Gabriel Orgrease has been reading footnotes again.

"Nilsson, Greek Piety, 60: "The application of the word daimon to the great
gods was restricted, and it was principally employed in reference to lesser
gods and indefinite supernatural powers. In the Attic orators we note a
manifest tendency to ascribe ill fortune to a daimon; they hesitated to make
the gods responsible for it. This is the beginning of the deterioration of
the word which finally led to its getting the meaning which `demon' has in
our language." See also A. H. Krappe, La Genese des mythes (Paris, 1952), 55:
"These `special divinities' (sondergotter) are all those divinities dedicated
to a special activity, a particular duty." An amusing instance would be the
petty divinities which Sir John Harington saw presiding over the
Elizabethans' privies, "for they [the ancients] that had gods and goddesses
for all the necessaries of our life, from our cradles to our graves; viz., 1.
for sucking, 2. for swathing, 3. for eating, 4. for drinking, 5. for sleeping
. . . etc., etc., I say, you must not think they would commit such an
oversight, to omit such a necessary, as in all languages hath the name of
necessity, or ease; wherefore they had both a god and a goddess, that had the
charge of the whole business: the god was called Stercutius . . . . But the
goddess was much more especially, and properly assigned to this business,
whose name was Dea Cloacina; her statue was erected by Titus Tatius, he that
reigned with Romulus, in a goodly large house of office (a fit shrine for
such a saint), which Lodovicus Vives cites the moral world of a tuned?up out
of Lactantius" (in The Metamorphosis of Ajax [reprinted at Chiswick, 1814]
28?29; new ed. by E. S. Donno (New York, r96z]). Cloacina is a patroness of
satire, where scatology is an extreme type of cursing and profanation."

Allegory, The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, Angus Fletcher