Daemons are Forever – Contacts and Exchanges in the Eurasian Pandemonium (Silk Roads) Paperback – 13 July 2020

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.

Well written book covering indo European and indo Aryan demonology in a balanced and scholarly fashion. Well worth reading. You will make Nanyang intellectual connexions.