Here’s a quote from Part I, first chapter, “The Ancestry of the Demonic” (it was hard to select something to quote, as I’ve found everything to be interesting enough):
DEMONS AS AMBIVALENT OPPONENTS: THE DAIMON
Our word for demon is etymologically derived from the ancient Hellenic daimon. This is an interesting and challenging concept, and points towards an original ambivalence that efficiently resists all attempts to fix and delimit the meaning of demons and the demonic. In his Greek Philosophical Terms F.E. Peters defines daimon as “supernatural presence or entity, somewhere between a god (theos) and a hero.” [1] According to Peters, the Greeks had developed a belief in supernatural spirits at a very early stage; this can be detected in their language. For example, the Greek word for happiness was eudaimonia, which literally meant ‘having a good daimon.’ These people believed that a daimon attached to a person at the moment of birth and dictated one’s destiny, good or evil. A good daimon acted as a kind of “guardian spirit” in the life of a happy person. The exact forms of this belief seem to have varied, and according to the shamanistic view the daimon was a very intimate part of an individual, another name for the soul. Among the later transcendentalists it became popular to think about daimons as intermediary figures between the Olympians and the mortals; they inhabited areas close to men and exercised direct influence over their affairs. [2]
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[1] Peters 1967, 33. The classification of rational beings into four classes (gods, daimons,
heroes and men, in this order) comes from Hesiod and was followed by Plutarch in his
Moralia (see Ferguson 1984, 33). – Jatakari 1996 is a thorough study (in Finnish) about
the role of the daimon in Greek thought between 550 and 300 B.C.E. The original roots of
daimon are multiple and disputed. It is commonly related to the verb ‘to apportion’
(da ¤omai ), but the scholarship does not agree on what was originally apportioned. Some
researchers think that the earliest daimons were malign natural powers and spirits; the
“apportioning” would have signified violent rending or eating of body (W. Porzig). Others
have more positive hypotheses, and suggest that daimons at an early stage were bearers
of light (W. Buckert), or that the daimonic ‘apportioning’ included the dimension of
apportioning fate or destiny (M.P. Nilsson). See Jatakari 1996, 4.
[2] Peters 1967, 33-34. Everett Ferguson produces a useful summary of Greek views on
daimons in his study Demonology of the Early Christian World (Ferguson 1984, 33-59).
Jensen (1966) has a more specific goal: to trace the function of Greek demonology in the
philosophical and religious dualism of Pythagorean and Platonic thought.
Mäyrä also refers in his introduction that he came across many texts that kept the subject of demons popping up in his life. By accident and because I was more alert to the subject of daimons in literature, here are few poems I found on a single American poetry anthology:
Edgar Allan Poe’s Alone
From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved—I loved alone.
Then—in my childhood—in the dawn
Of a most stormy life—was drawn
From ev'ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold—
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass'd me flying by—
From the thunder and the storm—
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.
Stephen Crane’s Many Red Devils
Many red devils ran from my heart
And out upon the page,
They were so tiny
The pen could mash them.
And many struggled in the ink.
It was strange
To write in this red muck
Of things from my heart.
from Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Flammonde
(…) But what of him—
So firm in every look and limb?
What small satanic sort of kink
Was in his brain? What broken link
Withheld him from the destinies
That came so near to being his?
(…)
And I found these after spending but a hour or less reading through the anthology…
________
Steven Connor, Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck College, University of London, writes the following on Mäyrä’s book:
Ilkka Mäyrä has written an absorbing and authoritative investigation of the role of demons and the demonic in literary and cultural history in the West. He draws impressively and with assurance on a wide range of theological, anthropological and philosophical sources to underpin and direct his analysis of a number of contemporary cultural texts. Rather than attempting to derive an underlying core of meaning from the shifting and polymorphous functions of devils and demons, Mäyrä argues suggestively that the demonic has come to embody uncertainty of identity and indeterminacy of meaning themselves. This makes the demonic a carrier of some of the most absorbing and widespread preoccupations of contemporary texts and cultural theory, and helps explain the stubborn survival of demons and demonism in contemporary writing. In the contemporary texts he discusses, from popular fiction such as Rosemary´s Baby and The Exorcist through to the novels of Anne Rice, Clive Barker and Salman Rushdie, Mäyrä finds the demonic at work within the idea of discourse itself. Most recently, the demonic has become a powerful explanatory metaphor for our increasingly complex relations with machines and technology. Historically well-informed, theoretically resourceful, critically subtle, this is an original and absorbing investigation of its topic.
As Mäyrä claims, the chapters of this book can be approached as individual items and in no specific order. And it is rich in bibliographical leads, which you can follow if you’re interested in different views of the same subject.
Mäyrä’s book is available online in PDF format here: http://www.uta.fi/~frans.mayra/Demon_2005/
Due to copyright issues for sure, the file unfortunately doesn’t come with illustrations. And handling a book is much a finer task than handling many printed pages. So I think I’ll buy me the book instead. There’s a link for it on that page also. The PDF file is great to quote the original work though.
Image: A woodcut from 1598 shows an exorcism performed on a woman by a priest and his assistant, with a demon emerging from her mouth. In Pierre Boaistuau, et al., Histoires prodigieuses et memorables, extraictes de plusieurs fameux autheurs, Grecs, & Latins, sacrez & prophanes (Paris, 1598), vol. 1.
