Club Jaguar: Article

Faunus Appears in the Gardens
of the Villa Pastoralis - Tibur

Faunus is a key figure in both ‘The Story of Gracchus’, and ‘Club Jaguar’’

There is obviously a question that hovers in the air, quite naturally, as to 'who' and 'what' is Faunus.

To make matters more confusing and mysterious, Faunus is not always open or honest about his nature and purpose.

This is understandable, however, as he does not wish to overly alarm those with whom he has dealings.
Also he realizes that he is dealing with 'sentient beings' who have limited understanding of their perceptions of reality, and would probably not being able to comprehend Faunus' true nature or purpose.
(When Faunus has a further meeting with Adonios in Marcus' villa in Athens he carefully demonstrates this fact by allowing Adonios a brief, and 'filtered', glimpse of the true nature of reality.)

Faunus

Faunus' initial appearance, however, takes place in the expansive gardens of the 'Villa Pastoralis' at Tibur, in Italy - one of the many luxurious villas built and owned by Gnaeus Octavian Gracchus.

At that time Marcus, (the ‘Dominus of the House of Gracchus - later to become ‘Jim’ in 'Club Jaguar'), has decide to take a brief rest in the beautiful Tuscan countryside.

It is there that Josh (as he is later known), a slave belonging to Marcus, in response to a dream, and the promptings of an young owl, (later identified as 'Glaux'), meets a 'teenage boy' who announces that he is a 'faun', (saying that his name is ‘Faunus’).

The faun (Latin: faunus, Ancient Greek: φαῦνος) is a mythological creature, often depicted with goat's horns and pointed ears, appearing in Ancient Rome. Romans believed fauns inspired fear in people traveling in lonely, remote or wild places. They were also capable of guiding humans in need, as in the fable of The Satyr and the Traveller', in the title of which Latin authors substituted the word Faunus. Ancient Roman mythological belief also included a god named Faunus often associated with enchanted woods.

Faunus, however, is an incarnated ‘Daimon’, taking only the form of a being well known in Greek and Roman Mythology - a 'faun' - complete with neat little horns.

Unfortunately the word 'Daimon' has become associated with the word 'demon'. This was a purposeful ploy by the christians, who systematically destroyed the civilization and culture of the classical world, and replaced it with the so called 'religion' and 'slave morality' of the Semitic tribes of the Levant, (the Levant is an approximate historical geographical term referring to an area in the Eastern Mediterranean. In its narrowest sense, it is equivalent to the historical regions of Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria). Equally the ancient knowledge of the supernatural was described as 'mythology' by these same christians, in an attempt to undermine the essential truths of classical religion and philosophy.

The DAIMON

Among the ancient Greeks, the concept of the daimon led a dual existence as it progressed along two distinct but related strands. On the one hand, daimons were conceived in typically 'animistic' terms as spirits that inhabited or haunted certain places, affected the weather and other natural occurrences, and so on. Some were associated with the spirits of the dead. On the other hand, a spiritualized or psychological view placed the daimons in a position of deep involvement with human subjectivity. Essentially, the Greeks regarded daimons as objectively real presences that made themselves known through their influence upon and within the human psyche. The objective, animistic beliefs about them were thus matched and accompanied by a more subtle and psychologically oriented view that framed them as inner influences upon human thoughts and emotions, and even as the keepers and emblems of individual character and destiny. This second view gradually became dominant over time - although the earlier view always remained in the background.

Daimon is the Latin for the Ancient Greek δαίμων - "
'god', 'godlike', 'power', 'fate', which originally referred to a lesser deity or guiding spirit; the daimons of ancient Greek religion and tradition, and of later Hellenistic and Greco-Roman religion and philosophy.

The word is derived from Proto-Indo-European ‘daimon’ - 'provider', 'divider', (of fortunes or destinies)", from the root ‘da’- 'to divide'.

Daimons were possibly originally seen as the souls of men of the 'golden age' acting as tutelary deities.

Daimons are benevolent or benign nature spirits, beings of the same nature as both mortals and deities, similar to chthonic heroes, spirit guides, forces of nature, or the deities (gods) themselves (see Plato's Symposium).

