demon

← Encyclopedia

A demon, in the word’s later and now dominant sense, is an evil spirit — a being of malice that tempts, afflicts, or possesses. That meaning is a narrowing. The English term comes through Latin daemon from the Greek daimōn, and in its Greek life the word carried no such charge. What follows is the history of a single word as it passed across two religious worlds, losing its old breadth and gaining a sentence of condemnation it had never originally borne. The beings it named did not change. The verdict on them did.

The divider

Beneath daimōn lies an act of distribution. The word reaches back to the Indo-European root *da-, meaning to divide, surviving in the Greek verb daiomai, to share out or apportion; a daimōn is, at root, a divider or allotter — the power that deals out a person’s portion of fortune. The earliest Greek usage keeps this sense of an agency operating on a life from just beyond it. In Homer the word can stand almost interchangeably with theos, a god, but it leans toward the god encountered as an event rather than named and worshipped: the unexpected turn, the sudden impulse, the stroke of luck or ruin that arrives without a face. A daimōn is the divine met as it intrudes.

From this comes the most everyday descendant of the word. To be eudaimōn — literally to be with a good daimōn, well-allotted, attended by a favorable spirit — is to be happy, and eudaimonia, that good-spirited condition, became the master word of Greek ethics, the name for the flourishing life the philosophers argued how to reach. Happiness, in the Greek hearing of it, was never a private mood; it was the report that one’s allotting spirit had dealt well. The dark twin sat inside the same grammar: to be kakodaimōn, ill-spirited, was to be cursed.

A daimōn could be tied to a single person across a whole life. Socrates spoke of an inner daimonion, a divine sign or voice that checked him when he was about to do wrong — never commanding, only forbidding — and the idea that each soul walks with an assigned spirit, a guide and an allotter both, would have a long career, surviving into the Christian doctrine of the guardian angel once the daimōn itself had been recast as a fiend. Hesiod gave the conception a cosmological setting: the men of the golden race, when they died, did not vanish but became daimones, holy guardians who walk the earth wrapped in mist and watch over justice. The word named a rank of being, a function in the order of things — not a moral kind.

Love, the bridge

Plato gave the daimōn its most consequential philosophical statement, and he gave it through a definition of love. In the Symposium the priestess Diotima teaches Socrates that Eros is no god — for the gods possess the beautiful and the good, and Love by its nature lacks and reaches for them — but neither is he merely mortal. He is a daimōn, and the daimonic is precisely the order of being that stands between. In Jowett’s translation of the Symposium, Diotima answers Socrates’ question about what Love is: “He is a great spirit (daimon), and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal.” Asked what such a spirit does, she says it interprets “between gods and men, conveying and taking across to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and replies of the gods; he is the mediator who spans the chasm which divides them.” God, she adds, mingles not with man; all converse between them is carried across by such intermediate powers, of which Love is one among many.

This is the hinge of the classical concept. The daimōn is a function — a carrying-across — and an entire population of such carriers fills the space the gods do not directly touch. Prayer ascends and answer descends through them; divination, ritual, the whole traffic between heaven and earth runs on their backs. Love is named as one instance of a category teeming with others.

The graded orders

The schools that read Plato after him built the daimōn into the architecture of the cosmos. Neoplatonism, the late flowering of Platonic thought, faced a structural problem its founders had set: if the highest principle is utterly transcendent and the sensible world hangs far below it, the distance must be bridged, and it is bridged by graded ranks of intermediaries descending from the divine Intellect toward matter. Demons, in this scheme, are not a moral category but a metaphysical stratum — beings finer than human souls and lower than gods, distributed down the chain.

Plotinus, the school’s founder, treated the guardian daimōn directly. In the tractate translated as Our Tutelary Spirit, he asks what the spirit assigned to a soul actually is, and answers from his own psychology: the daimōn of a person is the level of soul immediately above the one they presently live by. The contemplative whose center of gravity is the intellect is watched over by a higher spirit than the one who lives by appetite; the daimōn is not an external warden imposed from outside but the next rung of one’s own nature, the part of oneself one has not yet become. To rise is to take the guardian’s place and acquire a higher guardian still.

Iamblichus, who reshaped the school a generation later, ranked the daimonic kinds with a precision the earlier Platonists had left loose. Against the view that the soul could climb home by thought alone, he held that the soul descends whole into the body and must be lifted by the gods’ own action — theurgy, the god-work, the consecrated rites through which the divine reaches down. His system needed a fully articulated chain of mediators to make that reaching intelligible, and in On the Mysteries he set the classes of superior beings in careful order: gods, archangels, angels, daimones, heroes, sublunary archons, and purified souls, each with its own mode of manifestation, its own light, its own effect on the one who encounters it. Demons, in this ranking, govern nature and bind soul to body; they are powers of the generated world, neither saviors nor enemies but officers of the cosmic order. The word named a function in a hierarchy, not a verdict on a will.

The hinge: through Jewish and Christian channels

The shift toward evil came through Jewish and then Christian channels, and it began with an act of translation. The Septuagint, the Greek rendering of the Hebrew scriptures made by Jews of Alexandria from the third century BCE, reached repeatedly for daimonion to carry words the Hebrew had used for the gods of the nations and the spirits behind forbidden worship. Where a Psalm declared the gods of the peoples to be nothings — elilim, idols, vanities — the Greek made them daimonia: at Psalm 96:5 in the Hebrew numbering (95:5 in the Greek), all the gods of the nations are demons, while the Lord made the heavens. The Song of Moses had charged Israel with sacrificing to shedim, alien powers that were not God (Deuteronomy 32:17); the Greek again wrote daimonia. The word that for a Greek named a neutral intermediary became, in Jewish Greek, the standing name for the divine of everyone else — real enough to be dangerous, false enough to be shunned. This is where the concept of idolatry and the concept of the demon fuse: the gods of the nations are not nothing, they are daimonia, and to worship an image is to deal with a spirit.

