VMs: Demons, Daimones, Daemones...

[Nick Pelling <nickpelling@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

Just to clear up a thread from last week: if I'd read a few pages ahead to 
"Demons and Daimons: The Spirits Conjured" (chapter seven in Kieckhefer's 
"Forbidden Rites"), I'd have read about...

	"...a tension between the early Christian notion of demons as
	fallen angels, whose status is determined by their free moral
	act of rebellion against God, and the Graeco-Roman conception
	of /daimones/ (or /daemones/ in Latin) as spirits linked with the
	world of nature, whose status is fixed by their natural position
	within the hierarchy of beings. Apuleius's /De deo Socratis/
	remained long influential in Christian tradition, despite its
	incongruence with the notion of demons as fallen angels; for
	Apuleius, /daemones/ were rational beings whose natural sphere
	was the sublunary air, just as gods and humans are rational
	beings residing in the ether and on earth respectively. They
	are not naturally evil, but may be either good or evil". (p.154)
	...
	"One might thus say that the conjurations [of late medieval
	necromancy] betray a tension between 'demonology' and what
	we might call 'daimonology'." (p.155)

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....


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