“Oh, Lord, Give This One a Daimon So That He May No Longer Sin”: The Holy Man and His Daimones in Hagiography

Abstract

Abstract This essay examines two hagiographical accounts, each features a Christian holy man performing an unusual, though not aberrant, ritual action: casting a daimon onto or into a person. I argue that the priest Innocent in Palladius’ Lausiac History and Abba Daniel in John Moschus’ Spirituale Pratum acted in accordance with their late antique role as ritual experts and “charismatic ombudsmen” and, thus, they could manipulate power relations between the daimon and human to cleanse, protect and/or punish a human, sinful body. To grasp fully the hagiographers’ explorations of a holy man’s charismata-his power over daimones and what kinds of bodies that creates, I situate these narratives within a particularized context of contemporary and earlier Greek demonologies (Plato, Plutarch and Greek Magical Papyri, especially katadesmoi or binding spells), which reveals variant daimon/human relations through time and the consequential material, moral, and intellectual transformations relevant in these hagiographies.