Description: Explores the causes of evil in myth, encompassing themes such as defilement, the figure of the trickster, evil people both within and outside the society, and traumatic initiations.
Brief description: Robert Ellwood was Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California from 1967 until his retirement in 1997. He is author or editor of over 25 books, including textbooks in world religions and religious studies, histories, and works on spirituality.
Review Quotes: "Despite its possibly foreboding title, this book is a delight to read. Bob Ellwood marshals an extraordinarily wide range of material from every continent (except Antarctica) and from antiquity to the present. Star Wars and Star Trek, Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Buffy the Vampire Slayer stand beside, for example, trickster stories from indigenous peoples, stories from ancient Babylon, Greece, and Japan, and the lives of the Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad. Never pedantic, Ellwood manages to set the mythology of evil in a full, rich context of lived experience that includes fraternity initiations, witchcraft crazes, boot camp, and much, much more. Throughout it all the lesson of the volume is clear. We learn more about evil and how to deal with it from stories than we do from philosophical analysis. That is because after all life is not a set of philosophical propositions; it is a set of stories." - Greg Alles, McDaniel College, USA