Rethinking Ghosts in World Religions

by Poo, Mu-Chou

• ISBN13: 9789004171527
• ISBN10: 9004171525
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-05-15
• Publisher: Brill Academic Pub

Summary

The central theme of this volume is to re-examine the received concepts and images of ghosts in various religious cultures ranging from the Ancient Near East and Egypt to the Old Testament, the Classical Era, Early Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Early India, and Medieval China. As a religious phenomenon, the realm of ghosts has been less studied than the realm of the divine. Through a collaborative effort by scholars from different disciplines, this volume proposes a multi-cultural approach to construct a wider and complicated picture of the phenomenon of ghosts and spirits in human societies and to have a grasp of the various problems involved in understanding the phenomenon of ghost.

Author Biography

Mu-chou Poo Ph.D. (1984) in Egyptology, Johns Hopkins University, is Research Fellow in the Institute of History and Philology at the Academia Sinica in Taipei. His publications include Enemies of Civilization: Attitudes toward Foreigners in Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt and China (SUNY, 2005).

Table of Contents

Preface	p. vii
Acknowledgements	p. ix
Abbreviations	p. xi
List of Contributors	p. xiii
Introduction	p. 1
Wind and Smoke: Giving up the Ghost of Enkidu, Comprehending Enkidu's Ghosts	p. 23
Belief and the Dead in Pharaonic Egypt	p. 33
Where have all the Ghosts Gone? Evolution of a Concept in Biblical Literature	p. 47
Ghosts and Responsibility: The Hebrew Bible, Confucius, Plato	p. 77
The Roman Manes: The Dead as Gods	p. 95
The Ghostly Troop and the Battle Over Death: William of Auvergne (d. 1249) connects Christian, Old Norse, and Irish Views	p. 115
Ghosts of the European Enlightenment	p. 163
Ghost, Vampire, and Scientific Naturalism: Observation and Evidence in the Supernatural Fiction of Grant Allen, Bram Stoker and Arthur Conan Doyle	p. 183
The Cult of Vetala and Tantric Fantasy	p. 211
The Culture of Ghosts in the Six Dynasties Period (c. 220-589 C.E.)	p. 237
Allegorical Narrative in Six Dynasties Anomaly Tales: Ghostly Sightings and Afterworld Vengeance	p. 269
Chinese Ghosts: Reconciling Psychoanalytic, Structuralist, and Marxian Perspectives	p. 299
Bibliography	p. 311
Index	p. 337
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