ABSTRACT
The 'technical' method involves the natal horoscope, as the personal daimon was believed by most late antique astrologers to be reflected by the dominant planet at the moment of birth. The astrological significator of the personal daimon was given the designation oikodespotes or ‘Master of the House’. The magical ‘underworld’ of Platonism, which permeated various currents of Gnostic thought as well as the Greek Magical Papyri, might appear very different from the apparently purely philosophical and daimon-free Christianised Platonism of Church fathers such as Origen and Gregory of Nyssa. The ‘personal daimon’, in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic adaptations, eventually merged into the figure of the ‘guardian angel’. As magic was international in the late antique world and tended to cross religious boundaries, the guardian angel in Jewish magic bears a close family resemblance to the personal daimon of the Neoplatonists.
