David Gordon White’s new book, Dæmons are Forever: Contacts and Exchanges in 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. In this effort White was largely successful, with some caveats discussed below.
The overarching theme of the book is the influence and spread of religious traditions concerning dæmons, a term that White uses cross-culturally to describe “a protean grouping of spirit beings somewhere between their generally benevolent high gods and their generally malevolent demons.” (1) It is also a book about demons in the usual contemporary sense because some dæmons were, or were construed to be, morally evil. Dæmons in both senses “have always traveled more lightly than gods” (1) as White puts it, which is to say that vernacular religious traditions have always had a vital place in Eurasian religious history, were readily shared, and seldom required the mediation of religious specialists. White decries the decline of cross-cultural studies of myth and religion, noting the “corrosive effect” (11) that postmodernism in particular has had on much recent humanities and social science scholarship, as well as the isolating effects of the Area Studies paradigm on the study of India. With Dæmons are Forever, he seeks to revitalize a connected-histories approach to the study of religions and cultures.
The second chapter, “Of Filth and Phylacteries,” is the only one whose subject is limited to the Indian subcontinent. It contextualizes Hindu apotropaic rituals involving conventionally impure substances taken from temple images that White documented during fieldwork in rural southern Rajasthan and the urban Kathmandu Valley of Nepal. His premise is that it is unusual to find such a distinctive practice in two locations separated by over a thousand miles. His explanation is that itinerant Nath yogis spread the practice from southern Rajasthan to Kathmandu. While this seems reasonable on the face of it, it strikes this reviewer as overly simplistic; presumably, more extensive ethnographic research would turn up many other sites in India where similar rituals are current, significantly weakening the identification of White’s fieldwork site in Rajasthan as the origin point.
The third chapter, “The Demons are in the Details,” explores the spread of “demonological sciences” from, White proposes, Egypt in the early centuries CE to the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent and parts of central Asia. While the chapter is fascinating and makes many significant contributions, I found it weak in several respects—the demons are indeed in its details. One example will have to suffice here. His reading of the significance of the words chāyā, chidra, and chala in Netra Tantra 19 is based on similar words reported in William Sax’s ethnography in rural Uttarakhand. In an effort to show that the usage Sax noted derives from the Netra Tantra, White claims that the Tantra uses chala and chidra in obscure technical senses. (58) Yet his translation of chala conforms to the usual meaning (53–54) and he distorts the sense of Kṣemarāja’s remark about chidra. Kṣemarāja wrote chidram araṇye rodanādi, which I would render as “vulnerability [to spirit possession]: for example, crying in the forest.”
A few pages later the Netra Tantra lists several dozen activities that create such vulnerability, two of which are crying and screaming. White even notes this (57), yet proceeds to argue that Kṣemarāja means to call special attention to a supposed connection between the word chidra and wailing; this makes little sense in Sanskrit and in the context of the Tantra. The contemporary terms noted by Sax do appear to derive from the Netra Tantra, but a simple explanation is that someone with a weak grasp of Sanskrit mistook them as referring to types of demons. My critique may seem like it is picking on innocuous details, but they underpin the whole argument of the chapter, based as it is on a supposed “chāyā-chalam-chidram dynamic.” (68) Conversely, White’s point that the use of chāyā (shadow) to mean a demonic spirit is unique to sources from central Asia and the subcontinent’s northwest is mostly convincing. And connections between this and lore about the evil eye from Greek and Persian sources are apparent. However, White is too dismissive of older Indic references to related forms of divination and theories of extramissive vision, and he is too confident in proposing that “the compilers of the Netra Tantra adapted Plutarch’s eidōlon model…” (68)
The fourth chapter, “Medieval and Modern Child Abductions,” is a fascinating examination of European lore and ritual concerning faeries or demons stealing babies from their cradles and leaving changelings in their place. Based on historical sources and ethnographic fieldwork in France and Denmark, White points out the survival of such traditions in a few pockets of rural France, where swaddling cloths, booties, and pieces of cloth are hung on bushes and trees near sacred wells. He links these traditions with remarkably similar ones in India, where they originate with tree worship connected with sylvan divinities (yakṣa/yakṣiṇī), and survive to the present in various places. Many points White makes in the chapter are brilliant, such as linking the ubiquitous imagery of Krishna in a tree surrounded by the stolen cloths of the gopis with the older practice of hanging cloth offerings for a yakṣa (104). However, I have reservations about the correspondence White sees between Indian lore about miscarriage demons and European lore about changelings.
The final two content chapters are similar: in both cases White attributes particular mythemes found across southern Asia and Europe to prehistoric Indo-European protomyths. In chapter five this concerns themes of men encountering dangerous man-eating female spirits associated with a particular place and answering riddles to satisfy them, and so forth; in chapter six it concerns themes connecting horses, mercury, and geothermal sites. Both chapters are masterfully researched and written, providing astute insights about ancient connections between a wide range of mythologies.
White closes the book with a short chapter titled “Imagining a Connected History of Religions.” He argues for more nuance in the ways we imagine religion, underscoring that “religion has as much to do with immediate concerns as it does with ultimate concerns, with dæmonology as much as theology.” (207) Subsequently, White opines that “the productions of the humanities can never rise to the same level of objectivity as [the positive sciences].” (212) I strongly disagree. Humanists, like scientists, collect and analyze data, form hypotheses, and debate the relevance of their findings with colleagues. Objectivity is only limited by the availability of quality data and the fidelity and skill of the researcher in the pursuit of the truth. For questions as broad and ambitious as those White poses in this book, the data is, as he notes, mere traces. This makes his conclusions less stable than those of scholars asking more specific questions about a more limited set of data. Nevertheless, by asking big questions and showing us that reasonable answers are often possible, Dæmons are Forever charts a path for future insights into Eurasia’s interconnected histories.
Michael Slouber is associate professor at Western Washington University
Michael Slouber
Date Of Review:
September 30, 2022
