From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The words daemon and daimon are distinctive, older spellings of demon. This spelling is used purposely today to distinguish the daemons of Greek mythology, "supernatural beings between mortals and gods, such as inferior divinities and ghosts of dead heroes", from the Judeo-Christian usage demon, "a malignant spirit that can possess humans".
Daemons ("replete with knowledge", "divine power", "fate" or "god") were not necessarily evil. The Greeks divided daemons into good and evil categories: eudaemons and cacodaemons, respectively. Eudaemons somewhat resembled the modern idea of the guardian angel. They watched over ordinary mortals to help keep them out of trouble.
Socrates claimed to have a daimon that warned him and gave him advice but never coerced him into following it. He claimed that his daimon exhibited greater accuracy than any of the forms of divination practised at the time.
See also eudaimonia.
A comparable Roman genius accompanied a person or protected and haunted a place (genius loci).
In the 1st century BCE, Arabian Eudaemon (usually associated with the port of Aden was a transshipping port in the Red Sea trade. It was described in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (probably 1st century CE) as if it had fallen on hard times. Of the euphoniously named port we read that
- Eudaemon Arabia was once a fully-fledged city, when vessels from India did not go to Egypt and those of Egypt did not dare sail to places further on, but came only this far.
