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Thank you to Achilleas Vortselas for doing most of the work. The proximate source is possibly the album of Rotting Christ, as he explains.

But as the Wikipedia page about the album, Κατά τον δαίμονα εαυτού, says, the phrase occurs on Jim Morrison’s tombstone: Jim Morrison . (The OP knew this too, if I can judge from the topics included in the question.)

So while Rotting Christ might have been thinking of Thelema, the first appearance of the phrase likely doesn’t—and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone did think of Jimbo’s “inner d(a)emons” when using it for him.

But it’s always safe to check the ancients for any Ancient Greek that turns up in modern times; and I see that something quite close to the phrase occurs in Dio Chrysostom , Orations 23.7: ΛακουσΚούρτιος • Δίων Χρυσόστομος / LacusCurtius • Dio Chrysostom . Close enough in fact, that this has to be the source.

Οὐκοῦν καὶ δαίμονα, εἴπερ τινὰ ἀγαθὸν ἡγῇ, δῆλον ὡς δίκαιον ἡγῇ καὶ χρήσιμον καὶ φρόνιμον; — Πῶς γὰρ οὔ; —Δ. Ἦ γὰρ ὃν κακόν τινα νομίζεις, πονηρὸν οἴει τὸν αὐτὸν εἶναι καὶ ἄδικον καὶ ἀνόητον; — Ἀνάγκη πάντως. —Δ. Τί δαί; οὐ τῶν ἀνθρώπων ἕκαστον κατὰ τὸν αὑτοῦ δαίμονα βιοῦν, ὁποῖος ἂν ᾖ ποτε, ἀλλὰ καθ’ ἕτερον; — Οὐδαμῶς καθ’ ἕτερον. —Δ. Οὐκοῦν τὸν τυχόντα ἀγαθοῦ δαίμονος ἡγῇ δικαίως ζῆν καὶ φρονίμως καὶ σωφρόνως; τοιοῦτον γὰρ ὁμολογεῖς εἶναι τὸν δαίμονα αὐτοῦ. — Πάνυ γε. —Δ. Τὸν δὲ μοχθηροῦ δαίμονος πονηρῶς καὶ ἀφρόνως καὶ ἀνοήτως καὶ ἀκολάστως; —Φαίνεται ταῦτα συμβαίνειν ἐκ τῶν εἰρημένων νῦν. —Δ. Ἆρα ὅστις ἄνθρωπος νοῦν ἔχων ἐστὶ καὶ δίκαιος καὶ σώφρων, οὗτος εὐδαίμων ἐστὶν ἀγαθῷ δαίμονι συνών· ὅστις δὲ ἀσελγὴς καὶ ἄφρων καὶ πανοῦργος, ἀνάγκη κακοδαίμονα φάσκειν ἐκεῖνον κακῷ δαίμονι συνεζευγμένον καὶ λατρεύοντα; — Ἀληθές. —

Dio. Then in the case of a guardian spirit also, if you really consider any to be good, is it not clear that you consider it just and useful and sensible?

Int. Why, of course.

Dio. Pray, when you think that any person is bad, do you believe that he is at the same time evil and unjust and senseless?

Int. Most assuredly so.

Dio. Well, then, do you not think that each man lives under the direction of his own guiding spirit, of whatever character it may be, and is not directed by a different one?

Int. Certainly not directed by that of a different one.

Dio. Then do you believe that the man to whom Fortune has given a good guardian spirit lives justly and prudently and temperately? For this is the character that you agree his spirit has.

Int. Certainly.

Dio. And that the man to whom Fortune has given the bad guardian spirit lives wickedly and senselessly and foolishly and intemperately?

Int. That appears to follow from what we have just said.

Dio. Then when a man is in possession of intelligence and is just and temper, is this man fortunate because he is attended by a good spirit; but when a man is dissolute and foolish and wicked, must we maintain that he is unfortunate because he is yoked to a bad spirit and serves it?

Int. True.

κατὰ τὸν αὑτοῦ δαίμονα is just a variant of κατὰ τὸν δαίμονα ἑαυτοῦ. (Modern Greek speakers, note the daseia on αὑτοῦ: this is not modern αυτός.)

