Brief historiography of the daimōn since the ^mid-19th century

Abstract

The most famous daimōn in the historiography of Greek religion is undoubtedly Jane Ellen Harrison'seniautos daimōn ^[1], an interpretative artifact forged to account, in a Greek context, for the spirit of vegetation as conceived by James George Frazer in his famous Golden Palm. In this perspective, which also reflects Durkheim's reflections on the collective effervescence of rituals, daimones are supposed to belong to the " primitive " strata of Greek religion, before becoming theoi, full-fledged gods. This type of reconstruction creates a kind of " novel of origins " where the daimōn emerges from primordial times that are never dated.

References

[1] Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, Cambridge, 1903 ; Themis. A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, Cambridge, 1927² [1912].

[2] Louis Gernet, Recherches sur le développement de la pensée juridique et morale en Grèce. Étude sémantique, Paris, 1917, p. 316-317.

[3] Here, I pinpoint two recent works: André Timotin, La démonologie platonicienne. Histoire de la notion de daimôn, de Platon aux derniers néoplatoniciens, Leiden, 2012 ; David G. Greenbaum, The Daimon in Hellenistic astrology: origins and influence, Leiden, 2016.

[4] M. Detienne, De la pensée religieuse à la pensée philosophique. La notion de "  daimôn " dans le pythagorisme ancien, Paris, 1963, p. 27.