| In the story of The Bacchae, by Euripides (484 BC), Dionysus is the son of Zeus, born by Semele and “delivered by a lightning-blast.” He praises Kadmos, Semele’s father, who has made the tomb of his mother sacred and to which he has covered with the cluster bearing grapevine. He discusses leaving the “rich lands of the Lydians and Phrygians,” where he arrived at Thebes and established the “khoroi and mysteries,” so that he may be a “daimōn manifest among mortals.” In the following verse from The Bacchae, one can see that daimons were associated with good, too: “Blessed is he who keeps his life pure, with a good daimōn and knowing the rites of the gods, and who has his psūkhē (Spirit) initiated into the Bacchic revelry, dancing in inspired frenzy over the mountains with holy purifications, and who, revering the mysteries of great mother Kybele, brandishing the thyrsos, garlanded with ivy, serves as attendant [therapōn] to Dionysus. Go, Bacchae, go, Bacchae, bringing home the god Bromios, himself child of a god.” (225) Later in the story, Pentheus is complaining to Kadmos about the women who are “honoring with khoroi this new daimōn Dionysus.” Daimones were regarded as neither good or bad, in the general sense, they were considered as invisible spirits of supernatural powers, but did not carry any moral connotation. (226) Kronos had created a “golden race of men” who were mortal but lived like the gods. When each of these heroes would die, he would become a daemon forever flying about inhabiting the ethers around the earth. Kronos appointed them to rule over human civilization who was susceptible to corruption. When Zeus seized control from his father, Kronos, a new group of daemons of the “silver” kind were less ingrained with goodness and would turn those who are unjust over to god for punishment. These “silver daemons” were then divided into two classes, good and bad, represented by positive agathodaimons and the malevolent kakodaimons. The latter group would punish us for no reason and tell us lies to confound us. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle all had their own ideas of what daemons were and how they applied to the workings of man and how they affected his personal success or failure. It is not the scope of this book to get too deep into any of this, but it’s fair to say that when philosophers start to argue about the nature of things, the original meaning has either been long lost, or is in that moment, being invented. From the Webster dictionary, surprisingly, we get a definition of the word Demon, which includes “genius.” This is odd, to say the least but it’s related to the Genie and the Jinn at the same time, so there you have it. Genies or Jinn were not always considered “evil” but grew into this role over time through usage by the church. According to Jane Harrison in her book, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, the daimones of disease or keres were associated with the Telchines: “To the primitive mind, all diseases are caused by, or rather are, bad spirits. It was commonly said that diseases were ‘personified’ by the Greeks. This is to invert the real order of primitive thought. It is not that a disease is realized as a power and then turned into a person, it is that primitive man seems unable to conceive of any force except as resulting from some person, or being a sprite, something a little like himself.” |
According to the Greeks, diseases were personified. And according to Harrison, the ancient people imagined diseases as being caused by something akin to themselves. I would maintain here that all of this relates to entheogens because the ancient people believed the plants had different spirits attached to them, and some would harm and some would heal. The Telchines themselves to me, appear to be plant teachers, or fungal kingdom teachers. Continuing the quote from Harrison: “Instructive too is the statement of Stesichorus, who, according to tradition ‘called the Keres by the name Techines.’ Eustathius in quoting the statement of Stesichorus adds an explanatory of keres is late and probably a gloss, it means darkening, killing, eclipse physical and spiritual. Leaving the gloss aside, the association of Keres with Telchines is of capital interest and takes us straight back into the world of ancient magic. The Telchines were the typical magicians of antiquity, and Strabo tells us that one of their magic arts was to ‘bespirinkle the animals and plants with the water of Styx and Sulphur mixed with it with a view to destroy them’. “Eustathius in the passage where he quotes Stesichorus allows us to see how this [transfer from ancient myth to magician] happened. He is commenting on the ancient tribe of the Kouretes: these Kouretes, he says, were Cretan and also called Thelgines, and they were sorcerors and magicians. ‘Of these there were two sorts: one sort craftsman and skilled in handiwork, the other sort pernicious to all good things; these last were of fierce nature and were fabled to be the origins of squalls of wind, and they had a cup in which they were said to brew magic potions from roots. They (i.e. the former sort) invented statuary and discovered metals, and they were amphibious and of strange varieties of shape, some were like demons, some like men, some like fishes, some like serpents; and the story went that some had no hands, some no feet, and some had webs between their fingers like geese. And they say that they were blue-eyed and black-tailed.’ Finally comes the significant statement that they perished struck down by the thunder of Zeus or by the arrows of Apollo.” (227) (225) Bacchae 74-75 (226) Healing Gods, p. 212-213 (227) Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion – Jane Harrison, Cambridge University, 2nd Ed. 1908, Page 165-172 |