Note on this edition: this is an electronic version of the 1999 book ...

The Ancestry of the Demonic 33of the basic boundaries that produce identity; the separation of the human“us” and the animalistic “them” is presented as dangerously confounded inthis distorted figure.T.O. Ling, in his study of Theravâda Buddhism, has gathered togethersome central features of demons from the rich demonology of India’s folklore.For the most part, demons inhabit deserted places, outside the community.They are at their most active during the night. Their man-eatinghabits, inhuman strength and terrifying appearance (red eyes, hairiness,sharp teeth, plus some supernatural attribute, such as casting no shadow)mark their demonic nature. 40 In other words, they are complete opposites ofthe common, civilised human beings. Edward Langton has noted how placesthat were formerly populated, but now desolate, are especially susceptible tobe inhabited by demons. 41 There seems to be a structural logic at work, onewhich situates demons at the “grey zone” between two different systems oforder; those of the human world and nature. A ruin or a graveyard as a toposexpresses analogous logic compared to the logic characterising most descriptionsof demons: human reality is brought to its limits and faced (andmixed) with something Other. Ruins and graveyards retain signs and tracesof meanings that are going through a transition into something else, and this“margin of the unknown” is utilised in demonic discourses.The interest in these marginal areas and figures has endured, even up toour own days. As an important recent example, Noël Carroll has incorporatedthe anthropological insights of Mary Douglas into his work, The Philosophyof Horror (1990). His starting point is the thriving modern horrorculture with its innumerable monsters and supernatural threats. A classichorror monster, such as Dracula, elicits strong reactions in those mortals itfaces, both in its novelistic and movie incarnations. Carroll names this reaction“art-horror” and divides it into three distinct components: the thoughtof such monster as Dracula has properties which make the audience feel abnormal,physical agitation, and it evokes a desire to avoid the touch of suchmonsters. The most important properties that evoke this reaction are themonster’s credible presentation (that it is “possible” even if not really existingin reality), and that it is regarded as both threatening and impure. 42The impurity of the monster is not literal dirtiness but a conceptual featurederived from Mary Douglas’s theory. Carroll suggests that “an object orbeing is impure if it is categorically interstitial, categorically contradictory,incomplete, or formless.” His examples include beings that are both livingand dead: ghosts, zombies, vampires, mummies, the Frankenstein’s monster.Other entities “conflate the animate and the inanimate: haunted houses,with malevolent wills of their own, robots, and the car in [Stephen] King’sChristine. Many monsters confound different species, too: werewolves, humanoidinsects, humanoid reptiles, and the inhabitants of Dr. Moreau’s is-40Ling 1962, 16-18.41 Langton 1949/1982, 5.42Carroll 1990, 27-8. Italics in the original.