demon

Before demons grew horns and acquired a permanent address in Hell, the Greek daímōn could be a helpful divine intermediary—something closer to a guardian spirit or an invisible dispenser of fate. Socrates even spoke of his daimonion, an inward supernatural warning system; by the late 14th century, English writers were calling this the “Demon of Socrates,” though Christian interpreters increasingly treated it as suspicious. The darker meaning gathered force when Jewish and Christian translators used the Greek term for pagan gods and unclean spirits, turning a neutral “spirit” into the villain we recognize today. In 1667, John Milton packed all the demons into Pandæmonium, the palace at the center of Hell in Paradise Lost; by 1779, the palace’s name had escaped into ordinary speech as a word for uproar and confusion. Fiend followed a completely different road—from a Germanic word meaning “enemy”—so demon and fiend are linguistic strangers who merely ended up wearing similar costumes. The old daímōn was a distributor of destiny; the modern demon is what happens when the distributor gets blamed for the delivery.