That you will have to ask Socrates
Taken from:
[FONT="]D[/FONT][FONT="]EMONIC [/FONT][FONT="]C[/FONT][FONT="]REATIVITY [/FONT]
[FONT="]A Writer’s Guide to the Inner Genius [/FONT]
[FONT="]by [/FONT][FONT="]Matt Cardin[/FONT]
Both the idea of the daimon and the idea of the muse come to us from the ancient Greeks, who in addition to worshiping the gods and goddesses familiar to all of us through the stories of classical mythology believed in spirits they called daimones or daimons (known more com-monly today by the variant spelling ‚daemons[FONT="]‛[/FONT]; see below). In fact, if we are to believe classical scholar Reginald Barrow, worship of the daimons made up an underground mainstream in ancient Greek religion: ‚Be-cause the daemons have left few memorials of themselves in architecture and literature, their importance tends to be overlooked…They are omni-present and all-powerful, they are embedded deep in the religious memo-ries of the peoples, for they go back to days long before the days of Greek philosophy and religion. The cults of the Greek states, recognised and officially sanctioned, were only one-tenth of the iceberg; the rest, the submerged nine-tenths, were the daemons.
In one respect the daimons weren’t very different from the animistic spirits that have populated the belief systems of all peoples throughout history. They were thought to be local, limited spirits that inhabited cer-tain places, affected the weather, brought good and bad luck, and so on. But the Greeks also held a more distinctly spiritualized or psychologized view that eventually outstripped the first. In this second version, the daimons were understood to exist deep within the human psyche or spi-rit, where they made themselves known through their influence upon human thoughts, emotions, attitudes, and actions. They were conceived as intermediate spirits, neither divine nor human but bridging the gap between the two realms, whose function was to mediate the will and messages of the gods to people, and vice versa. It was such a potent con-cept that it eventually swept through the ancient world and became one of the cornerstones of Western psychological and spiritual thought. The iconic figures of both the angel and the demon in Western religion have their origins in the ancient Greek daimons, as combined with ancient Jewish beliefs about spiritual hierarchies, which themselves had been in-herited from Zoroastrianism (a long and complex line of influence, to be sure, and one that I explore in some depth in my above-mentioned ‚An-gel and Demon[FONT="]‛[/FONT] essay).
