http://www.paghat.com/images/narcissus-and-echo.jpg
In Ancient Greece, ideas were believed to be given to us by a Daemon, or a guiding spirit. It is not always clear if the Daemon was making the decision for you, or if the Daemon just gave you an idea upon which you get to decide. Socrates claimed to have a daemon that much resembled what we would call the conscience: it told him to make the right choice, but was not always clear on what the right choice was.
Caravaggio’s “Sacrifice of Isaac”
Similar ideas are expressed in the Torah, where God’s Angels (“Messengers”) come down and tell people what to do: to kill your firstborn son, or to stop at the last second. This is contrasted (in English translations) with “God’s evil spirit,” or “the spirit of the Lord” which causes people to do wilder things: Saul goes mad, Samson starts slaughtering people.
Daemon’s are not seen as bad until sometime around Plato, when “bad daemons” are designated as causing bad behavior. Likewise, demonic possession does not appear until the New Testament. What’s particularly interesting about the New Testament (and to a lesser extent Plato) is that now Bad Daemons, Demons, are completely separate and capable of being moved about: exorcised.
Marx said that before we kill a man, we must first make him our enemy. I wonder how much of these superstitions were born over the idea of making an enemy. I wonder how much of western religion was born, not out of our misunderstanding of the weather or our fear of death, but out of our inability to understand our own abstract thought processes in the earliest times of our humanity, when abstract thought was new.
I wonder how little we understand our own abstract thought even now.
That’s it.