The many lives of Eurasian daimonology

The many lives of Eurasian daimonology

David Gordon White

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

...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...