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Widespread assumptions about the material constitution of demons in Roman and later antiquity have much to teach us about conceptions of the cosmos and the human person. Focusing on spiritual, psychological, or even the social implications of demons, the sophisticated readings of recent scholarship have proved so fruitful that more fundamental ideas about matter, physics, and biology are easy to miss. Exploring the physical "science" of demons, however, need not preclude their psychological interpretation. On the contrary, simultaneous attention to matter and spirit suggests that demons and people had more in common than we might otherwise suspect.
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Primitive ideas die hard and after their apparent death they tend to survive in attenuated forms.
E. R. Dodds, Proclus: The Elements of Theology (Oxford, 1933)
Daemones sunt genere animalia, ingenio rationabilia, animo passiva, corpore aëria, tempore aeterna.
Apuleius, De deo Socratis 13 (148)
It is very hard, and very important, to remember that ancient demons had bodies. In theory specialists will know this already but for people living after Descartes it is one of those curiously counterintuitive facts that deserves repetition, reflection, and, as I hope to suggest by means of the present paper, renewed exploration from a range of perspectives. Demons have always been exceedingly subtle, after all. And few temptations have been as attractive (or productive) as the psychological interpretation of demons, especially Christian ones.1 It is an illustrious tradition, with sturdy ancient roots. John Cassian, who "subordinates the monk's conflict with demons to a persistent and divinely planned conflict within himself," transmitted his vision of Egyptian asceticism to the west with momentous results.2 By way of influential eastern example John Climacus comes readily to mind, himself dependent on a distinguished line of authors and teachers who found some of the most dangerous demons of all lurking in the human psyche.3 (Sensitive attention to the mind and the self seems so modern, or profound, that one hardly thinks to ask what it might mean or feel like to have a demon in your psyche at a time when neither "demon" nor "soul" was a figure of speech.)
The psychological or figurative interpretation of demons continues to illuminate, yielding at the hands of distinguished modern scholars insights about ancient...