Equally, if not more significant, as a source of daimon theory is Plato's Laws. The Athenian Stranger's political application of the daimon myth has the same goals as the Faerie Queene, and in its own historical moment Plato/Socrates is also attempting to refashion and employ the ordering force of dying religious-mythical symbols from an earlier age. I wouldn't be surprised if Spenser took "daimon theory" seriously as a pagan symbolization of an experience emphasized in protestantism--the guiding pull of the divine. Milton seems to have appropriated the theory and its terminology, as he refers to his own genius/daimon in this sense and makes Lycidas return to earth from heaven as a genius. Perhaps daimones/genii were an acceptable replacement for the saints, the dead, purgatory, etc. and a means for Spenser and Milton to insert/assert divine agency in human political affairs when Protestantism had made that more difficult to do. When Milton calls Cromwell "the tutelary genius of liberty," it strikes me as being more than a metaphoric ornament, but in context it seems full of doubt and a too-conscious desire to believe. The Athenian Stranger is clear that if daimones don't rule the people, or if society is not ordered by laws informed by the immortal, daimonic element within us, then you get tyranny and Ano means of salvation@ for the people. -Dan Knauss

 

On Wed, 19 Nov 2003 00:01:49 +0000 [log in to unmask] writes:
> All ---
>
> Many posts of interest, lately, on the good old subject of faeries. 
> Anne is right as rain (yes it's
> raining now all around Seattle) with her comment on the 'utter
> absence from Spenser of ... fairy
> theory.'  Yes, but one can infer, between the lines as it were, a
> good deal of demon theory, and I
> think it provides a basis for thinking about faeries.  (I like
> Gordon Teskey's observation that FQ
> is most of all 'about thinking.')  Back when I wrote about Platonism
> for the Spenser
> Encyclopedia, I opined at the end that Spenser was especially
> interested in the order of reality
> that Plato had termed 'daimonic,' and I still believe that many
> figures in FQ are, very much like
> Eros according to Socrates and Diotima, daimonic, mediatory between
> humanity and the divine.
> I've elaborated on this theme at several points in 'Spenser's
> Supreme Fiction,' and would be
> interested to know if readers find my references to the Symposium
> and the tradition of
> commentary on that text either a) helpful in this connection or b)
> all too confusing.
>
> I don't think I'd go so far as to say that the fays as a race,
> according to Spenser, are good
> demons, as their kind was understood by Plato's interpreters, but
> it's possible.  Louis Le Roy's
> commentary, accompanying his translation, 'Le Sympose de Platon,'
> traces daimones back to
> Hesiod, according to whom there are four kinds of ensouled
> creatures: gods, daemons, heroes,
> and men.  This understanding of Hesiod probably comes from Plato's
> 'Cratylus,' 398B-C, where
> good men who become daemons after death are termed 'chryso genous,'
> of golden race, and
> 'hero' is derived from 'eros.'  Maybe Spenser read the Cratylus in
> Plato's 'Opera' entire, either
> Ficino's or Serranus' version, but maybe he just took Le Roy's
> 'Sympose' to bed with him: Le
> Roy was the F. M. Cornford of his day.
>
> Jon Quitslund (emeritus, Geo. Washington U.)
>
>