Daemons Are Forever

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.
"Historian of religions David Gordon White's Daemons Are Forever leads the reader on a sweeping tour of Indo-European traditions by focusing on the fascinating and seemingly ubiquitous central figure of the "daemon." White's journey along the Eurasian Silk Roads undertakes a close examination of ritual and myth, connecting multiple traditions through their shared imagining of human-daemon encounters. Over the course of this rollicking study, White shows how supernatural beings predating the advent of Christianity in Europe and classical Hinduism and Buddhism in South Asia underwent several transformations over time, as different cultures appropriated these creatures and gave them new forms and uses along the way. This book is slated to become a touchstone of the field and to provoke wide-ranging, passionate discussion over the uses and abuses of comparison, as well as the proper task of cross-cultural religious history"--
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.
"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"
"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"