Long before the arrival of Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and the other great religions of world history, malevolent spirits made their homes in the untouched forests and undisturbed pools of the Eurasian steppe, the Indian subcontinent, and the Japanese archipelago. Hints of ancient prayers and fragments of amulets and other protective artifacts attest to the manifold fears that demons aroused in local peoples, who blamed them for the physical illnesses and spiritual maladies that afflicted humankind. While the theologies of the great religions attempted to impose order and meaning on these evil entities by finding places for them in the complex taxonomies of spiritual beings that inhabited their cosmologies, they were unsuccessful at eradicating the local and regional richness of demonic traditions that stretched along the Silk Road from Europe to eastern Asia. The dread of unseen malevolent forces was ubiquitous in eastern literature from the ancient period to the dawn of modernity, but the forms taken by these demons and their activities in the world were as varied and complex as the literary cultures in which stories about them flourished.