The ordinary man sees only what happens to him, unpredictable and not Ill 3.5 DAIMON 181 of his own enacting, and he calls the driving power daimon, something like fate, but without any person who plans and ordains being visible. One must be on good terms with it:"The daimon active about me I will always consciously put to rights with me by cultivating him according to my means.''' One exclaims, 'O daimon', but with no prayer. 'Many are the forms of the daimon-ly, many things unhoped-for the gods bring to pass,' is the stereotype conclusion to Euripidean tragedies: as soon as a subject of the action appears, it is gods. "The great mind of Zeus steers the daimon of the men whom he loves.' Whether he is happy or unhappy is not something which lies in man's control; the happy man is the one who has a good daimon, eudaimon, in contrast to the unhappy man, the kakodaimon, dysdaimon. That a special being watches over each individual, a daimon who has obtained the person at his birth by lot, is an idea which we find formulated in Plato,'* undoubtedly from earlier tradition. The famous, paradoxical saying of Heraclitus is already directed against such a view: 'character is for man his daimon.'' The average man sees reason enough to fear the daimon: the euphemistic talk about the 'other daimon'"® instead of the evil daimon indicates a deep unease in the face of an uncanny power. Tragedy has ample occasion for portraying the dreadful blows of fate which strike the individual, and here, in Aeschylus especially, the daimon becomes an independent, individual fiend that 'falls hard upon the house' and gorges itself on murder - though this, too, is 'wrought by the gods'.'? Uncanny powers of a similar kind are the Erinyes."® the embodied curse, and the Alastor,'? the personified power of vengeance for spilled blood: this indeed is a demonic world; but daimon is not a general term which covers all such powers, it is merely one among many, the power of fate as it were alongside the power of vengeance or the power of the curse. A general belief in spirits is not expressed by the term daimon until the fifth century when a doctor asserts that neurotic women and girls can be driven to suicide by imaginary apparitions, 'evil daimones'.*® How far this is an expression of widespread popular superstition is not easy to judge. On the basis of Hesiod's myth, however, what did gain currency was for great and powerful figures to be honoured after death as a daimon. Thus, in Aeschylus' Persians, the dead king Darius is conjured up as a daimon,"' and in Euripides, the chorus consoles Admetos over the death of Alcestis with the words, 'now she is a blessed daimon," while the murdered Rhesos is transformed into a prophesying man-daimon."* Plato contends that as a general policy all who die fighting for their country should be honoured as daimones. Later in Hellenistic grave inscriptions it became almost a matter of course to describe the dead person as a daimon."* When Socrates sought to find a word for that unique inner experience which would compel him in all kinds of situations to stop, say no, and turn about, rather than speak of something divine, he preferred to speak of something daimonly, the daimonion that encountered him." This was open to misinterpret-ation as dealings with spirits, as a secret cult. It cost Socrates his life.
— Walter Burkert
Burkert's survey makes visible something the word *eudaimon* carries even now in every use of "happiness": you are not happy, strictly speaking — you have a good daimon, and the daimon was assigned by lot. The locus of control sits entirely outside the self. What strikes hard about this is not the superstition but the grammar it encodes. The ordinary Greek did not say "I flourish" the way a modern therapeutic subject might say "I am thriving" or "I am doing the work." He said the daimon was with him, favorable, and that was all there was to say. The personal development apparatus — the whole expansive logic that says growth is a project you execute and wellbeing is a destination you reach — runs directly against this grammar. Heraclitus was already breaking it: *character is for man his daimon* is a first reach toward mastery, the soul arming itself against the uncanny by interiorizing it. You can read the entire history of Western psychology as the long elaboration of that Heraclitean move, the daimon tamed, made inward, made controllable.
Socrates is the hinge. His *daimonion* is not the old fate-power and not yet the modern interior; it is something genuinely in between — a compulsion to stop, not a push forward. It cost him his life because it was misread as a cult, a private divinity. That misreading never fully ended. We still tend to assimilate the stopping-force to pathology rather than attend to what it is stopping us from.
Walter Burkert·Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical·1977