Demonology
Hollywood
February 22, 2012
The word Demon itself comes from Ancient Greece. In Greek mythology a daemon was actually a benevolent spirit. The belief was that if a mortal did particularly well in their lifetimes then the god Zeus would honor them by making them an immortal spirit called a daemon. Daemons were believed to be a sort of guardian angel of the ancient world. It got to the point where there were actually cults that formed on the worship of persons daemons. Alexander the Great was one individual that was said to have a particularly affluent daemon. Instead of worshipping Alexander himself they would worship his daemon. This is where the modern day cult of personality appears to have started. The Ancient civilizations actually built shrines to house hero’s daemons so that they would not wander restlessly. It was said that good luck would come if one paid respect to the statues of the daemons.
Aristotle actually wrote eudaimonia, a state of the highest human good. It’s a combination of the Greek words for good and demon. This is just another example of how a demon was not always what we believe; the Greeks actually believed that being possessed by a demon could lead to a sense of transcendentalism.
Some people attribute demons to the evils that Pandora released from her jar (Yes that’s right; Pandora in classical Greek mythology actually had a jar, not a box. A sixteenth century writer actually mistranslated the Greek word pithos, a large storage jar, to the Latin word pyxis, meaning box and the misconception has stuck ever since). However, the spirits released from Pandora’s jar were actually keres, female deaths spirits birthed of the Greek god of Night Nyx, not daemons like is commonly believed.
Daemons were considered supernatural and immortal, yet not precisely god-like. Homer used the word theoi to represent god, and daimones for daemons. The Hellenistic Greeks later classified daemons into groups; agathodaimōn ("noble spirit"), from the word agathós ("good, brave, noble, moral, lucky, useful"), and kakódaimōn ("malevolent spirit"), from the word kakós ("bad, evil"). This is where the Greek concept of the daemon started to resemble Judeo-Christian angles and demons. Form this classification, Xenocrates, a student of Plato; he came to define daemons as a potentially dangerous, perhaps not evil though, lesser-god.
Daemons are a large part of Greek mythology, and later under the name of genius in Roman mythology, however they are rarely ever depicted in Greek mythology or artwork as they are said to be felt but hardly ever seen and can only be assumed (a concept shared today). The Ancients would conduct festivals in their honor, usually at sanctuaries of the Greek god of madness and wine Dionysus. Daemons were usually represented by a serpent of the underworld.
From all this, the word daemon actually attained its negative connotations through the New Testament, which when written in Greek and used the word daemon to describe the Christian idea of a demon instead of the benevolent guardians of Ancient Greece. This is another example of how simple mistranslation can entirely change the meaning of words and concepts that lead to severe misconceptions of what we see today.
Works Cited:
Illiad By Homer
Theogony By Hesiod
Works and Days By Hesiod
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