. The notion of an ethically perfect deity demanding human striving for ethical perfection began to appear among Greek thinkers like Xenophanes, and Socrates and his pupil Plato gave the concern with goodness and right behavior the primary place among serious human endeavors. Socrates’ pupil Xenophon, in his historical romance The Education of Cyrus, pictured the Persians at the time of the foundation of their empire as being moral athletes, [4] much as he (mistakenly) viewed the Spartans of his own day. The actual behavior of the Persians of his own time he attributed to decadence. [5]
E.R. Dodds, in his informative albeit biased study, The Greeks and the Irrational, looks elsewhere for the origins of this moral athleticism. Noting that the quest for rising above the human condition was not present in early Greece he hypothesizes that it may have come in via reports of shamans among the Getic peoples north of the Euxine (Black Sea). [6] We can read of them somewhat in Herodotus (v. Abaris et al). [7] From this, he says, a sort of proto-puritanism arose, in which faculties humans did not share with the animals were attended to exclusively in the attempt to rise to a suprahuman level (in Aristotle the faculty of reason is singled out thus). This was probably emphasized in opposition to the age-old effort to blend in with natural processes by imitating the actions of animals, as in the periodic ‘orgies’ of the Mossynoecians [8] (similar to those of the Picts and other barbarians), lying out in the woods and fields on specific nights, copulating, in imitation of the seasonal matings of animals, in order to participate in and encourage the overall fertility of nature and therefore also of crops, flocks and herds.
The spread of the Persian Empire to the Ionian coast brought other religious ideas to the notice of the Greeks. Mesopotamian religion identified the gods with the planets, the ‘wandering stars,’ and astrology traveled west. Around the late 6th century BCE the names of some of the principal Olympian deities were assigned to the planets. Aphrodite was associated with the planet we call Venus today, following the Romans. Previously the planet had been called Hesperus, the star of evening, as well as the star of morning, and the two were not clearly identified as one by the Greeks. [9] The old Mesopotamian civilization, still speaking and writing and reading Akkadian (the Empire had adopted Aramaic as its lingua franca), enjoyed a last flowering in astronomy and mathematics in the temple schools and the Greeks learned from it in the last centuries BCE.
The identification of Aphrodite with the planet we call Venus today meant that there was a heavenly Aphrodite, Aphrodite Urania, [10] as well as the earthly one that appeared to Anchises and other mortals of legend. These projections of heavenly deities began to be identified with the demigods or daimones. Astronomical observations suggested that everything above the sphere (we would say the orbit) of the Moon was eternal, and change was confined to the space enclosed within the lunar sphere (because of the Moon’s phases), including the Earth. [11] Thus, in the last centuries BCE, it was believed that daimones lived in this infra-lunar world and came periodically to Earth to conduct their affairs. Unlike the celestial Gods who were morally and physically perfect, [12] the daimones were a mixed lot; but until the Christians addressed the topic they were not all considered evil.
‘Saint’ Paul changed all that. He speculated that Pagan Gods and Goddesses were either demons or else simply errors, tales with nothing behind them. The former explanation was prominent for the first nine or ten centuries of Christian missionization, for the monks were confronted with peoples who had thousands of years of religious experience behind them and well-elaborated systems of sensory interpretation to take to that experience. The Pagans really saw and heard and spoke with their deities, at least from time to time. It was necessary, therefore, to begin the conversion process by making them fear nature spirits.
It was only after this work had been accomplished and generations grew up insulated from Pagan religious experience, that Paul’s second explanation could be employed. The Norse scholar Snorri Sturluson, who lived in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, wanting to preserve what remained of the old bardic poetry and its significance, wrote a compendium of Norse myths we call The Prose Edda, prefaced by a prudent introduction explaining that all of these fables were based on human error. [13] He had Paul as an authority for this, and though he encountered a good deal of ecclesiastical opposition from those who accused him of trying to teach young people Heathenism, this approach to the subject worked and the book was allowed to survive.