So Achilleas’ intuition was correct: daemon does indeed refer not to your own inner will, but to an external guiding spirit—whether it’s a guardian angel or a guardian devil. And while I don’t know much about Thelema, I assume that Tolis’ Crowley-inspired interpretation of Jimbo’s tombstone is inaccurate.

Thanks, Achilleas, that was fun!

Are they all not just history books concluding to have some moral message to help us live our lives? Because if this is true, then life should be put first before religions. And nobody should take a life of a preacher or one dedicated in a path to understand religion. It’s secondary is it not?

Other respondents are responding to the OP’s use of “history” vs “story” (mythology). But OP’s question is, if the Bible is not divine, then one’s morality cannot derive from religion, but affirmation of life.

It’ll interest OP to know that there was a prominent theologian who came to pretty much that conclusion. This theologian pioneered Historical Jesus research, and came to the conclusion that the actual Jesus was all about the end of the world—and since the world has not ended, that Christianity was founded on a lie. (Subsequent Historical Jesus researchers have concluded that the end-of-the-world guy was John the Baptist, not Jesus, but that’s not the point here.)

So. You are a big time theologian, and you have just proven to yourself in your forties that everything you believed in is a lie. What do you do?

You switch jobs, study medicine, and go to Africa to heal the sick. “Life should be put first.” In fact, your personal philosophy Reverence for Life.

Ok, that’s one take on it, and I see that it’s not Wikipedia’s take on Albert Schweitzer: he articulated quite Christian motives for dropping theology and taking up medicine (and he didn’t really drop theology for that matter). But clearly he did not stay an orthodox Christian, and he had a crisis of faith after confronting the issue of literal truth in the New Testament.

My site on Greek and Unicode is currently offline, but this is what I had to say about it: http://photius.tlg.uci.edu/~opou… . (I refer to the “calligraphic” phi as the mathematical variant:

Until Unicode 3.0, the normal character for phi was the closed form, and the mathematical variant was the open. The reference glyphs were swapped in Unicode 3.0, as it was realised that the normal mathematical phi is the closed form, and Greek text uses the open form exclusively, at least in Greece. (The Loeb Classical Library amongst others uses the closed phi, so it is fair to say that Classicists have a greater tolerance for the closed form.) Fonts created before the release of Unicode 3.0 (September 1999) are likely to have the old default form for phi.

Sure, I did. But I’m a linguist, so I don’t count. 🙂

Not that agglutinative/flexional is the same thing as analytic/synthetic, but Esperanto did spoil me for language learning in my teens, and I have read a Turkish grammar just for aesthetic enjoyment. And the most joy in the historical grammar of Greek is tracing the inflections to their agglutinative origins. For that matter, on the synthetic side, I’ve gotten my jollies from reading Tok Pisin and Mandarin grammars too. 

Of course, “inconvenient” isn’t the right answer, as other respondents have said. They are just different ways of expressing the same meaning, and they certainly aren’t intractable for native speakers to learn.

And synthetic language speakers shouldn’t get too envious. If you read the fine print of those Mandarin and even Tok Pisin grammars, you find that the semantics of aspect and mood particles gets very messy very quickly.

I’ve switched careers from being a humanities academic to being a business analyst. Currently I’m more a data analyst with a sideline in IT architecture and policy. The clarification is important, because business analysts are more human-facing than data analysts.

I switched from natively writing in Dickensian paragraphs, to natively writing in dot points. My audience would much rather read something created in Powerpoint, than something created in Word. I learned that there was not that much point correcting simple spelling mistakes from colleagues (though that’s not as much of an issue in my current position!) I relearned something I had learned before linguistics, when I was interning as an engineer: I am writing for people who would rather not be reading what I am writing, so I don’t get points for eloquence or cleverness—just concision.

I still happen to write formally, because of my training (although I use less semicolons than I used to); but I notice that few of my colleagues or their bosses bother. I have one boss who is a stickler for formal (and impersonal) tone, but I strongly suspect this is a generational thing. In fact, I’ve been in the middle of an edit war between bosses on formal tone of a document. I like the subjunctive, but have found that it outright confuses colleagues; then again, the subjunctive is now mostly an American affectation in the Commonwealth.

