EXPULSION. Expulsion can be harmful but also beneficial, depending on the purposes toward which it is directed. Associated concepts are alienation, banishment, excommunication, exile, exorcism, expurgation, purification, repentance, scapegoating, defilement, and cleansing. Greeks, Romans, and Indians practiced expulsion as a means of exerting social control over individuals or groups over millennia. Against that cultural background, religious communities adopted and adapted expulsion to their own purposes and provided some of the most dramatic instances of one or another form of expulsion.

The story in the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible of Yahweh sending Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden as punishment for their disobedience of his commands is an archetypal story of expulsion that is widely known, particularly in the West. One widespread and persistent interpretation of the story asserts that ever since that momentous expulsion humans have been estranged and alienated from their proper...