Second Temple Judaism carried the narrowing further, developing an elaborate angelology and, alongside it, a dark counterpart. The Book of Enoch supplied the most influential origin story the demon would ever have. Expanding a single cryptic passage of Genesis — that the sons of God took human wives — its oldest layer tells of two hundred heavenly Watchers who descended upon Mount Hermon, bound themselves by oath, took women, and taught humankind the arts that should have stayed sealed. Their offspring were monstrous giants who devoured the earth and turned on its people; and when the giants were destroyed, the book explains, the spirits that came forth from their bodies did not die with them but remained on the earth as evil spirits, afflicting and tormenting without end. Here, for the first time, the demons of the troubled world are given a genealogy — a fall, a flood, a brood — and the neutral daimōn of the Greeks has nothing to do with it. The old Hebrew Bible had already known scattered wilderness powers, the goat-spirits or se’irim of Leviticus and the desert figure of Azazel; the Enochic myth gathered such fragments into a single account of where the malice came from.

The early Christians inherited this framework and sharpened it to a point. The apostle Paul, writing to Corinth, took up the language of the Song of Moses almost word for word: what the nations sacrifice, he warned, they sacrifice to demons and not to God (1 Corinthians 10:20). The gods of the surrounding cities were not empty fictions, the Christian apologists taught, but real spirits — fallen, hostile, and hungry for the worship offered at their altars. The daimones of the old religion were thereby recast wholesale as the agents of the adversary: Diana of the groves, Astarte of the Levantine cults, the high sky-fathers of Mesopotamia, the gods of Thrace and of every place the gospel met — all of them sorted, under the single word, into the ranks of the fallen. What had been a neutral term of Greek cosmology became, in the mouths of churchmen, the name of an enemy. By the time the term settled into Latin Christendom, daemon meant simply a fiend.

The text and its scholarship

The trajectory of daimōn is a textbook case in historical semantics of how a word’s meaning follows a shift in worldview rather than any change in the things it named — what the discipline calls pejoration, the slide of a neutral or favorable term toward the negative. The classic philological account remains Walter Burkert’s Greek Religion (Harvard, 1985), which sets out the archaic sense of daimōn as divine power encountered impersonally, distinct from the named and worshipped theos; the relevant pages are gathered in the publisher’s catalog record at hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674362819. The standard study of the term’s afterlife in early Christianity is Jan N. Bremmer’s work on the Greek and the demonic, surveyed in his The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife (Routledge, 2002) and in his essays tracing how Christian writers from Justin and Tatian onward reassigned the pagan daimones to the camp of the fallen. For the Septuagint’s role at the hinge, the lexical evidence is laid out in the entries on daimonion in Gerhard Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (Eerdmans), which documents the deliberate use of the word to render the gods of the nations; the Brenton edition of the Greek Old Testament, which prints the daimonia of Psalm 95:5 in English, is widely available in transcription at ccel.org/ccel/brenton/lxx. The Enochic origin of the disembodied-spirit demon is treated authoritatively in George W. E. Nickelsburg’s Hermeneia commentary, 1 Enoch 1 (Fortress Press, 2001), whose exposition of the Book of the Watchers is the modern reference for the giants’ spirits becoming the demons of the present age; the volume’s record is at fortresspress.com. The Platonic and Neoplatonic side of the story rests on the primary texts hosted in this library — Plato’s Symposium, Plotinus on the tutelary spirit, and Iamblichus On the Mysteries — read against the modern critical editions, Burkert’s Greek Religion for the classical background and Gregory Shaw’s Theurgy and the Soul (Penn State, 1995) for the daimonic hierarchies of Iamblichean ritual.

The orthographic split

The neutral and the malign senses never wholly displaced one another. When the Renaissance recovered the Platonic and Hermetic texts that the Latin West had lost, the graded daimōn came back with them. The learned magic of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, working from Plato, Plotinus, Iamblichus, and the Hermetic corpus, revived the older intermediary spirit alongside the Christian demon, and the two have shadowed each other in Western esoteric thought ever since — the tutelary spirit and the tempter sharing a single inheritance. The history of demonology, which catalogs the named ranks and powers of the fiends, and the contemplative literature of the guardian spirit run side by side out of the same root, often in the same authors; and the whole long quarrel over whether reality holds one governing power or two — the problem of dualism — kept the question of the demons’ standing perpetually live, since a cosmos with a rival dark principle has a place for malign spirits that a strict monotheism must strain to provide.

That double life is preserved, to this day, in the spelling. English writers who want the Greek intermediary — the allotting spirit, the guardian, the daimonic power of Diotima’s speech — reach for daemon or daimon, the older orthography held deliberately apart so that the morally neutral sense survives intact, while demon is left to the fiend. The same beings, on either side of a single vowel, are called by what the writer takes them to be. The word still divides — only now it divides not fortunes but verdicts, and the choice of letters is itself the oldest argument in the concept’s history, fossilized in two ways of writing one name.

→ In the library: Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna): Our Tutelary Spirit · Iamblichus on the Mysteries (Taylor, 1821) · The Book of Enoch (Charles, 1912) · Plato — Symposium (Jowett)

→ Related: Zeus · Nous · Neoplatonism · Gnosis · Babylonia · Leviticus · Plato · Iamblichus · Book Of Enoch · Second Temple Judaism · Idolatry · Angel · Guardian Angel · Theurgy · Renaissance Magic · Demonology · Dualism · Eros