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Chronos
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Demogorgon is a demon in Greek mythology associated with the underworld and envisaged as a powerful primordial being, whose very name had been taboo.
Derivation and history
Demogorgon is first mentioned by a Christian scholiast of ca AD 350 - 400, who was writing glossary annotations into the margins of Statius's Thebaid. This unidentified scribbler is misidentified with various Christian authors by enthusiastic modern demonologists. Prior to this, there is no mention of the supposed "Demogorgon" anywhere by any writer, pagan or Christian.
By the late Middle Ages, nevertheless, the reality of a primordial "Demogorgon" was so well fixed in the European imagination that "Demogorgon's son Pan" became a bizarre variant reading for "Hermes' son Pan" in one manuscript tradition of Boccaccio's Genealogia Deorum gentilium ("Genealogies of the Gods":1.3-4 and 2.1), misreading a line in Ovid's Metamorphoses.
"Though a "primal" god mentioned in quite a few Renaissance texts, and impressively glossed "Demon-Gorgon," i.e., "Terror-Demon" or "God of the Earth," Demogorgon was quite possibly brought into existence by way of a garbled scholium on Statius' Thebais 4.516 (often linked to Lucan 6.744-49), where most scholars like Seznec, for instance, now spot an allusion to the Demiurge ("Craftsman" or "Maker") of Plato's Timaeus. For a remarkable early text actually identifying Ovid's Demiurge (1/1, here) as "sovereign Demogorgon," see the paraphrase of Metamorphoses I in Abraham France, The third part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Yuychurch (London, 1592), sig. A2v."
The origins of the name Demogorgon are uncertain. Various theories suggest that the name is derived from the Greek words daemon ('spirit' given the Christian connotations of 'demon' in the early Middle Ages)— or, less likely demos ('people')— and Gorgon or gorgos ('grim'). Another, less accepted theory claims that it is derived from a variation of 'demiurge.'
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