Zhongyongdaoist

Thanks for your continued interest Stigweard. I am afraid that if I go over to the Magic thread that I may really start frothing at the mouth. As it happens I opened a can of worms here and I intend to deal with every wiggly little one before I am done. Maybe later I will wonder over to Magic, but frankly I am more interested in other things, such as the Neiye and the other Xin Shu texts of the Guanzi and their possible relation to the material in Charles Luk's Taoist Yoga.

I have found my study of TCM very useful in my self-cultivation. Reading Giovanni Maciocia's Foundations of Chinese Medicine was a landmark in my understanding. It is particularly important to understand that the development of jing, qi and shen are an natural part of human physiology, then one can see that the results of qi gong or the promises of internal alchemy are extraordinary applications of our own natural endowments, which is a very important insight. I like this thread and consider this aspect of traditional thought very important. I will probably post more here in the future, but for right now my posts on Demons are consuming most of the time I can devote to this forum. Thank you exorcist_1699 for opening up this interesting and important topic!

It may come as a surprise to some readers that in my previous post I was referring to Plato at all. At this time Plato is one of the most misunderstood thinkers of all time, and a lot of people who might benefit from studying him don't because they think he is some sort of 4th century BC Immanuel Kant. Well, he's not. John Rist (Eros and Psyche, Toronto University Press 1962) says Plato believed, '(people)...have the potentiality of divinity." and that Plato believed that '(people) can raise themselves to the level of divinity, or rather can "know themselves" to be in a sense already divine" and finally that "Plato's notion of theology is not so much anthropomorhic as his notion of mankind is theomorphic" If you went to a platonic philosopher during the Hellenistic period, it was not to learn to prattle on about this that and the other thing, it was to achieve liberation from the delusion that you were a mere mortal, a humanoid animal and to realize that you were a real partaker in divine nature and in some powerful and profound sense a god. This is what constitutes self-knowledge in real Platonism and was the explicitly stated goal of Platonic study from the First Century BCE to the end of the Hellenistic age, around 500 AD. That said, let us return to the stated purpose of all this talk, the development of the concept of 'demon'. Having dealt with the Hellenic background earlier, and then taken a short digression into cross cultural comparison, I will now cover 'demon' as it develops in the Hellenistic period. As I mentioned previously the concept of 'daimon' as a mediator between divine being and humans in the world became split into good daimons called agathodaimons and bad ones called cacodaimons. Some of you who are familiar with Western Gnostic writings may even have run across references to the Agathdaimon in them. The term was certainly used in a variety of movements in the early Hellenistic period. As the concept developed a problem arose. If daimons could be good or bad, what did that say about their own ontological status? Were they too close to embodied human nature to be the real mediators between humans in the world and the Gods? Whatever the details by the time we reach Iamblichus (On the Mysteries)in the early Fourth Century AD, a new category had been introduced, Angels, and had even existed long enough to have been differentiated into two catgories, that of angels and archangels. The difference between either angelic class and daimons was that the angels, like the Gods, were wholly good. There could in this classification be no such thing as a 'fallen' angel, rather, the only thing that might 'fall' would be a daimon because of their more changeable nature. From this perspective the stories about fallen angels that arise in Jewish, early Christian and Gnostic literature would really be about daimons that 'fell' to earth, and a late Hellenistic commentator might critique them for being as misleading about 'angelical' nature as the older mythology was misleading about the Gods. Indeed since as the Hellenistic period developed daimons become almost solely associated with generation and becoming embodied, it would only be a daimon that could possibly fulfill the requirements of being attracted to women and descending to earth to mate with them, to create that race of giants, about which Genesis speaks. Now, these stories with their beginning in Genesis and their development in the apocrypha are an important part of the demonization of daimons, but they are not the whole of the story and it is not something that can be laid solely at the door of Christianity as it develops and most important we are not looking at the demonization of the Pagan Gods, even within Christianity, rather as I noted before the Gods have ontologically lower counterparts that follow in their train, roughly in the following order Gods, archangels, angels, daimons, humans. Iamblichus adds a couple other orders such as archons and heroes, but for the moment they are not part of our concern, in part because the do not survive past the Hellenistic age, but also because they are not directly relevant to our discussion of 'demons'. How Christianity was to affect all of this is an interesting story, and one some surprising twists. The simple fact is that Christianity, far from demonizing the pagan Gods, angelicized them and made them a part, if a somewhat controversial part, of the Roman Church's claim to be a Catholic (i.e. universal) Church. For the surprising continuation of this discussion, tune in next time. Bye for now.

