Dissertation on the Natural Knowledge of Angelic Existence

but nonetheless, he added a curator to each one, his own Genius, and committed him to the guardianship of each person: and one who neither blinks, nor sleeps, and who cannot be deceived. In this manner, Epictetus also speaks, when he says ($β$): (β) also Book 1, Discourses, ch. 14. (γ) Ep. 110. (δ) On Divination, p. 289. O men, know that each of us is committed to a certain diligent and excellent guardian. Therefore, when you have shut the doors and made darkness inside, remember never to say that you are alone. For you are not, no, but God is inside, and your Genius is inside. And what need have they of light to see all your deeds? Nothing. For to every man, from his first birth, a certain Genius is joined by the will of God, to whom—as Seneca teaches ($γ$)—the Stoics added Juno, who is his perpetual companion, a premonitor in doubtful matters, an asserter in dangerous ones, as the Chaldeans, Egyptians, Syrians, and Latins have taught, as the named authors declare. Hence that saying of the ancient Greeks in Peucer ($δ$):

(ε) Book 3, Odes 17.

On his birthday, sacrifices were made to this Daimon spirit, or Genius, whence Horace to his friend ($ε$):

Tomorrow you will attend to your Genius with pure wine
and a two-month-old pig.

(ζ) Contemplations of the Academy, book 4, ch. 12. (η) Book 7, Physics, ch. 4.

To this also pertain those things which Henry Kipping reports from Stephanus Theubulus ($ζ$) regarding the Phoenicians, Egyptians, and older Greeks ($η$), who taught that God existed before the sensible world and had produced it at a certain beginning of time from some pre-existing matter. But lest they posit God as idle in eternity, they said that for many ages before the sensible world, an intellectual world existed with God, consisting of Genii and Minds. But at last, the minds, acting arrogantly and wishing to equal themselves to God, were cast out of Heaven, and that, to pay the penalties of pride, certain fragile bodies were made by the agency of the Genii, into which they were thrust as into a prison and suffered ungrateful things more often, with Genii subsequently added as censors and taskmasters of what was done. Empedocles...