The Seba library treats Miasma in 6 passages, across 6 authors (including Padel, Ruth, Otto, Walter F, Burkert, Walter).
Creon’s impiety flowers in a fantasy of precisely this miasma, pollution: he will not weaken, not if Zeus’s eagles want to carry the body up as food, snatching him up to Zeus’s throne.
Padel demonstrates that miasma in Greek tragedy is embodied and imagistic — the pollution of the unburied corpse becomes a psychic landscape of sacrilege, predation, and divine wrath.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994thesis
The ram was carried around the town “to absorb the miasma.” “The meaning of the custom is, therefore, clear.” … Hermes certainly did not carry the ram on his shoulders to absorb infectious germs.
Otto disputes the rationalist-functionalist reduction of miasma to hygienic contagion, insisting that mythic ritual carries an irreducible symbolic meaning that cannot be collapsed into proto-medical purification logic.
, Dionysus Myth and Cult (1965), 1965thesis
Purification rituals are therefore involved in all intercourse with the sacred and in all forms of initiation; but they are also employed in crisis situations of madness, illness, and guilt.
Burkert establishes purification — the ritual response to miasma — as a structural hinge between the sacred and the social, active wherever boundaries between pure and impure are transgressed.
, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, 1977supporting
A miasma of petty tasks and pointless duties sullied everything. Increasingly he had found himself longing for a lifestyle that had nothing to do with domesticity.
Armstrong deploys miasma as a living metaphor for the spiritual contamination of ordinary domestic life, naturalizing the ancient concept within modern spiritual biography and depth-psychological narrative.
, Buddha, 2000supporting
Miasma, see ‘Pollution’. Mistake, plea of, 5; in Homer, 30 ff; not admitted from heads of household, 35 f.; nor from leaders in war, 47 f.
Adkins formally equates miasma with pollution and situates it within the legal and ethical architecture of Athenian responsibility, linking it to debates over intention, homicide, and culpability.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
Miasma. See Pollution.
Williams’s index cross-reference signals the term’s accepted equivalence with pollution in the scholarly literature on Greek moral psychology, without independent elaboration.
, Shame and Necessity, 1993aside