The many lives of Eurasian daimonology

[Celerity]

Demonology

By turns benign and malign, powerful and vulnerable, earthbound and aerial, daimons across the world resemble one another

https://aeon.co/essays/the-many-lives-of-eurasian-daimonology


Demon exorcisor by an unidentified artist of the Ming (1368-1644) or Qing dynasty (1644-1911). Courtesy the Met Museum, New York





Back in my student days in late 1970s Paris, one of my favourite walks would take me to the fabulous Père Lachaise cemetery near the eastern edge of the French capital. A miniature city of monumental tombs and crypts in a lush garden setting, it has long been ‘home’ to the remains of no small number of the very special dead: Molière, Oscar Wilde, Colette, Sarah Bernhardt, Chopin … and Jim Morrison. Morrison’s gravesite was always part of my itinerary, because it was a gathering place for a colourful array of people paying their respects with flowers, notes and a few tokes on something vaguely illegal. A stone bust of the Doors’ legendary frontman had already been completely chipped away by the time I started visiting the site, however what remains today is a bronze plaque engraved with his name, his dates (1943-71) and an epitaph in Greek. Kata ton daimona eaytoy may be read in a number of ways, figuratively as ‘true to his own spirit’, but also literally, ‘true to his own daimon’ or ‘by the favour of his own daimon.’ What or who could have been Jim Morrison’s ‘own daimon’?

Some 25 centuries before Morrison’s time, Plato’s daimons were something akin to guardian angels, spirits that watched over the living, whom they guided on the path to Hades after their death. Well before Plato’s time, Homer had referred in the Iliad to the Olympian gods themselves as daimons. Also referred to as daimons were the denizens or guardians of prominent and often forbidding features of the natural world – mountaintops, forest groves, caverns and springs – supernatural beings with oracular powers. Quite often, however, the daimons of ancient Greece were dire, hostile, dangerous spirit beings, the evil eye demon (baskanos daimon) being an illustrious example.

What these conflicting usages tell us is that the daimons of the ancient world were ambiguous beings, spirits with varying degrees of power that they could employ, or be made to employ, for good or evil ends. This is how they were portrayed in the Christian Bible where, in the Book of Matthew, Jesus admonished his disciples to ‘heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, and cast out demons.’ These daimons (translated as ‘demons’ in the English Bible) were unambiguously noxious, so that, when Jesus exorcised them, their victims were released from their sufferings. Such was the case of Mary Magdalene herself, ‘from whom he had cast out seven demons’. Yet, these same daimons were also cast as spirits capable of recognising and conversing with Jesus: ‘And he healed many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.’

The demons of the Christian Bible were none other than the daimons of paganism demoted, that is, the lesser divinities of the Greco-Roman religion superseded by Christianity after Rome’s conversion to Christianity in the 4th century CE. Thereafter, the triumphant Church would condemn this ancient host, this pandemonium, to the dark side. Fallen angels, forces of evil, agents of temptation, these were now demonised as hell creatures toiling in the service of the prince of darkness: Lucifer, Satan, the Antichrist, the Devil. In the face of these supernatural enemies, the Church would quickly mount an arsenal of countermeasures, and so the applied science of Christian demonology was born. This is not to say that Christianity was the first or the only great religion to forge a demonological lexicon. Centuries, even millennia before the Greeks and Romans, the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians had developed a variety of techniques for combatting malevolent demons. And, in fact, every one of the world’s religions has had a demonological component for battling their inner demons.

snip

[cachukis]

1. The Smithsonian Magazine, some years ago,

examined the history of the devil manifested in art. Don't remember how long ago, but it shows how Satan evolved over time. Quite fascinating.