Death Gods: An Encyclopedia of the Rulers, Evil Spirits, and Geographies of the Dead

摘要

In Australian folklore the Bunyip are evil water spirits that live in the mud at the bottom of lakes and pull victims into the water and drown them. Eumenides is an underworld spirit with blue-skin who strips the flesh from dead bodies leaving only their bones. In Jewish folklore the Dybbuk is a disembodied spirit of a dead person who cannot find rest because at some time while it was alive it was wronged by another and still suffers from the injustice. In Hindu mythology Yanna is the god ofrndeath and justice, and in Buddhist mythology he is the fifth king of Hell whom the deceased meets after death.rn"This encyclopedia, derived from world mythologies, is a biography of the gods and goddesses, devils and demons, who inhabit the realms of the Underworld, and a geography of those domains". In the prefatory list of subjects, there are more than five hundred "death gods and demons" listed - a few of which are Lucifer, Odin, Azrael, Quetzalcoatl and Voodoo's Baron Samedi.