New Publication"Demons and Scatology" by Ilaria Briata

The article sheds light on the connection between demons haunting and the (socially and bodily) liminal spaces of the toilet and the bathhouse according to classic rabbinic texts from late antiquity, including the Babylonian Talmud and Midrash Rabbah on Genesis. The geographic distinction between Babylonian and Palestinian literature is paralleled by a hiatus in content, which in turn reflects different cultural and social environments. On the one hand, Babylonian rabbinic corpora attest a magico-medical concern with demons infesting toilets––a fact that can be understood on the background of Zoroastrian notions of impurity, linking bodily waste to evil spirits. On the other hand, Palestinian rabbinic sources document the notion of daemones balneares, demonic entities inhabiting the foggiest and darkest chambers of bathhouses in Greco-Roman tradition. Although the latter can be depicted, ironically, as supernatural allies to the rabbinic chiefs, demons of the toilet and demons of the bathhouses represent two cognate manifestations of the menace of liminality, intended as the locus where human control fails to be active due to exposure to either spatial or physical vulnerability.

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