Daemones

In later times, too, the daemones were regarded as beings intermediate between the gods and mankind, forming, as it were, the retinue of the gods, representing their powers in activity, and intrusted with the fulfilment of their various functions.

But the Greek daemones had been tutelary: Socrates’ had been a good spirit, careful to admonish him in accordance with the dictates of wisdom and virtue.

Similarly, the daemones that served or hindered the theurgist were derived from both philosophic doctrine and magical lore.

In that early medieval Europe sustained a powerful belief in angels, it is true to say that the old good daemones were to some extent rescued in this form.

In later antiquity, Neoplatonic philosophy gave the daemones an important role as mediators between the spheres of men and God the gods themselves being too individualized to suit this mystic purpose.

Daemones were gifted with knowledge of the future and, in the pre-Christian world, were generally held to dwell in ‘that murky layer of the middle air which reached from the moon to the earth’.

The world that emerges must surely be that which the ancient Sphinx looked out upon, the primal scenes, ruled over by the Moirai, Fates, ruthless and oblivious, the truth expressed by the Greek daemones before the theos, god, of Olympus’ palliated reality.