*scrubs the slow cooker*

[dreamer_easy]

Yet another podcast, this time about the personification of evil, in particular, evil spirits:

'...in eastern traditions the ambiguity and ambivalence of these figures is much more accepted. So that if your community were suffering from some type of terrible fever, disease, you would identify the demon of that disease and you would propitiate that demon. And this is why people in the western tradition are so amazed and awed by the religious art of Indonesia and Tibet because it seems to be so frightening and demonic. But this is because spirits of danger become spirits who can get rid of danger.

You don't have that in the western tradition. What happens in Christianity is that spirits of danger become uniformly evil, and they must be exorcised and chased away and bound and sent back to where they came from.'

I don't think that's an east vs west thing - it's a monotheism vs polytheism thing. I immediately thought of the ancient Greeks and the gorgoneions, Gorgon faces, they put on their buildings to ward off the evil eye - using a malign influence against itself, fighting fire with fire. But if you have only one all-powerful, all-good deity, then good can't flow from any other source.

Comments

[purplepooka.livejournal.com]

That and drainage, of course.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Ha! You beat me to it! :-)