Talk:Daimon (ancient Greek mythology)

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Daemon and astrology

Would daemons from the ancient/Medieval Astrological beliefs also belong here? VenusFeuerFalle (talk) 23:56, 29 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Merge proposal

I propose merging Daimonic into Daimon. Agree/disagree? Biohistorian15 (talk) 11:39, 13 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

• Agree just the adjective.

AimanAbir18plus (talk) 04:01, 4 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Augustine, City of God VIII/IX

Just a little drive-by comment here: I'm surprised this article makes zero mention of Augustine's deeply influential discussion of this topic in City of God Books VIII and IX. I won't be adding this myself, I'm just making a friendly suggestion. Larry Sanger (talk) 16:23, 5 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Move from "Daimon" to "Daemon (classical Greek mythology)"

AimanAbir18plus recently moved this article from the title "Daimon" to "Daemon (classical Greek mythology)", pointing to these Ngrams as their reasoning. While these results do indicate that the word "Daemon" is found more commonly than "Daimon" in recent, published works, I'm not sure we can confidently infer that "Daemon" is the WP:COMMONNAME for the Greek mythological concept. There are quite a few other topics that go by the names "daemon" and "daimon", and looking at Google Books searches [1][2] it would appear that many (if not most) instances of these terms counted in the Ngrams aren't occurrences in a mythological context.

Checking ten fairly standard mythological encyclopedias and handbooks, I see that seven of these works use the spelling "daimon", two use the spelling "daemon", and the last simply opts for "demon". This would at least seem to suggest that "daimon" isn't too uncommon of a spelling, though this is of course a small sample size. It might also be worth noting the results of Google Scholar searches when the word "Greek" is included as a filter ("daimon", 24,100, to "daemon", 18,800).

I'm also somewhat puzzled by the chosen disambiguator, "classical Greek mythology". The phrase "classical mythology" is generally considered synonymous with "Graeco-Roman mythology", meaning that "classical Greek mythology" sounds a bit like "Graeco-Roman Greek mythology". It isn't a disambiguator that is used anywhere else on Wikipedia, [3] and I'm not sure it offers anything that "Greek mythology" doesn't already provide. – Michael Aurel (talk) 08:13, 5 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

In my experience, "daemon" is a common alternate for demon in fantasy spaces, so that Ngrams is highly suspect to me since it doesn't rule out that some of those hits on Google Books don't include the entirety of Warhammer tabletop game (which uses daemon in place of demon), or whatever other fantasy books feel the need to use a slightly less familiar term for their fiends. And I distinctly recall seeing daemon used in conjunction with some computer technobabble back in college. Happy editing, SilverTiger12 (talk) 21:22, 5 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

"a common alternate for demon in fantasy spaces" See for example the Marvel Comics character Lady Daemon, a Scottish occultist. Dimadick (talk) 12:34, 6 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The fact that the spike in "daemon" over "daimon" starts in the mid 1980s suggests to me that daemon (computing) may be a contributing factor. That "daimon" is increasing in popularity steadily throughout the period where "daemon" spikes in usage also seems to support the idea that the explanation is not that "daemon" is increasingly being preferred to "daimon", but that there are new uses where "daemon" is the only spelling. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 09:43, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

"daemon" is not PIE

the article states that "daemon" is a Proto-Indo-European word, as does the source it cites, but the wiktionary article states otherwise. obviously it is derived from PIE, as are most things in IE languages, but "daemon" itself is pretty obviously not PIE, at least not in any spelling system for the language that I've ever seen.

i'm not a PIE scholar, and I don't have an appropriate source to replace the current one with, but someone who knows better ought to change this. Hugo P. Behrmann (talk) 05:26, 11 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Hugo P. Behrmann: I've removed the citation to "etymonline.com" (which I don't think qualifies as a WP:RS), and sourced the sentence to Beekes, adjusting its contents accordingly. – Michael Aurel (talk) 16:24, 12 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

thanks :) Hugo P. Behrmann (talk) 20:21, 12 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Page inclusion on Category:Creatures in Greek Mythology

@AimanAbir18plus: I had removed this page from Category:Creatures in Greek mythology per WP:CATSPECIFIC as the parent Category:Daimons is already present in that category. Is there any issue with restoring that edit?

Requested move 27 October 2025

It has been proposed in this section that Daimon (ancient Greek mythology) be renamed and moved to DaimonDaimon. A bot will list this discussion on the requested moves current discussions subpage within an hour of this tag being placed. The discussion may be closed 7 days after being opened, if consensus has been reached (see the closing instructions). Please base arguments on article title policy, and keep discussion succinct and civil. Please use {{subst:requested move}}. Do not use {{requested move/dated}} directly. Links: current log • target log • direct move

Daimon (ancient Greek mythology) → DaimonDaimon – As noted above, this was moved from daimon without discussion by AimanAbir18plus on September 3rd. Since this is the primary topic for term "daimon", it should be moved back. (Daimon currently redirects here.) XabqEfdg (talk) 01:32, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Support Per nom. A move request should have been done in the case of the original move, it's hard to not call such a move controversial. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 02:25, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• Support per nom. Gets an order of magnitude more pageviews than every other article titled Daimon put together, and is clearly primary topic under both criteria. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 09:19, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Support, in light of the recent move, since evidently the article was already at that title. An alternative would be to make the disambiguator "Greek mythology" rather than "ancient Greek mythology", since there is no other Greek mythology that ancient Greek mythology needs to be distinguished from. P Aculeius (talk) 13:21, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]