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The New Yorker
Under Review

Science's Demons, from Descartes to Darwin and Beyond

How supernatural conceptions have advanced our understanding of the
natural universe.

By Casey Cep

January 8, 2021

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Illustrated science beaker with smoky demon coming out
Illustration by Daniel Zender

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It is difficult to count demons. In the Gospel of Mark, when Jesus
meets a man on the far side of the Sea of Galilee who is possessed,
he asks the demon to identify itself. It replies: "My name is Legion,
for we are many." But how many? The thirteenth-century German abbot
Richalmus suspected the number of demons was incalculable, as
numerous as grains of sand in the sea. Three centuries later, when
the Dutch physician Johann Weyer composed his demonology, he
identified some sixty-nine demons by name, who commanded millions of
others: at least eleven hundred and eleven distinct legions, each
with six thousand six hundred and sixty-six demons. Around the same
time, the German theologian Martin Borrhaus reached a very different
estimate: two trillion six hundred and sixty-five billion eight
hundred and sixty-six million seven hundred and forty-six thousand
six hundred and forty-four demons.

Others scholars avoided a head count, choosing instead to organize
demons into typologies and hierarchies, as Dante Alighieri did in the
Inferno and King James did in his "Daemonologie," published nearly a
decade before he commissioned a new translation of the Bible.
According to such taxonomies, demons were a busy bunch, tasked with
everything from promoting quarrels, discord, and war (the work of a
demon called Bufas) to inserting errors into the manuscripts of
scribes and keeping tabs on the mispronunciations of preachers during
worship (the work of Titivillus).

[undefined]
Casey Cep is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of "
Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee."
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