ABSTRACT
Ever since early Western thought equated the Good with notions of self-identity and sameness, the experience of evil has often been linked with notions of exteriority. Almost invariably, otherness was considered in terms of an estrangement which contaminates the pure unity of the soul. Strangeness was thought to possess our most intimate being until, as Macbeth’s witches put it, ‘nothing is but what is not’. Evil was alienation and the evil one was the alien. One of the oldest stories in the book.
