Words

Demon

from Greek daimon, "a spirit"
An evil supernatural being. For most of the word's life, it meant nothing of the sort.
Documented

The moral execution of a word

Greek daimon was morally neutral: a spirit, a lesser divinity, a man's fortune. Socrates spoke of his daimonion as an inner voice. Plato's Cratylus even puns daimones with daemones, the knowing ones. Beekes traces the root to daiomai, to divide or distribute, the distributor of destinies. The flip happened in translation: Septuagint scholars around the 3rd century BCE used daimon for Hebrew shedim, foreign spirits, and the New Testament used daimonion only for evil ones. Augustine sealed it, mocking Apuleius for calling Socrates' spirit a god when by his own terms it should be a demon.

Assessment: Fully documented in the lexica and the primary texts. A rare case where the exact mechanism of a word's moral inversion can be watched happening, translation by translation.
Stories

The genius that became the devil

The story the old world told: every person had a daimon, a tutelary spirit born with them. Rome kept it as the genius, honored on birthdays with offerings. Your genius was you, slightly taller. When the word fell, the companion fell with it, and the whisperer on the shoulder was redescribed as a tempter.

Assessment: Documented as Roman and Greek religious practice. The continuity between tutelary spirit and tempting demon is the story of one institution renaming another's gods.
Interesting claims

Daimons were never spirits, they were operators

The ancient-astronaut and occult revival reading: daimones as intermediaries between realms sound less like metaphors and more like functionaries, agents of a governing intelligence, which is why the old texts describe them delivering knowledge on request. The demonologists did not invent the operators; they inherited them and changed their clearance.

Assessment: The functional reading has a genuine documentary basis: Greek and Roman daimones really did carry information between human and divine. Whether that describes a mechanism or a worldview is exactly the question the word's history cannot answer.
Sources and further reading
  1. Plato, Apology 27c-e, Socrates' daimonion
  2. Homer, Iliad 1.222, daimon usage
  3. Septuagint Deuteronomy 32:17, daimoniois for shedim
Worth asking

The word was executed by translation, not by theology. If one vocabulary choice can damn a concept for two thousand years, what else has language convicted without trial?

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GR8YFILES · competing origin stories, labeled by the strength of their evidence · readers 14+