| | Joe-
Wonderful etymologies; thank you from someone interested in these subjects.
I would however, contest one jarring point,
"The word religion is derived from Latin "religio" (what attaches or retains, moral bond, anxiety of self-consciousness, scruple) used by the Romans, before Jesus Christ, to indicate the worship of the demons. "Demon" is a concept that only makes sense in a Christian or monotheistic framework. The word in question is the Greek daimon; the term refers to hypothetical 'intermediary' entities existing, like 'gods', as subtle bodies (objects solely of ideation), but who are nonarchetypical immortal beings of limited potential. They are presented in classical works usually as having limited place in a social ecology of religion; when we talk about 'insporation' or 'amusement', we recall language which sees concrete images and ideas which 'come to us' (which Objectivisms holds to be the subconscious integration of conceptual value, which I agree with as far as it goes) as essentially external, not internal to the intentionality or focus that is uniquely individual; hence, the personification as an exterior personage, such as the muses, graces, furies, etc., collectively called spirits or daimons.
It must be remembered that the ancients had no concept of 'reality' as apposed to 'illusion'. Dreams, 'hallucinations' were treated not as unreal, but as different forms of reality; independent objects of consciousness, of which Pagans, Christians, and various schools of philosophers debated the nature and source. Nietzsche said the same thing when he said (rough paraphrase) "the senses do not deceive us, it is what we make of them that does so". And as William James, whom I generally despise, did rightly point out when talking about mystical experiences, it is a strangeness of empiricism which tells people that experiences are not 'really' happening. Daimons were seen, rather imprecisely, as either the cause of the experience or the object of experience itself.
Socrates, for instance, treated what people would describe as a rationalist's 'moral conscience' as such a daimon. The Romantics coined the use of the term genius, a person of special inspiration who defies normal rules of composure, manners, and morality, from the Greek spirits of the same name whose presence was experienced as a 'flash of insight'; the 'genies' or 'djinn' or fairy stories who grant gifts or wishes are simply metaphorical embodiments of the subtle-bodied gift-givers of Greek thought; the Romantic "genius" simply places the inexplicable creativity as ontologically interior to, rather than exterior to, the artist; Shelley merely altered the ontology of Plato's Ion, who took in straight from the mystery religions. Mozart, who described his compositions as God writing through him, was talking in the same daimonic language. See also, "I am the Walrus."
Pagans usually did discourage, sometimes violently, outright worship of daimons, but not because they were evil 'demons', but because the gods of the semi-established, 'high church' Pagans were seen as morally responsible, while the worship of daimons was mostly a low-church phenomena; daemons, being beings without cosmic position of responsibility, could not be trusted not to give antisocial advantages to the wrong people (i.e., ordain witchcraft). Worshipping household gods which would logically fit the concept of a daimon was OK, but by a double standard where the established intermediate spirits were functionaries with a proper place, to whom decent people could request favors from, but witches who consorted with other daimons did so out of dangerous self-interest. Basically, the first seeds of the 'demon' concept lie in the separation of the daimons of people inside and outside the tribe; it took monotheism to reify this into familiar angels and demons on the Medieval schema.
In one aspect, this is basically an expression of a state of incomplete victory of patriarchal over matriarchal cultures; just as Pagan myths are the foundations of fairy stories under Christianity, so the matriachal Pagan gods were demoted to daimons under pre-Christian patriarchy, at least in the eyes of the powers-that-be. In this sense, the 'demon' concept does start to form in a pre-Christian setting, but ultimately only as part of the completion of the same Christianizing process by which philosophy and religion moved closer and closer to moral-heiracrhical dualism; a 'daimon' seen from an anthropological sense is just a god the speaker wishes to denigrate; though in Roman Paganism this denigration was essentially a question of civic virtue, not a dualism of good and evil as in Christianity. But both sets of Pagans usually recognized separate concepts of gods and daimons; they just played games of what names to put in each category as part of sociopolitical power struggles (I remember reading somewhere that one of the Plinys went so far as to attempt scientifically schematized classifications!)
The same line was followed by some philosophers; actually the existence and/or nature of intermediary spirits was a big fight in the culture wars of the later Roman Empire; the Epicureans (and to a lesser degree the Aristotelians) tended to agree with modern science and call the whole concept superstition, and actually the Patristic church writers often agreed. Many Stoics and Platonists accepted the existence of daimons; some Christians agreed, but considered this category inclusive of all Pagan divinities who were real beings but false gods; that view eventually won out, and daimon, now "demon", came to mean something evil and malevolent. That said, there is a substantial undercurrent in Medieval thought of a synthesis of Pagan daimonism and Neoplatonist philosophy in some Pagan/Abrahamic crossfertilizations such as gnosticism and Kaballah, where the previous daimonic conception were preserved and elaborated on by semi-philosophers. But even in mainstream religion and philosophy, the original Greek concept of the daimon in moral teleological form as Aristotelian the scala natura employed by St. Thomas Aquinas and Pico della Mirandola; here daimons are collapsed into 'angels' and treated as innately good instead of evil. The Pagans had generally placed daimons between humans and gods; the Christians placed angels between humans and God; except for the moral framework of the latter, both meant essentially the same alleged existent.
Oh dear, I got carried away again... sorry for the lecture of demonology. ;o
Pyrophora of Cyprus ))(*)((
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