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Daemons Are Forever: Contacts and Exchanges in the Eurasian Pandemonium (Silk Roads) Paperback – January 8, 2021

by David Gordon White (Author)

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Part of: Silk Roads (5 books)

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A richly illustrated tapestry of interwoven studies spanning some six thousand years of history, Dæmons Are Forever is at once a record of archaic contacts and transactions between humans and protean spirit beings—dæmons—and an account of exchanges, among human populations, of the science of spirit beings: dæmonology. Since the time of the Indo-European migrations, and especially following the opening of the Silk Road, a common dæmonological vernacular has been shared among populations ranging from East and South Asia to Northern Europe. In this virtuoso work of historical sleuthing, David Gordon White recovers the trajectories of both the “inner demons” cohabiting the bodies of their human hosts and the “outer dæmons” that those same humans recognized each time they encountered them in their enchanted haunts: sylvan pools, sites of geothermal eruptions, and dark forest groves. Along the way, he invites his readers to reconsider the potential and promise of the historical method in religious studies, suggesting that a “connected histories” approach to Eurasian dæmonology may serve as a model for restoring history to its proper place at the heart of the discipline of the history of religions.

Editorial Reviews

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"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

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.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Chicago Press; First Edition (January 8, 2021)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 360 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 022671490X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0226714905
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.1 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.1 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #923,117 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #167 in History of Hinduism
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Mark Stephens

Another Classic From a Brilliant Scholar

Reviewed in the United States on March 15, 2022

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There's a common passion for neat histories, stories of nations or lineages or philosophies rising in just this or that way, unpolluted by "others," giving us so many senses of cultural origin or ownership. If life were only so simple. Taking on the dæmons and demons across 6,000 years of Eurasian expression, David Gordon White gives us an altogether revelatory book that through granular historical analysis of text, iconography, and other sources reveals the interconnected histories – the rich and dense cross-fertilizations – of concepts and ritualized practices spanning times and places others have erroneously treated as separate.

While we've learned to respect White's erudite scholarship in his Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography, his trilogy of works on tantra (Kiss of the Yogini, The Alchemical Body, and Sinister Yogis), his two anthologies for the Princeton Readings in Religions series (Yoga in Practice and Tantra in Practice), Dæmons Are Forever is further distinguished in its astounding detail, bring the richly lived experience of humans with their spirt beings into three-dimensional relief filled with sounds, aromas, tastes and brushes of your skin.

This book compels and inspires religious studies, historical sociology, and others fields attempting to decipher human development to do not merely the thick description that anthropologist Clifford Geertz long ago modeled, but to do so with historical methods that intimately analyze human exchanges across the boundaries of borders, languages, and ideologies.

It also presents a formidable challenge to those who invoke cultural appropriation as camouflage for authoritarian nationalism.

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