INTRODUCTION

The word ΔΑΙΜΟΝΑΣ ("daimonas", or Δαιμών) is the word "demon". It is a Greek word and is pronounced "demonas". The Greeks of antiquity worshipped not only the gods of the heavens (mount Olympus), but also the chthonic gods of the underworld, as well as disembodied deifications of abstractions, what we today might call "spirits". "Right" and "Wrong", were no mere concepts but daimones, demons; sacred ideas, spirits, with divine power.

According to Christianity's religious book:
"...the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God, and I do not want you to be participants with demons. You cannot drink from the cup of the Lord and the cup of the demons too; you cannot have a part in both the Lord's table and the table of demons." New Testament 1 Corinthians 10:20-21

This reinforces the message of the Old Testament; Psalms 96.5 in the Septuagint reads "πάντες οι θεοί τών εθνών δαίμοναι, ό δέ κύριος τους ουρανού εποίησεν." ("eternally are the gods of other nations demons, since it is the lord who moves the heavens." my translation). It should be noted that the "Old Testament" now in use in western Christian churches is the Septuagint re-written in the 10th century AD by Jews who claimed to have corrected what are said to be errors in the Greek. This 10th century AD Jewish OT replaces demon with idol.

The Mesopotamian inheritance of Jewish belief defined "demons" as "asakku"; illness and misfortune personified; evil afflictions which take "possession" of the "soul". With Christianity, all that once represented good was rendered a representation of evil, and all that was once considered bad, became good. Greek "demons" came to be associated with evil.

It was this Judaic creed and its intolerance of other faiths, or philosophical views, which was first adopted by, and then imposed, by Roman force of arms. With Christianity as its official faith, a pluralist syncretist understanding of the cosmos came to bee seen as a disavowal of Christian thought and as a consequence the Classical world came to be disembowelled. Theodosius closed down the Sarapeum in Alexandria, and in Greece, the Sacred Oak of Dios (Zevs) at Dodona was closed down. This was the intolerance that was to come.

Centuries earlier, when the Dorian invaders overthrew the Mycenaean civilization of Greece a new representation of Dios (Zevs) came about; his symbol was the trident. Hesiod, in his Theogony, tells us that his power lay in the 3 manifestations of the storm: the lightning bolt, lightning flash, and the sound of thunder. This figure of the trident wielding god appeared from Greece through Anatolia and Syria [on the trident]. In addition, in antiquity divinity was represented by the wearing of the bull-horns: symbol of the crescent moon. It meant that the god was the master of the heavens. The Greek Dios (Zevs), as per Hesiod, was the god of Order, Righteousness and Reason, having created them from Chaos . The symbols of the bull-horned, trident-wielding, divine figure of God, was inverted by the Christians to became a monster, the symbol of the Devil, of unspeakable evil. In the Latin West the old Greek component of Roman civilization was obliterated, thanks largely to Augustine (considered by Catholics to be a "saint"). In the Greek east the Christian was merged with the Greek philosophical past in a syncretist reinterpretation of Christianity. (It was this Greek Byzantine version, via Greek philosophers from Mistra - like Gemistos Plethon, and John Argyropoulos - that the birth of the Renaissance in Florence was able to come about; before the Muslim Turks reduced Mistra, Greece's Florence, into an abandoned wilderness.)

From England, Boniface  travelled to Germany, to expunge the Germans of their syncretist version of Christianity. His most notable achievement was the tearing down of the Sacred Oak of Donnar (or Thonnar, who came to later be known as "Thor"). The most notable consequence was that Germany, via the efforts of Boniface, was introduced to absolute intolerance. The Oak of Donnar was destroyed (as had been the Greek oak at Dodona) because the Old Testament demands that the altars to other gods be demolished lest they become "a thorn in one's side". The Old Testament also forbade astrology, & "sorcery". In the New Testament, the Jews were deemed to have been responsible for the "murder" of the Christian's prophet. Germans went from destroying the pagan places of worship, to expunging heretics & "infidel", (those who denied Jesus, for example, Jews), and the "vols" who came to be defined as "witches" (hexen). Boniface's greatest achievement lies, then, in the eventual Holocaust undertaken by Hitler in the 20th Century AD. Boniface, an intolerant abomination, is remembered as the "patron apostle" of the Germans.