Hesiod

According to stories recounted by Hesiod, "great and powerful figures were to be honored after death as a ‘daimon’…"

A ‘daimon’, therefore, is not so much a type of quasi-divine being, but rather a ‘particular mode’ of their activity.

In Hesiod's ‘Theogony,’ Phaëton - the boy who flew too near to the sun - on his demise, becomes an incorporeal ‘daimon’, or ‘divine spirit’, but, for example, the ills released by Pandora become deadly deities, ‘keres’, not ‘daimones’.

From Hesiod also, the people of the Golden Age were transformed into ‘daimones’ by the will of Zeus, to serve mortals benevolently as their 'guardian spirits'; ‘good beings who dispense riches….'

The ‘daimones’ of venerated heroes were localized by the construction of shrines, so as not to wander restlessly, and were believed to confer protection and good fortune on those offering their respects.

One tradition of Greek thought, which found agreement in the mind of Plato, was of a ‘daimon’ which existed in relation to a person from their birth.

MYTHOLOGY and PHILOSOPHY

Homer

Homer's use of the words ‘theoí’ (θεοί ‘gods’) and ‘daímones’ (‘δαίμονες’) suggests that, while distinct, they are similar in kind.

Later writers developed the distinction between the two.

Plato, in ‘Cratylus’, speculates that the word ‘daimōn’ (δαίμων ‘deity’) is synonymous to ‘daēmōn’ (δαήμων ‘knowing’ or ‘wise’), however, it is more probably ‘daiō’ (‘δαίω’ - "to divide, to distribute destinies, to allot").

SOCRATES

Socrates

In Plato's ‘Symposium’, the priestess Diotima teaches Socrates that love is not a deity, but rather a "great daimon".

She goes on to explain that "everything daemonic is between divine and mortal", and she describes ‘daimons’ as "interpreting and transporting human things to the gods and divine things to men; entreaties and sacrifices from below, and ordinances and requitals from above...".

In Plato's ‘Apology of Socrates’, Socrates claimed to have a ‘daimonion’ (literally, a ‘divine something’) that frequently warned him - in the form of a ‘voice’ - against mistakes, but never told him what to do.

The Platonic Socrates, however, never refers to the ‘daimonion’ as a ‘daimōn’; it was always referred to as an impersonal "something" or "sign".

By this term Plato seems to indicate the true nature of the human soul, - man’s new found self-consciousness.

The daimonion, therefore, is not an inspiration but "a kind of spiritual tact checking Socrates from any act opposed to his true moral and intellectual interests."

Regarding the charge brought against Socrates in 399, Plato surmised "Socrates does wrong because he does not believe in the gods in whom the city believes, but introduces other 'daemonic' beings…" and so a special being watches over some individuals, a ‘daimon’ - an idea which we find in Plato, undoubtedly from earlier tradition.

The famous, paradoxical saying of Heraclitus is relates to such a view: “character is for man his daimon".

PLATO and PROCLUS

Plato

In the ancient Greek religion, ‘daimon’ designates not a specific class of divine beings, but a peculiar mode of activity: it is an occult (hidden) power that drives humans forward or acts against them.

Since ‘daimon’ is the veiled countenance of divine activity, every deity (Aeon) can act as a ‘daimon’.

A special knowledge of daimones is claimed by Pythagoreans, whereas for Plato, a ‘daimon’ is a spiritual being who watches over an individual, and is possibly tantamount to a ‘higher self’

While Plato is called ‘divine’ by Neoplatonists, Aristotle is regarded as ‘daimonios’, meaning ‘an intermediary to deities' (the gods or Aeons).
For Proclus, 'daimones' are the intermediary beings located between the celestial objects and the terrestrial inhabitants.

Proclus Lycaeus

Plotinus

Proclus Lycaeus (412 – 485 AD), called the Successor (Greek Πρόκλος ὁ Διάδοχος, Próklos ho Diádokhos), was a Greek 'Neoplatonist' philosopher, and one of the last major classical philosophers . He set forth one of the most elaborate and fully developed systems of 'Neoplatonism'. Neoplatonism is a term used to designate a strand of Platonic philosophy that emerged in the third century AD against the background of Hellenistic philosophy and the 'Mystery Religions'. Even though Neoplatonism primarily circumscribes the thinkers who are now labeled Neoplatonists and not their ideas, there are some ideas that are common to all Neoplatonic systems, for example, the monistic idea that all of reality can be derived from a single principle, the 'ONE', (Plotinis) and the the concept of the descent of the Æons and archons.

