Daemons Are Forever

"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"--