Notes on Demonology
Jan. 24th, 2024 08:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingIn medieval Japanese setsuwa folktales, oni are characterized by their cannibalistic tendencies. What I'd like to do is draw a connection between "eating people" and "being a demon." My discussion is fairly dry, but I should preface this post with a content warning for a description of prion diseases, which are horrifying.
There are two main reasons we don't eat people:
(1) The bacteria that feeds on dead human tissue isn't great for humans who are still alive, so eating any byproduct of the human body is a quick way to get super sick.
(2) Tissue from the human brain, spine, and nervous system can contain prions (infectious proteins) whose consumption results in progressive neurological disorders. Basically, these prion diseases are like rabies, except they take twelve months to destroy your nervous system instead of two weeks.
I'm not a philosopher, and I don't know much about religious taboos, but I'd connect the illnesses associated with cannibalism with "the demonic" like this:
(1) Because eating human flesh is very likely to make you very sick, only someone in the most wretched of circumstances would risk it.
(2) Prion diseases are deeply uncanny, as they create a person who looks human but doesn't move like a human, have facial expressions like a human, or understand human speech. Again, unlike rabies, these diseases play out over months, with the affected person's behavior becoming increasingly upsetting.
A demon is therefore:
(1) Someone who lives in miserable circumstances.
(2) Someone whose behavior lacks human rationality.
Returning to medieval Japanese setsuwa folktales...
(I should add a footnote here to explain that setsuwa are a specific genre of medieval writing. They're not so much "folktales" as they are didactic parables written by Buddhist priests to use as material in sermons. We have access to them today precisely because they were written down, but still. Whatever their original form may have been, these stories were preserved as Buddhist morality tales.)
...it seems that the ontology of "the demonic" is often applied to three categories of people:
(1) People who live outside of "civilization," such as "savage" communities of indigenous people to the north and south of Japan.
(2) Members of the political elite who are so disconnected from reality that they use their resources to vampirically drain the vitality from their tenants and vassals.
(3) Women who are still sexually active despite no longer being teenagers. Shocking!!
I don't have any summarizing conclusion; these are just my notes for now.
Meanwhile, in Christianity, it seems that eating the flesh of Christ is good actually, which is perfectly normal I'm sure.
There are two main reasons we don't eat people:
(1) The bacteria that feeds on dead human tissue isn't great for humans who are still alive, so eating any byproduct of the human body is a quick way to get super sick.
(2) Tissue from the human brain, spine, and nervous system can contain prions (infectious proteins) whose consumption results in progressive neurological disorders. Basically, these prion diseases are like rabies, except they take twelve months to destroy your nervous system instead of two weeks.
I'm not a philosopher, and I don't know much about religious taboos, but I'd connect the illnesses associated with cannibalism with "the demonic" like this:
(1) Because eating human flesh is very likely to make you very sick, only someone in the most wretched of circumstances would risk it.
(2) Prion diseases are deeply uncanny, as they create a person who looks human but doesn't move like a human, have facial expressions like a human, or understand human speech. Again, unlike rabies, these diseases play out over months, with the affected person's behavior becoming increasingly upsetting.
A demon is therefore:
(1) Someone who lives in miserable circumstances.
(2) Someone whose behavior lacks human rationality.
Returning to medieval Japanese setsuwa folktales...
(I should add a footnote here to explain that setsuwa are a specific genre of medieval writing. They're not so much "folktales" as they are didactic parables written by Buddhist priests to use as material in sermons. We have access to them today precisely because they were written down, but still. Whatever their original form may have been, these stories were preserved as Buddhist morality tales.)
...it seems that the ontology of "the demonic" is often applied to three categories of people:
(1) People who live outside of "civilization," such as "savage" communities of indigenous people to the north and south of Japan.
(2) Members of the political elite who are so disconnected from reality that they use their resources to vampirically drain the vitality from their tenants and vassals.
(3) Women who are still sexually active despite no longer being teenagers. Shocking!!
I don't have any summarizing conclusion; these are just my notes for now.
Meanwhile, in Christianity, it seems that eating the flesh of Christ is good actually, which is perfectly normal I'm sure.
