Plutarch on swimming with daimons

Plutarch (46-c.120 ce), biographer, Neoplatonist philosopher and priest of Apollo, wrote a great deal about daimons. [1] They can be slippery and ambiguous intermediary beings - thinlk of the "daemons" in A Discovery of Witches - so it is not surprising that his descriptions vary and sometimes seem contradictory. His daimons can be tutelary guides or evil influences, assistants to deities or gods awaiting promotion. There is the daimonion of Socrates, that inner voice you can trust, not to be confused with daimon tout court. The daimon may be an influx of sudden energy and courage, or an enforcer of personal fate. There are daimons in the astral realm of the Moon who mix up dreams for humans in a special bowl, watch over the celebration of the Mysteries, and may descend to intervene in human affairs – and can be demoted and thrown down if they fail to reach certain standards. [2]
     Plutarch seems happiest and most confident when he writes about daimons as spirits of the departed who have risen to higher understanding and can make humans their protégés. In a marvelous simile, he compares them to once-great athletes who gather to watch living swimmers in the sea, leaning in “with hand and voice” as those in the water approach the shore. We are given to understand that this is about more than the challenges of one lifetime. It is about the journey of the soul over multiple incarnations to reach a higher level of being. And in this role daimons are presented as operating under the supervision of the highest deity.
      The passage comes during a dialogue in De genio socratis in which a series of speakers discuss the nature of daimons and their role in human lives. Then we read this, from the mouth of a “stranger”:

 The gods order the life of few among men, such as they wish to make supremely blessed and in very truth divine; whereas souls delivered from birth and henceforth at rest from the body — set quite free, as it were, to range at will — are, as Hesiod​ says, daimons that watch over man. For as athletes who from old age have given up training do not entirely lose their ardor and their love of bodily prowess, but look on with pleasure as others train, and call out encouragement and run along beside them, so those who are done with the contests of life, and who, from prowess of soul, have become daimons, do not hold what is done and said and striven after in this world in utter contempt, but are propitious to contenders for the same goal, join in their ardor, and encourage and help them to the attainment of virtue than they see them keeping up the struggle and all but reaching their heart's desire.
     Daimons do not assist all indifferently. When men swim a sea, those standing on the shore merely view in silence the swimmers who are still far out distant from land. But they help with hand and voice those who come near, and running along and wading in beside them bring them safely in. This, my friends, is the way of daimons. If we are head over ears in the welter of worldly affairs and are changing body after body, like conveyances, they allow us to fight our way out and persevere unaided, as we endeavor by our own prowess to come through safe and reach a haven.
      But when in the course of countless births a soul has stoutly and resolutely sustained a long series of struggles, and as its cycle draws to a close, it approaches the upper world, bathed in sweat, in imminent peril and straining every nerve to reach the shore,​ God holds it no sin for its daimon to go to the rescue. One daimon is eager to deliver by his exhortations one soul, another another. Having drawn close, the soul can hear, and is saved. But if it pays no heed, it is forsaken by its daimon and does not come to a happy end. [3]

 

[1] For a careful discussion of Plutarch’s depiction of daimons, see Frederik E. Brenk “In the Light of the Moon: Demonology in the Early Imperial Period” in Wolfgang Haase (ed.), Philosophie, Wissenschaften, Technik (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1987) pp. 2117-2130
[2] See my article "Pluarch in the light of the Moon"
[3] Plutarch, De genio socratis, 593c-594a. trans. P.H. De Lacy and B. Einarson in Moralia vol 7 (London and Cambridge, Mass: Loeb Classical Library, 1957) pp. 481-3. I have made minor changes for clarity.

 

Image: Fresco from a tomb in Paestum (originally Poseidonia) in Magna Graecia (modern Campania, Italy), 5th century bce.