I agree with Scotty. Most of communication is body language and voice, a small percentage, less than 10%, is actual words and their content. If you want to connect better with people do a search under The Magic of Rapport by Jerry Richardson. Apparently this is out of print, but Barnes and Noble has some online connections at good prices, you might also try addall.com. Get this book, seriously put it into practice and in a few weeks to a couple of months you will be thanking me. Really.

Dear Stigweard and Rain, thank you for your words of encouragement. Looking back on what I wrote previously, I think that there is actually a good opportunity to make a useful cross-cultural comparison before I continue into the Hellenistic period and bring this back to Chinese theory which is what most of the people here are concerned with. In Harold Roth's translation and commentary on the Nieye (Original Tao: Inward Training, Columbia University Press, 1999) he has a discussion of vocabulary that is very interesting. It starts on p. 41 in a subsection titled, aptly enough, 'Technical Terminology'. For our purposes his discussion of shen is most interesting. On p. 43 Roth says that the translation of shen '... as "numen/numinous" (noun/adjective) instead of "spirit/spiritual" has several advantages: 1. it retains the sense of an other power superceding the individual will that Graham's "daemonic" has, but none of the former term's malign connotation in common English usage...'. Roth then references Graham's Chuang Tzu: The Seven Inner Chapters, p. 35 n. 72, for Graham's reasoning in regard to translating shen as 'daemonic', 'daemon' being the Latin version of the Greek 'daimon'. If I recall correctly, Graham also uses daemonic in his Disputers of the Tao (a truly wonderful book, well worth the read). Now from the perspective of what I said in my previous post Graham is quite correct to use 'daemon', if he means it in its sense as Plato does, but most people are not going to judge it that way because of the connotative baggage that the word has, which Roth rightly points out. Using the terminology which I investigated previously, a good term for shen would be agathodaimon, but I am all with Roth in rendering it as numen/numinous for reason which I will develop in my next post. That of course leaves gui to be rendered by cacodaimon. Now remember what I said in my previous post, talk about good spirits and bad spirits arose because people wanted to explain why bad things happen to good people, and good things to bad. Whether one likes this explanation or not and wants to give another one is up to individual judgment, there are other explanations and we are investigating this one to see what it can tell us about the concept of 'demon', whether one chooses to believe in such beings or not, these ideas arise from people trying to make sense of their lives, and they arise in ancient China as well as in the West and for roughly the same reasons, though there are some cultural differences that also arise. So to summarize the historical and cross-cultural discussion so far, shen can be rendered as agathodaimon, people look to shen for inspiration, for accurate guidance and protection from life's downs such as accident and disease and the furtherance of life's ups such as health and prosperity, gui can be translated as cacodaimon and people expect disease, misfortune and generally speaking a bummer of a time from them. Gui might protect bad people and even help them achieve what are conventionally considered to be good ends and miscreants might even turn to gui for the furtherance of their own unworthy ends, something which could give us a working definition of what is usually called 'black magic'.

