What is a demon?

Your goal in this lesson: to see how the word demon changed over time, and why that matters before you open the Goetia.

The Greek daimon

Historical Our word demon comes from the Greek daimōn. In early Greek it was not an evil word. It meant a divine power, a spirit or even a person’s fate. In Hesiod’s Works and Days (lines 121 to 126), the people of the golden age become kindly daimones after death, guardians of mortals. In Plato’s Symposium (202e), the priestess Diotima calls Love a great daimōn, a being between gods and humans who carries prayers up and gifts down. Socrates spoke of his daimonion, an inner sign that warned him when he was about to make a mistake.

So for a Greek reader, a daimon could be good, bad or neither. It was a go-between.

How the word darkened

Historical Jewish writers who translated the Bible into Greek used daimonion for foreign gods and harmful spirits. The New Testament uses it for the unclean spirits that Jesus casts out. In Christian Latin, daemon came to mean an evil spirit, one of the angels who fell with Satan. By the Middle Ages, a demon was a fallen angel, and every pagan daimon had become a devil.

Goetia: from lament to sorcery

Historical The title of the book this course is about, the Ars Goetia, is Greek too. A goēs was a kind of sorcerer. The word is linked to goos, the wailing lament sung over the dead, and the scholar Sarah Iles Johnston has argued that the goēs was first a specialist in lament and in dealing with the restless dead. By Plato’s time the word meant a cheat. Late antique philosophers set goeteia, low sorcery, against theurgia, “god-work”. The seventeenth-century title Ars Goetia, “the goetic art”, uses the word in that later sense: a manual for working with evil spirits.

The map of this course

1. Demons in Mesopotamia, Greece, Jewish texts and the New Testament.
2. Solomon and the medieval grimoires.
3. Weyer, Scot and the 1904 Goetia.
4. How to read a spirit entry.
5. Safety, ethics and myths.
6. Modern approaches and a year of study.

If you are struggling right now, call your local emergency number (112 in Europe, 911 in the US and Canada) or see Getting help.

Try this

Today’s exercise: write down where you first met the idea of demons, such as a film, a church, a game or a book. Then write one feeling the word brings up. Do not judge it. Keep the page; you will look at it again in lesson 7.

Quick recap

• The Greek daimōn was a divine power or go-between, not always evil.
• In Jewish Greek and Christian use, the word came to mean an evil spirit.
• Goetia first meant lament-sorcery, later low magic with spirits.
• Reading is safe; this course is a study course.

Keep going

Press “Mark as done” and continue with Demons in the ancient world.

Need a refresher? See the whole course or the Goetia hub.

Sources

• Plato, Symposium 202e to 203a.
• Hesiod, Works and Days 121 to 126.
• Sarah Iles Johnston, Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
• Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (Oxford University Press, 2009).

Go deeper: the Goetia pages on this site

Mark as done