The title of this site celebrates the Δαίμονες Daimones (Demons) of my ancestors, and the spirit that entailed that rather than the daimonas of "truth" ("Truth" is a demon) being found in written religious dogma, that it instead could be arrived at by our capacity to reason. Once, different views, even ones that were logically mutually-exclusive were considered to be equally valid. In the past syncretism meant that there was no such thing as wrong beliefs. Rome's bequest to us is that state's adoption of a religion which offers no such liberties. The cause celebre of Christianity is its intolerance of other faiths. The Judaic/Christian legacy is refelcted in the meaning δαίμνονας has come to acquire even in contemporary Greek. The online Greek dictionary (Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής) defines δαίμονας as "the spirit of evil":
δαίμονας ο [δémonas] : I1. το πνεύμα του κακού" (screenshot below, link to the online Λεξικό).

However, Christian intolerance pales into insignificance when compared to the religion of Islam, a religion which maintains that the purpose of this life is to wage perpetual war against non-Islamic societies, and in which the only way to guarantee one's soul going to heaven is to die in the process of so killing those not of the Islamic faith (Koran 9.38-52). For the religion of Islam the intolerance of our capacity to apply reason and thus reject religion is absolute.

The right to the freedom to seek out ones own answers, and apply reason in so seeking those answers, accept or reject religion came to be seen as evil, the domain of those possessed by the demon. This is the demon's site.

The idea of the genuine Greek demon as a force of benevolence rather than as a manifestation of evil has managed to survive even within Christianity. Plato and then Plotinus wrote that each individual was protected and guided by a guardian demon (often the word demon is translated into English as spirit.) Though the idea of a "guardian angel" does not appear in either the Old or New Testaments, it came to be a central component in Christian belief. This idea though is none other than the guardian demon of Greek religion redefined as an "angel". Beginning (Αρχέ) and Strength (Δύναμις) are certainly never mentioned in any biblical context. However, these two demons were rehabilitated and became angels in the Byzantine tradition (see image below). Mosaic of "archangels", beginning (Arche) and strength (Dynamis) from the church of the Assumption at Nikea (Nicea), Anatolia. Possibly older than 850 AD. Illus. 63, Talbot Rice, Art of the Byzantine Era. The church and its decoration were destroyed by the Turks in 1922. Symbolically, this was the church in which Christianity came to be defined. According to Islam which dates to 622 AD, the Christian and Judaic faiths which precede it were a corrupt rendition of the word of god, hence Allah it is claimed sent the angel Gabriel to possess Mohammed and through him as his medium proclaim a correct scripture. What passes for Arab/Islamic history also contends that the adoption of Christianity by the Roman empire resulted in the corruption of the word of God. According to Ibn Kathir, who wrote hundreds of years after the event, the first Ecumenical Council at Nikea which was organised by Constantine (who ruled from 324-337 AD) was a "disdainful treason, for it was there that the religion of Christ was changed". So too, according to Arabs, the adoption of Chistianity by Constantine resulted in the  rejection of knowledge. The Arab 'Abd al-Jabbar for instance claimed that Constantine after examining the claims of philosophers, judged their ideas to be false and "burned their books, destroyed their temples, and killed them, leaving none alive in Athens, then known as the city of philosophers. The only survivors were peasants and tanners...all of the books of philosophy and medicine were burned." (both quoted from p.p 117-118, and p. 108, N. M. el Cheikh, Byzantium viewed by the Arabs, isbn 0932885306). Needless to say this never happened, with such claims serving only a purely propagandist intent. Two hundred years after Constantine's conversion the universities in Athens were still open. In 529 AD, however, Justinian forbade non-Christians to teach at Plato's Academy in Athens. This resulted in a number of philosophers traveling to Persia in protest, before the culture shock of Zoroastrian customs led them to return (This event is covered in The Histories of Agathias).