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The Places of Good Daimon and Fortune in Astrology

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CHAPTER 2 Keeping in Good Spirits: The Places of Good Daimon and Fortune in Astrology The departure of the good Daemon What can I do in Poetry, Now the good Spirit’s gone from me? Why, nothing now but lonely sit And over-read what I have writ. Robert Herrick1 Tyche and Daimon are commonly paired in the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman eras. Astrology follows this propensity, literally connecting fortune and dai- mon in its mechanics, and often in its practices, as we saw in the Introduction. Chapter One initiated the discussion of how astrology connects fortune to daimon in the use of lots, and implicated daimon and fortune (as chance) in the workings of Greek fate. This chapter introduces essential cultural links and significations between Good Fortune (Agathe Tyche) and Good Daimon (Agathos Daimon). It will then examine the use of good fortune and daimon in the astrological places. We begin with a short introduction to the importance of Tyche and Daimon in Hellenistic Egyptian and Greco-Roman cultures. This précis will serve to establish the significance and relationship of these two concepts both religiously and philosophically. They will then be explored, primarily in an astrological context, through the rest of the chapter, and in greater detail in Chapter Three. Ultimately, this chapter has two purposes in examining Daimon and Tyche as a pair. The first is to establish the parameters and signification of the link between Daimon and Fortune. The second is to explore the uses of the Agathos Daimōn and Agathē Tuchē in the astrological places. Both the eleventh place (called Good Daimon) and the fifth (Good Fortune), which are connected in many respects, will be considered. In addition, by exploring the cultural Agathos Daimon in a (mostly) Greek milieu, we set the stage for its transfer into Egypt after Alexander, and the crucial connections between the Greek and Egyptian guises of the Agathos Daimon. Throughout the chapter, the enduring 1 In R. Herrick, The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004306��9_004 Keeping in Good Spirits 47 and inextricable link between the Agathos Daimon and Agathe Tyche under- scores its significance in both the theory and the practice of Hellenistic astrology. 1 Why Tyche and Daimon? Some Cultural and Historical Background One of the answers to this question lies in the culture of Alexandria, where the cults of Fortune and Daimon were well developed by the second century CE. There were not only cults to the general deities Agathe Tyche and Agathos Daimon, but the concept of one’s personal tuchē and daimōn also had some currency.2 In the Hellenistic period in Alexandria, the Agathos Daimon and Agathe Tyche become linked to Sarapis and Isis, as well as to the strictly Egyptian deities Shai (god of ‘fate’) and Renenet (goddess of nourishment). However, other cultural roots for the Agathos Daimon and Agathe Tyche lie in Greece.3 In books like Plutarch’s Parallel Lives the underlying theme shows the good or bad fortune given to each of the biographical subjects, as well as the con- nection with either a good or bad, a strong or weak, daimon.4 There is evi- dence of a personal Agathos Daimon for ‘ordinary’ people beginning around the fourth or third century BCE. For example, one Posidonius of Halicarnassus, who consulted an oracle of Apollo at Telmessus, was told that he should pay homage to ‘the Agathos Daimon of Posidonius and Gorgis’ (his own and his wife’s daimon).5 Both Fortune (Tyche) and Daimon are, from the Hellenistic period into Late Antiquity, given great power in the determination of human fate. Cults of Agathe Tyche and Agathos Daimon arose to propitiate these deities as early as the fourth century BCE, and they were still flourishing when the Hellenistic form of astrology came to prominence. (In Roman Egypt, children were even 2 See P. M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), here I, 241–43. 3 For an account of the Agathos Daimon in Greece and Alexandria, see D. Ogden, Drakōn: Dragon Myth and Serpent Cult in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 271–309. This resource is helpful for all things god, snake and serpent related in the ancient Mediterranean world. 4 For discussion of daimōn and tuchē in the Lives, see Brenk, In Mist Apparelled, 148–54, 159–83. 5 G. Sfameni Gasparro, ‘Daimôn and Tuchê in the Hellenistic Religious Experience’, in Conventional Values of the Hellenistic Greeks, ed. Per Bilde, et al. (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1997), 89 and nn. 172–173..
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