Ancient Attitudes toward Daimones
Interested in ancient demons and exorcisms? Would it surprise you to learn that not all demonic creatures in antiquity were considered ‘evil’? In fact, the modern word “demon” doesn’t even come close to accurately reflecting the conception of ancient creatures such as the Mesopotamian Pazuzu and Lamaštu, the Egyptian Ikenty and Sehaqeq, and the multitude of unnamed daimones in Greek and Roman curse tablets and other texts, such as accounts of exorcisms. This talk provides an overview of nearly a thousand years’ worth of so-called demons from the ancient Mediterranean and West Asia, focusing on various beliefs held by different cultures across the region.
Image: A bronze figurine of Pazuzu, the Assyrian/Babylonian demonic god. 1800-800 BCE. University of Tübingen, Germany. Creative Commons: Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
Speaker Bio:
Debbie Felton is Professor of Classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she teaches ancient Greek and Latin as well as various courses in translation, such as “Fairy Tales in the Ancient World,” “Magic in the Ancient Mediterranean,” and “Monsters of Classical Myths.” She specializes in folklore in classical literature and has published on various folklore-related topics including ghosts and witches. She is the author of Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity (1999) and Serial Killers in Classical Myth and History (2021). She has also edited several volumes, including The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth (2024). Her current project is a volume on revenants in the ancient world (with Reaktion Books).
Hosted By:
Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience
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