Meanwhile, the church’s program of vilifying nature spirits as evil continued in the less ‘converted’ areas of northeastern Europe. The Finnish Kalevala, relating what survived into the early 19th century of the folk songs of the Karelian peninsula (a part of Russia today to the east of modern Finland), exhibits a culture that has only been partly Christianized. Sacred groves and sacrifices have been suppressed, but the Gods and Goddesses are still prayed to alongside ‘God Almighty,’ and magic of a poetic sort is still employed. The name for the ‘Evil Demon,’ Hiisi, is derived from a term for the old sacred groves, and the Lapps are said to still serve demonic forces. [14]
The last country in Europe to be conquered by the Christians and officially ‘converted’ (though they would remain in a dual faith condition for a number of centuries thereafter) was the Pagan Lithuanian state. Enough of their traditions (many written down) have survived into modern times so that the ancient faith of that country, and of its neighbor, Latvia, is today in a vigorous process of revival. A modern Lithuanian scholar has recently commented on the nature of pre-Christian belief in nature deities before the missionizing monks came on the scene:
”Jonas Balys wrote: ’There is no information to affirm that ancient Lithuanians, before coming face to face with Christianity, had known of evil gods or evil spirits. It looks like the same gods could help man and also harm him. This is why the gods had to be appeased and made to be well disposed towards man, by offering sacrifices to the gods.’ “ [15]
From this brief survey of the history of the word ‘daimon’ it would appear that demons were the first entities to become demonized. Their importance to us latter-day Neo-Pagans cannot be exaggerated, though, for it is only through re-establishing contact with more immediate spirits that we can hope to reach out to the greater Gods and Goddesses of nature.
Bibliography
BURKERT, Walter, Greek Religion, transl. John Raffan, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1985.
DODDS, E.R., The Greeks and the Irrational, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, Universoty of California Press, 1951.
FRAZER, Sir James, The Golden Bough; a Study in Magic and Religion, one-volume abridgement, Hertfordshire, Wordsworth Editions, 1993.
HERODOTUS, The History, transl, David Grene, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1987.
HESIOD, Works and Days, in Hesiod and Theognis, transl. Dorothea Wender, London, Penguin Books, 1973.
LÖNNROT, Elias, compiler, The Kalevala, transl. F.P. Magoun, Jr., Cambridge, MA and London, Harvard University Press, 1963.
ROSE, H.J., Religion in Greece and Rome, New York, Harper and Row, 1959.
STURLUSON, Snorri, The Prose Edda, transl. Jean I. Young, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Longon, University of California Press, 1954.
TRINKUNAS, Jonas, ed., Of Gods and Holidays; the Baltic Heritage, Vilnius, Tvermé, 1999.
XENOPHON, Anabasis, transl. Carleton L. Brownson, Cambridge, MA and London, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1998.
__________, The Education of Cyrus, transl. H.G. Dakyns, London and Vermont, Everyman’s Library, 1992.
Exercise: Take some time every day to rest your eyes and just listen to the sounds of the world. If you find your mind wandering, pay attention to your phosphenes, that is, the lights and squiggles you can see when you shut your eyes, which are produced by the light pressure of your eyelids on the optic nerve. Divide your attention between sounds and phosphenes.
When you lie down at night to rest and eventually sleep, practice this same exercise for a few moments. You may find dream images starting to form in place of the phosphenes.
We are conditioned to start thinking when we close our eyes, and this contributes to the nervous habit of insomnia. We also spend our waking hours pretty much focused on seeing; taking time out for listening and giving the eyes a rest also gives the mind a rest and helps to recover a degree of ‘early morning freshness’ in our awareness.
