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

[Pamela Richards <spirlhelix@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, Nick!

This is from Plato's _Timaeus_, written about 360 BCE.
Plato speaks of the creation of the world, and the
actions of the Creator in forming souls for the stars,
and for mankind:

>From Plato's Timaeus:

"Thus he spake, and once more into the cup in which he
had previously mingled the soul of the universe he
poured the remains of the elements, and mingled them
in much the same manner; they were not, however, pure
as before, but diluted to the second and third degree.
And having made it he divided the whole mixture into
souls equal in number to the stars, and assigned each
soul to a star; and having there placed them as in a
chariot, he showed them the nature of the universe,
and declared to them the laws of destiny, according to
which their first birth would be one and the same for
all,-no one should suffer a disadvantage at his hands;
they were to be sown in the instruments of time
severally adapted to them, and to come forth the most
religious of animals; and as human nature was of two
kinds, the superior race would here after be called
man. Now, when they should be implanted in bodies by
necessity, and be always gaining or losing some part
of their bodily substance, then in the first place it
would be necessary that they should all have in them
one and the same faculty of sensation, arising out of
irresistible impressions; in the second place, they
must have love, in which pleasure and pain mingle;
also fear and anger, and the feelings which are akin
or opposite to them; if they conquered these they
would live righteously, and if they were conquered by
them, unrighteously. He who lived well during his
appointed time was to return and dwell in his native
star, and there he would have a blessed and congenial
existence. But if he failed in attaining this, at the
second birth he would pass into a woman, and if, when
in that state of being, he did not desist from evil,
he would continually be changed into some brute who
resembled him in the evil nature which he had
acquired, and would not cease from his toils and
transformations until he followed the revolution of
the same and the like within him, and overcame by the
help of reason the turbulent and irrational mob of
later accretions, made up of fire and air and water
and earth, and returned to the form of his first and
better state."

Warmly,

Pam




=====
"I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing, than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance."

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