Of the origin of demons
Currently we understand demon as an “evil spirit”, a more or less intelligent entity that works against us or produces some harm or, more symbolically, as an essential evil, a vice, a limitation.
The word that we use today to refer to this type of nefarious entity comes from the Greek daemon which, for many of the ancients, meant god or minor spirit, without any negative connotation.
The Greeks, in turn, took the word from the Proto-Indo-European daimon, which means the one who distributes or the one who dispenses. In a religious context it could be the one who dispenses fortune or destiny: that is, a spirit with influence over men.
Thus, we can read Diotima, a Greek priestess of the 5th century BCE, who, in his discourse on the nature of Eros (The Symposium, 202d, Plato), speaks of the daimones as intermediary entities or messengers between the gods and men.
And Plotinus (3rd century CE), contemporary philosopher of the Gnostics, who discusses the functions of personal guardians of some demons, that is, he imagines them as entities equivalent to the guardian angels of Judaism or Christianity.
But, if for the classics demons were spirits and minor gods that were not necessarily evil, at what point did the word demon begin to be conceived as equivalent to everything that is evil?
In the West, the widespread association of the word demon with the idea of an evil spirit could be due, on the one hand, to the triumph of the Judeo-Christian tradition over Hellenic polytheism and, on the other hand, to the influence of Gnostic dualism on Judaism and Christianity in the first centuries CE. onwards.
For the ancient Israelites, spirits were almost always emissaries of some evil or affliction. This perspective would not be entirely strange in the context of the Ancient Middle East, in which a good part of magical efforts were dedicated to protection against spirits, responsible for pain and illness.
Although for the Sumerians or Canaanites, as for the Greeks, not all spirits or gods were evil, for the ancient Israelites, who worshiped a single national god to the detriment of the rest, it was rhetorically advantageous to emphasize the negative aspects of neighboring pantheons, as well as to conceive of them in a primarily negative perspective.
Thus, for example, on the few occasions that the Bible mentions gods from the Canaanite pantheon, they are terrible gods such as Mawet, Resheph or Dever (death, plague and pestilence, respectively); Spirits are not mentioned as favorable influences and, in some biblical passages, foreign deities are mocked, dismissively describing them as hairy spirits or satyrs (se’irim).
Taking into account this negative perspective regarding the generality of spirits, the translation made by the authors of the Septuagint in the 20th century could be contextualized as a practically defamatory exercise. III B.C.E. from the original Hebrew for idols (elilim), in Psalms 96:5:
“For all the gods [of the rest] of the nations are demons (daemonia).”
Centuries later, in the Greek originals of the New Testament, we find echoes of this negative perspective regarding the generality of spirits in its popular version, when we read that Jesus Christ performs an exorcism on two men possessed by unclean spirits (pneumati to akatharto, in Luke 8:29) who, in Matthew 8:28, are said to be: two demonized men (daimonizadomenoi).
The Judeo-Christian redefinition of the demon as an evil spirit is not, however, the first time that peoples and cultures in competition and conflict try to redefine or invert the theological terminology of neighboring peoples, in favor of their own culture, religion or identity.
Another very curious case is that of the two Aryan religions that still survive today: Zoroastrianism and Hinduism.
The Avestan word for “lord”, Ahura, was used by ancient Persian priests to refer to their main gods, and at some point became part of the name of the main god: Ahura-Mazda.
In the oldest Vedic texts, the Sanskrit voice for Ahura (Asura) originally coincides in meaning with the Avestan voice and is used in the same way, so it would not be a difficult syncretic exercise to identify the Ahura-Mazda of the Avestan texts with the Asura-Varuna of the Rig Veda, since in their respective texts both are lords (or ahuras) of Truth and Justice.
However, the Hindu Brahmanical tradition evolved in such a way that the new Indian gods, the daevas, replaced the old gods, the asuras, and since the new gods were the benevolent ones, there was a curious reversal of the meaning of asuras which, in the post-Vedic epics, is a synonym for demons, enemies or thieves of the wealth of the new gods.
Apparently, the ancient Persian sages, in their respective texts, returned this “favor” by describing all daevas as demons, and identified Indra, one of the two main Vedic deities, as lieutenant of the Evil One, and all this despite the fact that—as we saw in the case of Varuna—both traditions cultivated affection for the same virtues!
Returning to the Western demonological imaginary, in my opinion, the influence of the Gnostic dualism of the first centuries of the CE. It has been another of the determining factors for its birth and formation.
In the Corpus Hermeticum (I-III c.e.), for example, we find that demons are governors or influences over the material world or men, entities that, although less sublime than the gods, are not necessarily representatives of any vice or essential evil, in line with Hellenic beliefs.
However, according to the teachings of Gnostic dualism, which calls for reunion with divinity, since demons are worldly, they cannot be good. This idea can be summarized in the sentence of the Corpus Hermeticum, book II:
Except God, no other being called god, nor any human, nor any demon can be good, to any degree.
Thus, from this perspective, demons are entities as far from the essential Good as our own material body, an idea perhaps analogous to that of the Wheel of Samsara - or cycle of reincarnations - for Indian religions: that is, an entity or influence that, although not terribly evil, represents an imperfect state of spiritual evolution, a certain vital suffering and, in any case, it is the most sublime spiritual objective to transcend it.
Although the Gnostic teachings would be largely discarded by the bulk of the Christian churches that would later dominate the Western world, I believe that these ideas influenced the imagination and configuration of the new demonological perspectives, since the idea that everything that is not God, in particular everything earthly, is fundamentally evil or hinders salvation, found natural resonances with both the Israelite and Christian monotheistic perspectives, whose religious people went on to enrich a new imaginary and literature. infernal with vocabulary and illustrations that are suspiciously reminiscent of old Hellenic and Mesopotamian gods.
To conclude, and without my intention to question the moral usefulness of the ancient grimoires insofar as, as fables, they identify universally condemnable evils, I would like to underline my suspicion that the Western demonological vocabulary and imagination is based on millennial fears and quarrels, on hatred and distrust of the foreign, the neighbor, the different… and that perhaps it would be a valuable exercise of posthumous justice to compensate the memory of old people. “hairy spirits” of all time, to the extent that documentary archeology and prudence allow.