Asclepius on Dæmons

Around the sun are many troops of demons looking like battalions in changing array. They are not far from the immortals though they dwell <with mortals>. From on high, they have been assigned the territory of mankind, and they oversee human activity. What the gods enjoin them they effect through torrents, hurricanes, thunderstorms, fiery alterations and earthquakes; with famines and wars, moreover, they repay irreverence. Irreverence is mankind's greatest wrong against the gods: to do good is the gods' affair; to be reverent is mankind's; and the demons' is to assist. Whatever else humans dare to do—out of error or daring or compulsion (which they call fate) or ignorance—all these the gods hold guiltless. Irreverence alone is subject to judgment.

For every kind, the sun is preserver and provider. Just as the intellectual cosmos that encompasses the sensible cosmos fills it by making it solid with changing and omniform appearances, so also the sun that encompasses all things in the cosmos strengthens and makes solid all of them that are generated, as it takes in those that are spent and dwindling away. The sun sets in array the troop or, rather, troops of demons, which are many and changing, arrayed under the regiments of stars, an equal number of them for each star. Thus deployed, they follow the orders of a particular star, and they are good and evil according to their natures—their energies, that is. For energy is the essence of a demon. Some of them, however, are mixtures of good and evil.

They have all been granted authority over the things of the earth and over the troubles of the earth, and they produce change and tumult collectively for cities and nations, individually for each person. They reshape our souls to their own ends, and they rouse them, lying in ambush in our muscle and marrow, in veins and arteries, in the brain itself, reaching to the very guts.

The demons on duty at the exact moment of birth, arrayed under each of the stars, take possession of each of us as we come into being and receive a soul. From moment to moment they change places, not staying in position but moving by rotation. Those that enter through the body into the two parts of the soul twist the soul about, each toward its own energy. But the rational part of the soul stands unmastered by the demons, suitable as a receptacle for god.

Thus, if by way of the sun anyone has a ray shining upon him in his rational part (and the totality of those enlightened is a few), the demons' effect on him is nullified. For none—neither demons nor gods—can do anything against a single ray of god. All others the demons carry off as spoils, both souls and bodies, since they are fond of the demons' energies and acquiesce in them. {And it is this love that} misleads and is misled. So, with our bodies as their instruments, the demons govern this earthly government. Hermes has called this government "fate."

The intelligible cosmos, then, depends from god and the sensible cosmos from the intelligible, but the sun, through the intelligible cosmos and the sensible as well, is supplied by god with the influx of good, with his craftsmanship, in other words. Around the sun are the eight spheres that depend from it: the sphere of the fixed stars, the six of the planets, and the one that surrounds the earth. From these spheres depend the demons, and then, from the demons, humans. And thus all things and all persons are dependent from god.

Therefore, the father of all is god; their craftsman is the sun; and the cosmos is the instrument of craftsmanship. Intelligible essence governs heaven; heaven governs the gods; and demons posted by the gods govern humans. This is the army of gods and demons.

(Corpus Hermeticum XVI x ff., as translated by Brian P. Copenhaver)

["God," here, is the same as the Neoplatonic nous (e.g. the being that creates the intelligible world). "The sun" is not the Greco-Babylonian planet in the fourth heaven, but rather the solar logos, the center and fount of all material being. It is much more like the Platonic Demiurge or the Hesiodic Zeus.]

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It is noteworthy that the Hermetists, like Porphyry, take a much more negative view of dæmons than the earlier Greek philosophers; I consider this obsession with the nous against all else to be a hallmark of the Piscean era, and an argument for a relatively late dating of the Hermetica.