I have a passion for ancient mythology, but I also do for computers. Mythology has been with me since I was a 3 year old, and the computers since 1994.

A Daemon, is not a Demon in Christian terms, but a much older term that relates to supernatural spirits that are connected with all of us, and it's represented as an animal.

I have a pet ferret, and her name is Daemon...

My Daemon, named "Daemon"

What is a Daemon?

There are two variations of what they are, but they're both based off the mythological source.

Daemon (classical mythology)

Daemons are benevolent or benign nature spirits, beings of the same nature as both mortals and deities, similar to ghosts, chthonic heroes, spirit guides, forces of nature or the deities themselves (see Plato's  Symposium). Walter Burkert suggests that unlike the Christian use of  demon  in a strictly malignant sense, "[a] general belief in spirits is not expressed by the term  daimon  until the 5th century when a doctor asserts that neurotic women and girls can be driven to suicide by imaginary apparitions, ‘evil  daimones’. How far this is an expression of widespread popular superstition is not easy to judge. On the basis of Hesiod's myth, however, what did gain currency was for great and powerful figures to be honoured after death as a daimon…"  Daimon is not so much a type of quasi-divine being, according to Burkert, but rather a non-personified "peculiar mode" of their activity. SOURCE

In the movie, The Golden Compass the movie is full of Daemons:

Here's the trailer:

This movie is where I got my inspiration for my pet's name...

From classic mythology our current digital age paradigm is full of Daemons, but now they are also in our computers...

Daemon (computing)

In multitasking computer operating systems, a daemon (/ˈdiːmən/ or /ˈdeɪmən/) is a computer program that runs as a backgroundprocess, rather than being under the direct control of an interactive user. Traditionally, the process names of a daemon end with the letter  d, for clarification that the process is, in fact, a daemon, and for differentiation between a daemon and a normal computer program. For example,  syslogd is the daemon that implements the system logging facility, and  sshd  is a daemon that serves incoming SSH connections.

In Unix environment, the parent process of a daemon is often, but not always, the init process. A daemon is usually either created by a process forking a child process and then immediately exiting, thus causing init to adopt the child process, or by the init process directly launching the daemon. In addition, a daemon launched by forking and exiting typically must perform other operations, such as dissociating the process from any controlling terminal (tty). Such procedures are often implemented in various convenience routines such as daemon in Unix.

Systems often start daemons at boot time and serve the function of responding to network requests, hardware activity, or other programs by performing some task. Daemons can also configure hardware (like udevd on some Linux systems), run scheduled tasks (like cron), and perform a variety of other tasks. SOURCE

I love how this myth is interconnected with computer tech. It's also cool, because it's a way for these myths to live on which can lead to hours of finding creative stories surrounding them - and those story inspirations then pushing us to create better technology.

Since we all have Daemons as well as our computers - it would be interesting to think about what animal would represent the one next to our hearts. Mines always been a ferret that can shapeshift into a lion.

What's yours?

...

Thanks for any upvotes/steem/reblogs/steem dollars/comments/follows!