Proclus on the Athena of the Odyssey

[sdi]

(Paging boccaderlupo to the red courtesy phone, please...)

Lastly, after essential heroes, an order of souls follows, who proximately govern the affairs of men, and are daemoniacal according to habitude or alliance, but not essentially. These souls likewise are the perpetual attendants of the Gods, but they have not an essence wholly superior to man. Of this kind, as we are informed by Proclus in his MS. Scholia on the Cratylus, are the Nymphs that sympathize with waters, Pans with the feet of goats and the like. They also differ from those powers that are essentially of a daemoniacal characteristic in this, that they assume a variety of shapes (each of the others immutably preserving one form) are subject to various passions, and are the causes of every kind of deception to mankind. Proclus likewise observes, that the Minerva which so often appeared to Ulysses and Telemachus belonged to this order of souls. [Thomas Taylor, Theology of Plato VII xlv]

I have long assumed that the Athena of the Odyssey was simply a daemon. Proclus, in fact, considered Her to be a hero (e.g. the category of an ascended human—dæmon-like but not inherently dæmonic), evidently since She would often change form. I'm not sure I'd go so far—in my experience, dæmons, since they speak to the imagination and the imagination isn't fixed, shift form as regularly as doing so would perpetuate communication—but it's interesting to see how the tail end of the philosophical tradition considered it.

Comments

[causticus]

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.