I would have to agree with your assumption that we're dealing with various classes of Spirits/Daimones in these stories. Plenty of others examples of this in Greek poetry and myth. I think the class of beings Proclus is referring to in the snippet above is what modern occultists call Nature Spirits. They are only superior to men in the sense they don't have dense physical bodies to deal with. Otherwise, they are subject to passions, emotions, limited knowledge, an imperfect moral nature, ect. Athena of the Odyssey seems like some sort of guardian spirit or perhaps a powerful family egregore which is animated by a guardian spirit; something more powerful and noble than a nature spirit, IMHO. Of course, the way She's depicted in the epic is that of a rather fictionalized and dramatized version of a personal or family guardian. Long and short, (and as we've discussed several times already) the ever-vague term Theoi includes a whole host of different types of beings; some rather close to the human level of existence, some very distant, and some in-between.
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Date: 2024-05-28 02:11 pm (UTC)