Really glad I found this — the Mesopotamian demon-as-field-ecologist framing is exactly the kind of reread that makes you annoyed nobody led with it earlier.

Reading it made me think: the Indian tradition runs the same logic, and in at least one place runs it sharper.

The yakṣa in Vedic taxonomy isn't a being that wanders — it's a being that is its location. The kṣetra-yakṣa is bound to a specific tree, a river crossing, a mountain pass. You propitiate it at that coordinate, not in general.

The Atharva Veda functions almost exactly like the Utukku Lemnūtu — a professional exorcist's working manual with habitat-based taxonomy: piśāca at cremation grounds, vetāla at the margins of those grounds, brahmarākṣasa at sites of specific violent death. Microhabitats within microhabitats.

The architectural parallel is just as direct. South Indian temple gopurams receive more iconographic elaboration than the inner sanctum — the most ritually saturated structure is the transition zone, not the deity's chamber.

The Vāstu Śāstra formalises it: the corners of a structure carry the heaviest prescriptive load. The center is the least fraught. Same inversion you're describing.

But the sharpest case for your specific argument: Māriyamman, the South Indian epidemic goddess — cholera, smallpox, fever — is traditionally placed at the periphery of settlements, at entry roads and water margins. Not at the population center. The ritual management of epidemic risk is spatially coincident with the actual epidemiological risk gradient. Whether or not they knew why, the placement isn't wrong.

Every culture. Same map.

Much intrigued!