Rethinking Ghosts in World Religions.

• Author: Scurlock, Joann
• Position: Book review

Rethinking Ghosts in World Religions. Edited by MU-CHOU POO. Numen Book Series, vol. 123. Leiden: BRILL, 2009. Pp. xvi + 342. $185.

The essays in this volume were originally delivered at a 2005 conference whose goal was to explore the subject of ghosts in cross-cultural perspective. Always a problem with such an approach is that, if the topic is too broadly defined, you end up comparing apples to oranges and missing interesting points of comparison. In this particular volume, those contributors who are social scientists or heavily social science-influenced scholars, including the organizer, too often fell into the trap of reductionist universal rationalism, rendering a number of articles actually unhelpful in pars or in tow. Another problem, amply illustrated by P. Steven Sangren's paper at the end of the volume (pp, 299-342), is that what is adduced as the normative standard against which Chinese ghost beliefs are measured (following Freud, Marx, and Structuralism) is, in fact, wildly aberrant from the norm.

Jerry Cooper's article on Mesopotamia (pp. 23-32) provides a nice overview of what is known about ghosts in Mesopotamian literature. I have only a few quibbles here. The Akkadian text describing the brief return of Enkidu from the netherworld at the request of his companion Gilgarneg in Gitgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld is not a mistranslation of the Sumerian version (pp. 28-29). The word "ghost" in the Akkadian (d-tuk-ku, the Sumerian sign for which is UDUG) is not a misreading of the Sumerian word "servant" (MJBUR). The Sumerian simply refers to Enkidu coming up from the neth-erworld as the servant of Gilgameg while the Akkadian refers to the rising Enkidu as a ghost, which the Sumerian does not, but this is pretty obvious from the context. It is interesting that the Akkadian scribe does not use the usual Aldcadian word for "ghost" etemmu, but rather a word that usually refers to a type a demon, and this may reflect the anomalous nature of Enkidu's brief return to the land of the living. Cooper is disturbed by the fact that Gilgameg and the ghost of Enkidu hugged and kissed one another. Our vision of ghosts may not permit this, but since Mesopotamian ghosts could eat the living, hugging and kissing them would have presented no problem. Also the ghosts of stillborn children had a cushy afterlife not because they were "pure and innocent" (p. 30), but because special shrines for them ensured a steady round of funerary offerings...