Sed quædam simulacra * *”
Virgil called it imago “image” and in the Odyssey (I. XI) the author refers to it as the type, the model, and at the same time the copy of the body; since Telemachus will not recognize Ulyssus and seeks to drive him off by saying—“No thou are not my father; thou art a demon,—— trying to seduce me!” (Odys. I. XVI. v. 194.) “Latins do not lack significant proper names to designate the varieties of their demons; and thus they called them in turn, lares, lemures, geni and manes.” Cicero, in translating Plato’s Timaeus translates the word daimones by lares; and Festus the grammarian, explains that the inferior or lower gods were the souls of men, making a difference between the two as Homer did, and between anima bruta and anima divina (animal and divine souls). Plutarch (in proble. Rom.) makes the lares preside and inhabit the (haunted) houses, and calls them, cruel, exacting, inquisitive, etc., etc. Festus thinks that there are good and bad ones among the lares. For he calls them at one time præstites as they gave occasionally and watched over things carefully (direct apports,) and at another—hostileos.[142] “However it may be” says in his queer old French, Leloyer, “they are no better than our devils, who, if they do appear helping sometimes men, and presenting them with property, it is only to hurt them the better and the more later on. Lemures are also devils and larvæ for they appear at night in various human and animal forms, but still more frequently with features that THEY borrow from dead men.” (Livre des Spectres. V. IV p. 15 and 16).
After this little honour rendered to his Christian preconceptions, that see Satan everywhere, Leloyer speaks like an Occultist, and a very erudite one too.
“It is quite certain that the genii and none other had mission to watch over every newly born man, and that they were called genii, as says Censorius, because they had in their charge our race, and not only they presided over every mortal being but over whole generations and tribes, being the genii of the people.”
The idea of guardian angels of men, races, localities, cities, and nations, was taken by the Roman Catholics from the prechristian occultists and pagans. Symmachus (Epistol, I. X) writes: “As souls are given to those who are born, so genii are distributed to the nations. Every city had its protecting genius, to whom the people sacrificed.” There is more than one inscription found that reads: Genio civitates—“to the genius of the city.”
Only the ancient profane, never seemed sure any more than the modern whether an apparition was the eidolon of a relative or the genius of the locality. Enneus while celebrating the anniversary of the name of his father Anchises, seeing a serpent crawling on his tomb knew not whether that was the genius of his father or the genius of the place (Virgil). “The manes[143] were numbered and divided between good and bad; those that were sinister, and that Virgil calls numina larva, were appeased by sacrifices that they should commit no mischief, such as sending bad dreams to those who despised them, etc:”
Tibullus shows by his line:—
Ne tibi neglecti mittant insomnia manes. (Eleg., 1. II.)
“Pagans thought that the lower Souls were transformed after death into diabolical aerial spirits.” (Leloyer p. 22.)
The term Eteroprosopos when divided into its several compound words will yield a whole sentence, “an other than I under the features of my person.”