The Daimon

In Platonist thought the daimones are intermediary beings who fill the vast space between gods and mortals, carrying prayers and sacrifices upward and providence and inspiration downward, so that the divine and human worlds are bound together rather than left apart. Diotima in the Symposium calls Eros himself such a daimon, and Xenocrates and the Middle Platonists built elaborate hierarchies of them, some benign and some malign.

The sign of Socrates

The most famous daimon is the inner voice of Socrates — a divine sign that, he said, came to him from childhood and always turned him back from a wrong course of action but never urged him forward. Whether it was a personal guardian spirit or the voice of his own purified reason was debated throughout antiquity; Apuleius, Plutarch, and Maximus of Tyre each devoted a work or discourse to the question.

Its role in the system

The doctrine let the tradition populate the cosmos with mediating powers and helped explain how a transcendent, impassive divine could touch the human world at all. It fed naturally into theurgy, whose rites engage these intermediary beings, and into the later angelology of the monotheist religions.