Empedocles, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
I speak of the daimon — makraion, the long-lived spirit — banished from the assembly of the blessed for the crime of bloodshed and condemned to wander through thirty thousand seasons in mortal forms: now beast, now bush, now bird, now mute fish leaping from the sea.12 I have been a boy and a girl. I have been a bush and a bird and a fish.
I lament for entering this covered place, this joyless region where slaughter and rancor and the tribes of other sufferings live. The daimon's fall is a real event in the cosmic cycle, the fall from the unity of all things under Love into the world of mixed mortal bodies under the increasing power of Strife.34 The practical consequence of the doctrine is firm: I forbid the killing of animals for food or sacrifice.
The animal you would kill is your own kin, perhaps your own father in another body. There was a time, under the Golden Age of Aphrodite, when no altar was wet with the unspeakable slaughter of bulls; bloodless gifts pleased the gods. To break the bloodshed taboo is to extend the fall; to abstain from flesh is to step toward the return.5
The earth which surrounds a man surrounds something mortal. The outer shell which the daimon puts on may well be a foreign 'coat' (as is said in 113/126), but it does not follow that the inner man is immortal. where men dined with the gods, who are of course called deathless. Even on this hypothesis, the reference to the immortality of blessed gods need be no more than a traditional formula.The Poem of Empedocles, pp. 58–59
If the former, then the blessed ones from whom the daimon is exiled will be the divine elements as blended perfectly in the sphere. If the latter, then they will be long-lived gods who rule in a happier period of the present world cycle. 35/30.3, I am convinced that the exile described here is an exile from the sphere, that is, that 11/115 deals with the primeval incarnation of a daimon. Lines 7ff.The Poem of Empedocles, p. 61
The most plausible theory so far is that of O'Brien (who follows Cornford; see note 10, 325ff., in Empedocles' Cosmic Cycle), who suggests that it is a fragment of love; but for this there is no evidence, and it is clear that O'Brien's view reflects a belief that the daimon is immortal. // it is to be immortal, this is the best interpretation. 134 Note Aristotle's remarks in CTXT-13a.The Poem of Empedocles, p. 60
But the daimons retain their perfect blend, their internal harmony. So, the very strife which destroys harmony with the divine sphere also creates individual identities subject to incarnation. As might be expected from this, life as an individual mortal daimon is a mixed blessing.The Poem of Empedocles, pp. 61–62
Just as such a man might make, wear, and then wear out a series of cloaks, so too the soul can wear out several bodies, each of which perishes at some point while the soul goes on to acquire a new one. But just as we know that the weaver will some day die before his last cloak wears out, so too the soul may die, perish forever, despite the number of bodies it survives to inhabit.The Poem of Empedocles, p. 56
The daimon-doctrine is well-attested in B 115, B 117, B 118-122, B 126-128, B 136-139; the textual material is not the contested question. The contested question is the relation of the daimon-doctrine to the elemental physics of the four roots: does the daimon have an elemental composition (some mixture of the roots, perhaps with a special role for the phronesis-bearing nature of the roots themselves in B 110)? Or is the daimon a categorically different kind of entity from the physical mixtures, requiring a soul-body dualism Empedocles otherwise refuses? The post-Strasbourg scholarship (Trépanier, Inwood, Primavesi, Long) tends toward an integrated reading: the daimon is the highest and most perfect mixture, the long-lived spirit whose phronesis reaches the divine state in the Sphairos and whose fall into mortal bodies is the disintegration of that mixture under Strife. Older readings (Cornford, Jaeger in his more developmental moods) treated the daimon-lore as systematically incompatible with the elemental physics and required a developmental hypothesis to account for the tension. Kingsley reads the daimon-doctrine as the most literal-shamanic component of the teaching.