Study Questions:
1. What were the two general meanings attached to the word daimon in the Archaic Period?
2. What is the meaning of the adjective daimoni in Homer?
3. According to Hesiod, what happened to the humans of the Golden Age after they died?
4. What was the personal daimon?
5. When did Pythagoreans expect to become daimones?
6. When did followers of Orphism or the Bacchic mysteries expect to become daimones? How was this achieved?
7. How did Zoroastrian and Mesopotamian religious ideas reach Greece?
8. What effects did Mesopotamian astrology have upon Greek mythology? Name two effects.
9. Did early Greece seek to rise above the human condition?
10. What was proto-puritanism, and where does E.R. Dodds think it came from?
11. According to later classical Paganism, where did daimones come from and were they good, bad or mixed?
12. How did the deities of the later classical Pagans differ from those of heathen peoples outside of the Empire?
13. What were Paul’s two theories about Pagan deities? Which theory was favored by early missionaries and why?
14. When did Paul’s other theory come into favor and what allowed this to happen?
15. What were the pre-Christian deities of heathens like in relation to humans?
Suggested Answers to Study Questions from Lesson 3:
Reading Between the Lines:
1. Name two assumptions scholars feel obligated to make when examining the world views of other cultures.
Psychic unity and the subjective nature of religious phenomena.
2. What is ‘paradigm creep’? What is ‘paradigm imposition’? Give an example of each.
Paradigm creep involves confusing one’s own explanations with what indigenous peoples believe. Paradigm imposition ignores what they believed and simply asserts that our own explanations are what ‘really’ happened.
3. How might the idea of ‘projection’ falsify the details of an experience?
By ignoring the actual feelings the experiencer had prior to receiving very different feelings from outside. In the example given, I was feeling rather cheap after giving the man five dollars and subsequently received a feeling of warm approval, which overlapped the prior feeling so that there were two contradictory feelings occurring simultaneously.
Our Two Souls:
1. Give an example from your own experience of the life soul; of the dream soul.
Answers can vary. The life-soul faces outward and deals with the outer world through language and the personality. The dream-soul faces inward but experiences the outer world through the eyes of the life-soul. Answer from your own experiences, bearing in mind these distinctions.
2. Has your life soul ever suffered injury? Describe how it healed.
Here again, answers can vary. Shock or bereavement or even just long, dull routine can make us feel dispirited, unreal, empty of zest and enthusiasm. Choose an example from your own experience and tell how you recovered from it.
3. Why has nature provided for the occasional partial separation of our two souls?
This provides us with a safety valve so we can occasionally stand back from disappointments and misfortune and regard them calmly.
4. How did the Pagan institution of the elgeta (holy beggar) prepare one for the eventual separation of the life soul from the dream soul at death?
The elgeta, like the Hindu sanyassin, owns virtually nothing and is all awareness. The same is true of the feeling we get when we are in the dream-soul, and therefore, presumably, that is how we shall feel when the dream-soul separates from the life-soul after the death of the body.
A Note to Students: As you know by now, I don’t believe in tests. If you want to send me your answers to the Study QQ, feel free to do so and I will evaluate your answers. In other words, you are on your honor to work this course hard for your own benefit. The Bibliography is also (as called in the first lessons) a ‘Suggested Reading’ list. You owe it to yourself to get as much as you can out of this course as well as anything else you take up in your precious, unique lives.
What I do ask each of you most earnestly is to send me at least one e-mail telling me what you think of the course, and asking any questions that occur to you. Feel free to criticize; anything is better than silence. I’d like to know how I’m doing.
My e-mail address is [email protected]
Bright blessings!
Ian
[1] Hesiod, Works and Days, 110-125, p. 62.
[2] Rose, Religion in Greece and Rome, p. 193.
[3] Burkert, Greek Religion, p. 295 et seq.
[4] Xenophon, The Education of Cyrus, Book I.
[5] Op.cit., Book VIII.
[6] E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, Ch. V.
[7] Herodotus, The History, IV:36, p. 292.
[8] Xenophon, Anabasis, V:34, p. 417. For other cultures see Frazer, The Golden Bough, abridged, pp. 135 et seq.
[9] Burkert, Greek Religion, p. 326.
[10] Op.cit., p. 155.
[11] This cosmic view persisted throughout late antiquity and the Middle Ages until the observation of a nova in Elizabethan times brought it to a sudden and dramatic end.
[12] This view of the Gods was confined to the Pagans of the Roman Empire. Heathen peoples who lived beyond the Empire continued to believe in deities of the Homeric type, who had passions and faults.
[13] The Prose Edda, pp. 23 et seq.
[14] The Kalevala, p. 388.
[15] Of Gods and Holidays, p. 159.