The mention of the word “Demon” is enough to send chills and negative thoughts and feelings coursing through your body and mind, preventing you from understanding and learning. However, ignorance isn’t bliss. Don’t be afraid to learn, and here’s why: the term “Demon”, also known in other variant spellings such as “Daemon” (Latin), is a translation of the original Greek word “Daimon” (δαίμων: “god”, “godlike”, “power”, “fate”).
Daimons were regarded as divinities or supernatural beings of a nature between gods and humans, an inner or attendant spirit or inspiring force.
Long before the creation of monotheistic cultures, our ancestors from ancient civilisations would have considered this entity a natural, benign, and benevolent nature spirit.
Daimons were possibly seen as the souls of men from the “Golden Age”, acting as tutelary deities.
One type of tutelary deity is the genius, the personal deity or daimon of an individual from birth to death.
Witches would have referred to them as “familiars” in folklore, but in modern belief systems, malaks, Jinns, fallen angels, watchers, and evil spirits are incorrectly placed into one and the same category.
Spirits of nature are similar to both mortals and deities, akin to ghosts, chthonic heroes, spirit guides, forces of nature, or the deities themselves.
It’s not uncommon for the methods or theoretical explanations of a genius to be ridiculed, slandered, and “demonised” by traditional scholars who show reluctance and inflexibility to evolve and adapt to new information and radical theories from some of the world’s greatest minds, such as Tesla, Einstein, John Nash, Nietzsche, and even Socrates.
Socrates claimed to have lived his life according to the dictates of his Daimon, which in this sense meant “replete with knowledge.”
The ancient Greeks believed there were both good and bad demons, called “cacodemons”.
A cacodemon (or cacodaemon) is an evil spirit, possibly even a former person who lived a wicked life, or (in the modern sense of the word) a demon.
Socrates claimed he had a lifelong daimon that always warned him of danger and bad judgment but would never direct his actions. He said his daimon was more accurate than omens of either watching the flights or reading the entrails of birds, which were two respected forms of divination at the time.
For a more visual understanding of modern-day misconceptions, I recommend watching the TV series “The Exorcist“, now available on Amazon, a reinvention inspired by William Peter Blatty’s original 1971 book.
Alternatively, for a nice outlook on nature spirits and daemons, I suggest watching “His Dark Materials”