All that said, precision is valued in my job, so “proper grammar” is appreciated.

Thaddeus Stevens would not have thought so…

As Toby Williams said, significant in pre-Classical Greece—after all, the Mycenaeans got their writing system from the Minoans, and there are echoes of the old Cretan dominance in the myths around Crete.

In Classical times, not much at all. A couple of philosophers (including Epimenides and his paradox), but Crete was a backwater. That continued even into Byzantine times: Andrew of Crete  is all I can think of for cultural impact on Byzantium. It was only under the Venetians that Crete had a significant cultural impact on the Greek-speaking world (including art as well as literature).

There are, not so much rules, but tendencies for why letters are pronounced so crazy-different in different dialects of English, and so differently from Early Middle English.

Unfortunately you need to go through a lot of historical phonology to make sense of it. Fortunately Wikipedia has a decent summary of both the historical phonology, and of subsequent changes. Unfortunately you need a linguistic background for the changes to make sense to you.

Phonological history of English

Basically start by assuming that the spelling used to make sense, and then move forward from Middle English for each of the sound changes. (The changes from Old English to Middle English aren’t as critical to making sense of the spelling, since spelling was reset from scratch after the Norman invasion.)

The craziness of vowels around l’s and r’s, in particular, is something very characteristic of English—and it makes sense once you realise that, compared to other European languages, l and r are pronounced quite back in the throat (retroflex and velarised)—which makes adjacent vowels be centralised.

Like I said, you need a linguistic background for the changes to make sense to you…

There have been toy translators into stereotypical dialects of English for decades. Fun Translations  has a representative sample.

It’s not just that the words came from languages where the silent letters used to be pronounced. It’s also that silent letters were reintroduced by pedants, to remind people of the languages they came from, though they had long since passed out of pronunciation.

Latin debitum went to French and Middle English dette (via *debte). French to this day has no problem spelling it dette. But when in the Renaissance English scribes worked out that dette came from debitum, they put a silent –b– in as a reminder—even though the –b– hadn’t been pronounced for hundreds of years.

Yes, phlegm is spelled like that because it comes from Greek phlegma. But the thing is, both Middle English, and Middle French that the word came via, were more phonetically spelled. And in fact the story of phlegm is much like the story of debt:

phlegm – Wiktionary

From Old French fleume, Middle French flemme (French flegme), and their source, Latin phlegma, from Ancient Greek φλέγμα ‎(phlégma, “flame; inflammation; clammy humor in the body”), from φλέγειν ‎(phlégein, “to burn”).

So the word starts out in Latin as phlegma (complete with p pronounced as /pʰ/.) Along the way, it changes pronunciation to:

• flegma (Imperial Latin)
• flegme (Proto-French)
• fleume (Old French)
• flemme (Middle French)
• fleme (Middle English)
• flem (Late Middle English)

Each phonetic change on its own makes sense as a simplification, and Middle English had no problem spelling the word consistent with those simplifications. (Although silent e‘s and double letters aren’t quite phonetic spelling, they are still useful for differentiating long and short vowels; so flemme or flemm would be a consistent way of spelling it.)

Then in the Renaissance some pedant realised that flemme came from phlegma. As a result, French put back in a silent –g-, and English also put in the Greek ph-.

The change of phlegma to flemme is not random, and the respelling of flemme as phlegm is not random either. But to boast that the randomness is proof of how organic English is, and how it doesn’t have an Académie, is misguided. Respelling flemme as phlegm is exactly the kind of shit an Académie would pull…

Note that the –gm– to –mm– happens in French, and is accompanied by the dropping of final –e. Other Greek words ending in –gma were borrowed later, and directly from Latin or Greek; they have no problem keeping the –gma. Stigma, dogma, magma.

(Vernacular Greek, on the other hand, did simplify –gma. The formal pronunciation of phlegm in Modern Greek is fleɣma; but my grandmother always said flema—by the same process that came up with Modern English and French /flem/.)