Before Good and Evil

Sometimes I’ll double up on books and have a fiction and nonfiction title going at the same time. They’re each a palate cleanser for the other. So, alongside A Child Alone With Strangers, I’m reading Jeffrey Burton Russell’s A History of Witchcraft: Sorcerers, Heretics, and Pagans. I like it when books challenge my worldview by offering a different perspective on history. I’m not a fan of the dry anthropological approach, but hey, you can’t have it all. There’s some interesting stuff buried beneath all that academic prose. Before the religious dualism of Zoroastrianism, which would later influence Abrahamic thought, many religions were polytheistic and understood the divine in less rigidly moral terms. The strict dichotomy between good and evil didn’t exist as we understand it today. Those traits could coexist within the same deity or spirit; they were more a function of action than a blanket characteristic. Did a ritual help crops grow? It was good. Did it unfairly harm another?…

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