Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations

Note on Translations

1 Dæmon-ology

2 Of Filth and Phylacteries

3 The Demons Are in the Details: Demonological Sciences and Technologies, East and West

4 Medieval and Modern Child Abductions

5 Odysseus in Taprobane

6 Perilous Fountains

7 Imagining a Connected History of Religions

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

About the Author

David Gordon White is Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Religion at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of several books, including The Alchemical Body, Kiss of the Yogini, and Sinister Yogis, all published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews

"David Gordon White’s new book, Dæmons are Forever: Contacts and Exchangesin the Eurasian Pandemonium, is one of the most significant monographs in the academic study of religion in recent years. With impressive geographical and temporal scopes—ranging from East and South Asia all the way to Northern and Western Europe, and from reconstructed prehistorical protomyths to  contemporary ethnography—the book impressively attempts to narrate the long story of vital religious contacts and exchanges across Eurasia. . . . Dæmons are Forever charts a path for future insights into Eurasia’s interconnected histories."
*Reading Religion*

"This is an excellent resource for advanced or graduate students and researchers, and it could serve as a reference covering the myriad stories, creatures, and Indo-European features included. . . . Dæmons are Forever is both capstone and cornerstone, a summation of a professional scholarly career and the laying of a foundation for the continuing work of a professor emeritus."
*Journal of the American Academy of Religion*

“Not only does White address an immense geographic space with stupefying erudition, but he examines an equally vast historical time period, using texts from High Antiquity to contemporary ethnography. . . . This work reveals the immense erudition and intellectual virtuosity of the author, an admirable expert not only of the religions of the Indian sub-continent, but also of a wide array of Euro-asian religious traditions.”
 
*Archives de sciences sociales des religions (Translated from French)*

“White is unique in combining the characters of an old-fashioned, obsessively knowledgeable linguist, an Eliadean (or even Frazerian) comparatist, and a cutting-edge theorist with a particular penchant for the dark, the bent, and the anarchic in human religious life. This book makes full use of all his talents, presenting a broad view, constantly enlivened with astonishing details, of the too-long-misunderstood role of the demonic in the history of religions.”
*Wendy Doniger, University of Chicago*

“A revelatory book that brims with erudition and ambition, making connections that span thousands of miles and cross not only centuries but millennia. White has written a book that issues a series of challenges to how we should look at South Asia and worlds far beyond.”
*Peter Frankopan, Worcester College*

"Impressive. . . [White] instructively leads the reader through closely—both historically and conceptually—entangled stories
of demons and their work, thereby dealing with a fascinating panoply of sources ranging from the Indian language arena to the Ancient Greek context but also to Germanic, Romance etc. regions."
*Religious Studies Review*