/ˈdiːmən/
[noun] An evil spirit or devil, often believed to cause harm, suffering, or temptation. In older or broader use, it can also refer to a powerful inner force or to a spirit that guides a person.
Before Christianity made it evil, a 'demon' was simply a divine spirit that could be good, bad, or neutral.
The word 'demon' travels a long and dramatic road from ancient Greece, and what it meant at the start is almost the opposite of what most people picture today. The ancient Greeks had a word, 'daimōn' (δαίμων), which referred to a spirit or divine power that existed somewhere between the gods and ordinary humans. It was not necessarily evil — it was a guiding force, a kind of personal spirit that watched over a person and shaped their destiny. The philosopher Socrates famously spoke of his own 'daimōnion,' a small inner voice he believed warned him away from wrong choices. For the Greeks, this was a sign of wisdom, not wickedness.
The word 'daimōn' itself is believed to come from an earlier Greek root, 'daiomai,' meaning 'to divide' or 'to distribute.' The idea was that these spirits were the distributors of fate — the invisible forces that divided up fortune and misfortune among human beings. Some scholars connect this to 'daiō,' meaning 'to burn' or 'to shine,' linking the spirit to a kind of inner fire. Either way, the original meaning carried a sense of power and mystery, but not of pure evil.
The shift began with the translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek, a version known as the Septuagint, produced around the 3rd century BCE. The translators used 'daimōn' and its related form 'daimonion' to refer to the foreign gods and spirits that the Hebrew Bible warned people against worshipping. Because these were rival spirits — false gods, in the Jewish and later Christian view — the word began to collect a shadow of wrongness around it. Greek 'daimōn' → Latin 'daemon' → early Christian texts, where 'daemon' became firmly associated with evil spirits that opposed God.
By the time Christian writers in Latin were spreading their texts across Europe, 'daemon' had become a clear label for a servant of the Devil. Latin 'daemon' passed into Old French as 'demon,' and from there into Middle English, where it appears in texts from the 13th and 14th centuries referring to wicked spirits, tempters, and agents of hell. The original sense of a neutral or even helpful guiding spirit had been almost completely lost, buried under centuries of theological reinterpretation.
In modern English, 'demon' carries its dark Christian meaning in everyday speech — we talk of demons as terrifying supernatural enemies, or use the word as a metaphor for struggles and addictions, as in 'fighting your demons.' And yet, one narrow academic and literary tradition kept the older Greek sense alive. When writers or scholars use the spelling 'daemon' rather than 'demon,' they are often consciously reaching back to that pre-Christian idea of a guiding spirit — a practice made famous by the author Philip Pullman, who used 'dæmon' in his 'His Dark Materials' trilogy to describe each person's soul in animal form. The two spellings — demon and daemon — now quietly carry two thousand years of argument about whether spirits are something to fear or something to follow.