Stigweard we meet again! And you were kind enough to offer me a seat and some tea, I hope that you haven't changed your mind, but I guess that if you are willing to adopt a scholarly pose, if only to humor me, we are still on good terms if only for now. As for letting me in, the door guardian spirits were out fishing and and I just couldn't resist the temptation. No doubt some heterodox Maoshan Spirit put the whammy on them and I snuck by in the confusion. As for being a scholar, well, I just like to get to the bottom of things. First I want to clarify what I am suggesting. I want to examine the development of a concept, which may or may not describe a real thing, but a concept that arose because people were trying to explain why 'bad' things happen to 'good' people and its converse why 'good' things happen to 'bad'. I don't at this time want to get involved in long digressions about the existence of 'demons', or more onerous still, the nature of 'good' and 'evil'. For the moment I am satisfied with more or less conventional definitions, such as it is good to be healthy, wealthy and wise, and bad to be sick, poor and a fool. After I am finished I leave it to the people who have trudged through this to see if if clarifies what a 'demon' might be or not. So with that in mind we will start with Western Antiquity and follow the concept up to the Renaissance, though I may comment on how this ideas was adopted by the Neo-magicians of the Golden Dawn. Having done that I will turn some attention to the Chinese perspective. To follow the lead of Whitehead it is all a footnote to Plato. When Plato in book two of The Republic starts asking annoying questions about how the characters described in Homer can be considered Gods, when they incite bloodshed and send deceiving dreams to people and do other 'bad' things like that he set off a landslide that totally changed how people thought about causation. Previously the gods were the cause of everything and no one asked 'are they friendly gods' (perhaps because they were afraid of being struck by lightning), and simply accepted such accounts as came down to them as being correct. Again I'm not concerned with whether Plato was right to ask such annoying questions, culturally he is in a sense right up there with the kids who laughed when they say the emperor naked as a jaybird walking in all imaginable pomp and circumstance down the street of the capital city, but ask them he did and the result was what could be called critical theology, which within a generation or two was to lead to critical demonology. Which is part of the reason it is not correct to say that a demon is our 'higher self', it jumps from Plato's use of daimon in regard to Socrates 'inner voice' over some 2500 or so years. Plato's usage of 'daimon' is to fill a gap between the 'gods' and mortals, something of its nature can be seen in Socrates speech in The Symposium, basically daimones in Plato's sense exist as mediators and it would be possible to consider your personal daimon in just such a light (Which is just what Plotinus does some 600 years later, see for Ennead III.4, 'Our Tutelary Spirit'). So Plato defined the divine nature as wholly good and the author of only the good things in our existence, the Gods in this sense do not incite to bloodshed and they do not send deceiving dreams, so where do these things come from then? Enter Xenocrates, Plato's second successor to the headship of the Academy. He had an answer, there were good daimones and bad daimones. In Greek these were called an agathodaimon and a cacodaimon (now don't laugh at caco, you may have just learned where caca comes from, for a similar usage think of cacaphony) So what is the relationship between these daimones, good or evil and the Gods, conceived as wholly good? In Plato's Phaidrus Plato describes the Gods as being leaders of a great train of beings ranging down from them to human beings and perhaps lower. The daimones were seen as being follows in the chain of a particular God, just as people were. Philosophers were followers of Zeus, military men of Ares, etc., and so these daimones were also followers of the Gods and partook of their nature just as people did. Thus the ancient myths came to be seen largely as stories of the doings of the daimomes and their interactions with human beings, cacodaimones sending evil dreams and agagthodaimones being the sources of uplifting inspiration and saviors in cases distress. Thus the 'demonization' of the pagan gods begins several centuries before Christianity, with their diamon-monization. Remember, I am not here to say whether this was a divinely inspired insight or a question of demon inspired hairsplitting, or simply the deluded thinking of some crazy ancient Greeks, only to describe the historical development. So much for part one, what we might call the Hellenic background, next time I will deal with how this developed in the Hellenistic period. I warned you this wouldn't be easy, but for a nifty overview see Philip Merlan's discussion 'Theology and Demonology: Plato and Xenocrates' p.32-36, in The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy.

It is possible to examine the historical roots of the present usage for 'demon' without addressing the existence of such a creature. In this regard most of what I have seen on this thread is somewhat inaccurate and based on popular misconceptions not scholarship. I can trace that fairly accurately from Antiquity to the Renaissance if that is what you are interested in. Then there is the matter of cross cultural comparison. In Chinese traditions the closest thing to a demon would be a gui (鬼). While a fair definition of gui can be given especially when it is contrasted to shen (神), I can't be as complete in terms of conceptual history as I might be with the Western concept. If you want a historical answer I can give it, and such an answer may even give some insight into what a 'demon' might be, should such a thing exist. However the answer is going to be long and somewhat involved and I might have to break it up into several parts. So White Tiger what do you want? By the way I was born in the year of the Metal Tiger and I have always identified with the White Tiger of the West, so I am willing to go the distance for you. Donald

Yes another overly funny, strange person has registered with The Tao Bums. I am sure many of you will live to regret this day least of all me. I came across you bums doing a search on Thunder Magic. That in itself should tell you how odd I am. I have many years of study, practice, reflection, etc. on Daoism in its spiritual/philosophical/religious dimensions behind me. I combine it with a long term interest in the Western Esoteric traditions such as Magic, Qabalah, Platonism as it shades into Neo-Platonism, Astrology (Western and Chinese), Esoteric Mathematics, etc. Back in the Eighties I jokingly, but rather accurately, summarized my studies as Cornelius Agrippa meets the Golden Dawn in Medieval China. That said, how do you like me so far? Donald

Thank you Stigweard, I like it strong and black. I noticed that you have an interest in the Neiye. To my mind this is an important text, though not as obscure as some would make out. Waley mentions it in his introduction to his Daodejing translation The Way and it's Power. When I first read it I was strongly struck by its connections with the mystical aspects of the Mencian branch of Confucianism, which go way beyond what Roth mentions. I find that the text so interesting that I have created tables that compare the Roth and Rickett translations line by line as well as creating a table of the Chinese characters line by line. Being obsessive compulsive is not an easy job, but somebody has to do it. Donald