Re: VMs: Demons, Daimones, Daemones...

[Nick Pelling <nickpelling@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Pamela,

At 16:13 21/09/2004 -0700, Pamela Richards wrote:
> Yes, in traditional astrology, the daemon is the
> "spirit" or "angel" to whom we are bound.  We are said
> to have a "good" one, the "Agathos daemon", which we
> find on the cusp of the eleventh house, and an "evil"
> one, "Cacodaemon", (really!) for "Dogma" fans, found
> on the cusp of the twelfth or sixth.  When Ficino
> speaks of the spirit of a star being bound to a human
> being, he uses the term daemon, which may be loosely
> translated "guiding spirit".  Guiding for good for for
> bad, either way, the spirit is thought to guide us to
> live out our fate.  The good one could be thought of
> as a "guardian angel".  See also Arippa, below.

I suppose I'm developing a quite different appreciation of the roots of 
Quattrocento humanism from the picture painted by most books. It was less a 
time of appreciating the classics than appropriating them - of myth-making 
rather than demystification. Think postmodernism rather than logical 
positivism (if you want to think about either much). :-

Agrippa and Ficino both operated within that humanist research programme: 
and as such, played fast and loose with their sources, in their attempts to 
construct (as had Alberti) fake modernist structural takes on 
politically-charged issues of the moment. That is, they constructed 
mythological frameworks, rather than reported them - humanism's central 
myth is its own internal decorum and responsibility to its sources, whereas 
in fact it had little or none of either.

I don't know of any evidence of any prior text linking named fixed stars to 
named d[a]emons: daemons, as Apuleius described, were typically thought to 
occupy the sub-lunary space, well below the stars. I suppose all I'm saying 
is beware of relying on authors like Ficino and Agrippa, whose approach 
involved a large degree of myth-making - a careful analysis of the 
intellectual history supporting their frameworks would be required, and I'm 
not sure any books currently do that (but please tell me if I'm wrong on 
that count).

BTW, did you mean that the agathos daemon is on the cusp of the tenth and 
eleventh house?

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


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