The first thing I would like to say is that I am not out to offend any of you/your religions (can one offend a religion?). I could care less what your worldview is. Now.
Today I got to sit and listen to a lecture about the life of Socrates. I know this sounds exceptionally boring, but . . . I actually kind of was interested (remember, I’m a nerd). So anyway, we got to talking about how Socrates alleged that he heard a voice that told him not to do certain things. Our teacher called this his daimōn.
I was confused for a moment, because this made me think of dæmon, the Middle English word for “demon.” What I think of as a demon (and what most people do nowadays) is a really bad spirit (from Hell or whatever). This voice of Socrates hardly seemed like such a malevolence–it wasn’t, after all, telling him it was bad to not kill children or anything of that ilk. Why dæmon?
So I looked up the etymology for “demon,” which does, in fact, come from the Middle English dæmon. This, however, comes from the Greek daimōn, which meant “divine power, fate, god”–note that there is no bad connotation. In Latin, on the other hand, dæmon came to mean “a spirit, an evil spirit, a demon.”
Moral of the Story: How can some people hold that morals are unchanging throughout time when words like daimōn can go from being innocent spirits (okay, maybe not completely, if you know anything about Greek mythology, but . . . ) to being malignant spirits? (Again, I’m not trying to offend people!)
Wordemic 