A thunder sent to bring / black Ariel and Azrael and Ammon on the wing: demons (religion in fantasy, III)

Furthermore, there are certain divine powers situated in the middle, in the airy space between the height of ether and the depths of earth, through which our desires and our deserts travel to the gods. These the Greeks name daemones....

Apuleius, On the God of Socrates 6

1.

Gods are not the only superhuman beings who feature in real-world religions. A whole host of lesser beings crowd the space between humans and the heavens. The ancient Greeks called these beings daemones. From this our own word "demon" derives, yet, unlike the demons of the New Testament or the saints' lives, these spirits were not unambiguously maleficent.

Fickle as the air of which they were made, the daemones were sometimes good, sometimes evil. As Apuleius, the author of the most famous ancient fantasy-story, the Metamorphosis, tells us in his theological treatise On the God of Socrates, they served as the gods' intermediaries with mankind, transmitting prophetic dreams and inspiring seers. They could even direct the lives of individual persons: each man had his guardian daemon, and the philosopher Socrates himself felt (so Plato's Apology tells us) that he was directed through life by the inspiration of his daimonion, the titular "god" of Apuleius' treatise.

The gulf between gods and men was not impermeable, therefore, and not everything that received worship was a "god" in a strict sense, that is, a good and powerful being fully removed from the corruption of the world. The gods' underlings had their place, and deserved their due, just like the emperors' subordinates, or the patrons--the bosses, or perhaps the dons, as it were--to whom the average Roman looked for support in time of need.  

The Sign of the Sibyl on sale - around 85% off

I will be holding a sale for the Kindle e-book of The Sign of the Sibyl from September 21 through September 27, inclusive, on Amazon and Amazon UK (sadly, price promotions aren't available on other international Amazon affiliates--a choice of theirs, not mine, I can assure you!)

Here's how it will work:

At 12:00 am GMT, September 21, the price will drop to 0.99 GBP on Amazon.co.uk (about 83% off).

At 12:00 am Pacific Daylight Time, September 21, the price of the e-book will drop to 0.99 USD on Amazon.com (about 87% off).

At 12:00 am, September 28 (in the respective time-zone), the book will revert to the ordinary list price of 7.49 USD/5.75 GBP. Throughout, it will remain free for subscribers to the Kindle Unlimited program, as well as to those who borrow it from their friends via the Kindle Owners Lending Library.

Above the evening star: astrology, the gods, and powers in heaven (religion in fantasy, II)

For Manasseh built again the high places which Hezekiah his father had broken down, and he reared up altars for Baalim, and made groves, and worshipped all the host of heaven, and served them. Also he built altars in the house of the Lord, whereof the Lord had said, In Jerusalem shall my name be for ever. And he built altars for all the host of heaven in the two courts of the house of the Lord.

2 Chronicles 33

1.

Ancient people worshipped the stars as gods, and believed that they had control over their lives and destinies. This is something that modern people, at least in Western Europe and North America, have great difficulty understanding. They can hardly be blamed for it, of course. It is rarely easy to understand the people of a different time and place. Even when you feel a kinship of mind or feeling with an ancient person--and many who read their works do--you nevertheless stumble across things that are utterly foreign, that cut clean contrary to the ordinary intuitions of life, the common sense of your own age. The worship of the heavenly bodies is one of those things.

To the typical modern, raised (even if he never studied or understood it) on post-Classical physics and living in a city (as virtually everyone does now) where the night-time sky is almost invisible against the glare of man-made lamps, stars simply are balls of super-heated plasma and gas. The planets simply are giant rocks or balls of gas. Maybe, just maybe, they contain life, and writers and filmmakers imagine what might come to pass, if someday we did meet a person like us in mind and soul (whatever he or she or it looked like), but from outer space.

But neither stars nor planets are themselves alive. For the ancients, they were. Higher and brighter than the wet, dirty ball on which we ourselves dwell, the heavens were everlasting and unchanging, a perpetual order moving in perfect harmony with the providence that ruled the world. At once gods and the work of the supreme God, they regulated both heaven and earth, and bound man's life, character, and destiny to their dictates. To this, the science of astrology was dedicated.