DAIMONIC CATEGORIES

The Hellenistic Greeks divided ‘daimons’ into good and evil categories: ‘agathodaímōn’ (ἀγαθοδαίμων - ‘noble spirit’), from ‘agathós’ (ἀγαθός - ‘good, brave, noble, moral, lucky, useful'), and ‘kakodaímōn’ (‘κακοδαίμων’ - ‘malevolent spirit’), from ‘kakós’ (‘κακός’ - ‘bad, evil’).

They resemble the ‘jinn’ of Arab folklore, and in their humble efforts to help mediate the good and ill fortunes of human life, they resemble the christian ‘guardian angel’ and ‘adversarial demon’, respectively.

‘Eudaimonia’ (εὐδαιμονία), the state of having a ‘eudaemon’, subsequently came to mean ‘well-being’ or ‘happiness’.

Significantly, the comparable Roman concept is the ‘genius’, who accompanies and protects a person or presides over a place (‘genius loci’).

Homer

A distorted view of Homer's ‘daimon’ results from an anachronistic reading in light of later characterizations by Plato, and Xenocrates, Plato’s successor as head of the Academy, of the ‘daimon’ as a potentially dangerous lesser spirit (like an elemental), and it has been suggested that, in the ‘Symposium’, Plato has laid the foundation that would make it all but impossible to imagine the ‘daimon’ in any other way, with ‘Eros’, who is neither god nor mortal, but a mediator in between, and his metaphysical doctrine of an pure actuality, ‘energeia’ ... identical to its performance: ‘thinking of thinking’, ‘noesis noeseos’ is the most blessed existence, the highest origin of everything.

‘This is the god - and on such a principle heaven depends, and the cosmos.’

The highest, the best is ONE; but for the movement of the planets a plurality of unmoved movers must further be assumed.

In the ‘monotheism of the mind’, philosophical speculation has reached an end-point.

In Plato there is an incipient tendency toward the apotheosis of ‘nous’. ... He needs a closeness and availability of the divine that is offered neither by the stars nor by metaphysical principles.

Here a name emerged to fill the gap, a name which had always designated the incomprehensible yet present activity of a higher power, - ‘daimon’.

THE DAIMON IN ART

Daimons scarcely figure in Greek mythology or Greek art: they are felt, but their unseen presence can only be presumed, with the exception of the agathodaimon, honored first with a libation in ceremonial wine-drinking, especially at the sanctuary of Dionysus, and represented in iconography by the chthonic serpent.

Xenocrates

For Plato, theology rests on two 'Forms': the ‘Good’ and the ‘Simple’; which Xenocrates unequivocally called the 'unity of god’, in sharp contrast to the poet's gods of epic and tragedy.

LATER DEVELOPMEMTS

Although much like the deities, these figures were not always depicted without considerable moral ambiguity, and Xenocrates ... explicitly understood ‘daimones’ as ranged along a scale from good to bad.

Xenocrates suggests that ‘It is towards these daemones that we direct purifications and apotropaic rites, all kinds of divination, the art of reading chance utterances, and so on.’ …

This account differs from that of the early Academy in reaching back to the other, Archaic, view of daimones as ‘souls’, and thus anticipates the views of Plutarch and the poet Apuleius during the Roman ‘Principate’ (the period beginning with Augustus).

In the Hellenistic ‘ruler cults’, that began with Alexander the Great, it was not the ruler, but his ‘guiding daimon’ that was venerated.

Similarly, the first-century Roman imperial cult began by venerating the ‘genius’, ‘numen’ or ‘daimon’ of Augustus, a distinction that blurred in time.

CONCLUSION

And so, in ‘The Story of Gracchus’ - which precedes ‘Club Jaguar’, when Gnæus Octavian Gracchus holds a ‘munera’ for the ‘divine Augustus’, it is to the ‘daimon’ of Octavian Augustus that the young gladiators are sacrificed, in accordance with Etruscan custom.

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