The woman most closely tied to the daimonic in Greek philosophy is Diotima of Mantinea, the priestess whom Socrates, in Plato’s Symposium, calls his teacher in matters of love: she taught that Eros is a great daimon, a spirit between gods and humans, and that through the daimonic everything passes between the two. Whether she was a real woman or Plato’s invention is disputed. A Delphic priestess, Themistoclea, was said to have taught Pythagoras, and in late antiquity the women philosophers Sosipatra and Asclepigenia were known for visionary and ritual knowledge, whilst the best known of all, Hypatia, has no recorded teaching on the daimonic.
What is the daimonic? #
In Greek thought, the realm and the beings between gods and humans. A daimon could be a god acting in a person’s life, a guardian spirit, or one of a whole class of spirits who move between the divine and the human. The word later passed through Latin into English as ‘demon’, but for the Greeks a daimon was not evil. Socrates’ own daimonion, the divine sign that warned him, belongs here. See What did Socrates mean by his daimonion, and by intellectual midwifery?
What did Diotima teach? #
That love is a spirit, and a path. In the Symposium, a dinner-party conversation about love, every guest gives a speech in praise of Eros. When Socrates’ turn comes he hands the floor to a woman who is not there: Diotima of Mantinea, who was wise in love and in much else, and who, he says, once put off the plague at Athens for ten years by advising the city on its sacrifices.1
Diotima tells him that Eros is not a god, because a god lacks nothing, and love is the desire for the beauty and goodness it does not have. Nor is Eros mortal. He is a great daimon, and everything daimonic is between the divine and the mortal. The daimonic interprets and carries messages both ways, human prayers and sacrifices up to the gods, the gods’ commands and gifts down to humans, and so binds the whole together. Through it pass all prophecy, the priests’ arts of sacrifice and initiation, spells and divination, since the gods do not meet humans directly.2 Eros himself is the child of Resource and Poverty, never wholly rich or wholly lacking, and in that sense a lover of wisdom, a philosopher.3
From there she leads Socrates up what became known as the ladder of love: from loving one beautiful body to seeing beauty in all bodies, then in souls, in ways of living and laws, in knowledge, and at last in Beauty itself, unchanging and eternal.4 Love, she teaches, is not only desire but a longing to give birth, in body or in soul, to something beautiful.
Was Diotima a real person? #
Nobody knows, and people have argued both ways for five centuries. No surviving source independent of Plato’s dialogue mentions her. The Renaissance Platonist Marsilio Ficino was the first to suggest she was a fiction, and many modern scholars agree, among them the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who reads her name as part of Plato’s literary design. On the other side, the German classicists Walther Kranz and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff took her to be historical early in the twentieth century; the philosopher Mary Ellen Waithe thought she may well have been an independent historical thinker; and more recently Irina Deretić and Nicholas D. Smith have made the case for her historicity too. A third view, revived by the classicist Armand D’Angour, is that Plato modelled her on Aspasia, the learned partner of the Athenian statesman Pericles.5
Who else taught about the daimonic? #
A few women, with very different kinds of evidence behind them.
Themistoclea, a priestess at Delphi in the sixth century BCE, was said by Aristoxenus, a philosopher writing two centuries later and quoted by Diogenes Laertius, to have taught Pythagoras most of his ethical teaching; the later writer Porphyry calls her Aristoclea.6 What she taught is not recorded, but Delphi was the place where the god Apollo spoke through his priestess, the Pythia, and where, in Plato’s account, Socrates’ own life of questioning began, when the oracle declared that no one was wiser than he.7
The Pythagorean women, such as Theano and Myia, belonged to a movement that taught the soul’s rebirth and a cosmos ordered by number and harmony. The letters and short works that circulated under their names deal with running a household, raising children and living in harmony, and many were probably written centuries after them; none of what survives is about the daimonic.
Sosipatra, a Neoplatonist philosopher of Ephesus and Pergamon in the fourth century CE, is known almost entirely from the biographer Eunapius. He tells how, as a child, she was taught Chaldean wisdom by two mysterious men who came to work on her father’s estate, and how, whilst lecturing on what becomes of the soul after death, she saw a relative’s accident far away and sent help. She taught an inner circle of advanced students in Pergamon. Historians are divided on how far to trust the account: Edward Watts suggests Eunapius overstated her importance, Heidi Marx calls much of it fiction, and Maria Dzielska suggests her near absence from other records may be the result of deliberate erasure.8
Asclepigenia, in Athens in the fifth century CE, was the daughter of Plutarch of Athens, head of the Neoplatonist school there. According to Marinus, the biographer of the philosopher Proclus, she taught Proclus theurgy, the ritual practices by which Neoplatonists sought union with the gods through the divine and daimonic powers.9
Hypatia of Alexandria, killed in 415 CE, is the best known woman philosopher of the ancient world: a mathematician, astronomer and Neoplatonist teacher in the Greek-speaking city of Alexandria in Roman Egypt. No teaching of hers on the daimonic survives, and much that is popularly said of her, including sayings attributed to her, comes from later fiction.
How does Therapeutic Shamanism relate to Diotima’s daimonic? #
Through the in-between. Diotima’s daimonic is the go-between that carries messages between the human world and the world of the gods, and part of the shaman’s role, in Therapeutic Shamanism, is to be the champion and voice of the other Peoples, making sure that humans live in right relationship with them.10 The GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this, too, are real beings, wise and loving, met in the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer and the Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer and not inventions of the mind, although Therapeutic Shamanism keeps the word Guide only for those wise and loving beings, not for every spirit that offers help. See What are helping spirits? and What is the relationship between animism and shamanism?
Her ladder of love points one way, up, from bodies to an eternal Beauty beyond them. Therapeutic Shamanism values that ascent, and adds the way down, to the Lower-World and the Soul, which a culture trained to look upwards rarely recognises as spiritual at all.11 See What did Plato teach about the living cosmos, and why did he downgrade the material world?
And these women taught in a world that had largely shut women out of public learning. The subjugation of women, justified by the sky religionsSky-religion. The vertical, hierarchical reordering of the sacred that the Fall installed, governed by the spell ‘up is good, down is bad’: transcend the body, escape matter, purify upward. The conditioning Therapeutic Shamanism works to undo. More about this’ raising up of a male god and the masculine, is one of the marks of the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer.12 A priestess remembered as the teacher of Socrates, and another as the teacher of Pythagoras, are reminders of a spiritual authority held by women even in that world. See What are the Sacred Masculine and Sacred Feminine, Father Sky and Mother Earth?
