daemones

See also: Daemones

English

Etymology

From Latin daemonēs.

Noun

daemones

1. plural of daemon
   • 1896, Harry Thurston Peck, editor, Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities, volume I, New York, N.Y., Cincinnati, Oh., Chicago, Ill.: American Book Company, page 464, column 2:

     In later times, too, the daemones were regarded as beings intermediate between the gods and mankind, forming, as it were, the retinue of the gods, representing their powers in activity, and intrusted with the fulfilment of their various functions.

   • 1965, Robert Rentoul Reed, Jr., The Occult on the Tudor and Stuart Stage, The Christopher Publishing House, →LCCN, page 70:

     But the Greek daemones had been tutelary: Socrates’ had been a good spirit, careful to admonish him in accordance with the dictates of wisdom and virtue.

   • 1989, Abstracts, American Philological Association, page 146:

     Similarly, the daemones that served or hindered the theurgist were derived from both philosophic doctrine and magical lore.

   • 1991, Valerie I[rene] J[ane] Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, →ISBN, page 157:

     In that early medieval Europe sustained a powerful belief in angels, it is true to say that the old good daemones were to some extent rescued in this form.

   • 1995, Richard Stoneman, Greek Mythology: An Encyclopedia of Myth and Legend, Diamond Books, →ISBN, page 58:

     In later antiquity, Neoplatonic philosophy gave the daemones an important role as mediators between the spheres of men and God the gods themselves being too individualized to suit this mystic purpose.

   • 2009, Susan Greenwood, The Anthropology of Magic, Routledge, published 2020, →ISBN:

     Daemones were gifted with knowledge of the future and, in the pre-Christian world, were generally held to dwell in ‘that murky layer of the middle air which reached from the moon to the earth’.

   • 2018, Doris Enright-Clark Shoukry, edited by Leslie Croxford and Leonardo de Arrizabalaga y Prado, Studies in Ontology in Twentieth Century Literature, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, →ISBN, page 58:

     The world that emerges must surely be that which the ancient Sphinx looked out upon, the primal scenes, ruled over by the Moirai, Fates, ruthless and oblivious, the truth expressed by the Greek daemones before the theos, god, of Olympus’ palliated reality.

Latin

Noun

daemonēs

1. nominative/accusative/vocative plural of daemon