the.com/demons
the original frenemies, blamed for everything from plagues to your 3am bad decisions
means Demons are malevolent supernatural beings, found across countless religions and folklore, believed to torment, tempt, or possess the living.
from From the Greek 'daimon,' which originally meant simply a 'spirit' or 'divine power' — a kind of guiding inner voice (Socrates famously claimed to have one). It wasn't inherently evil. The darkening came through Greek-influenced Jewish and then Christian writers, who used 'daimonion' to label pagan gods and unclean spirits, so the neutral 'daimon' slid into Latin 'daemon' and arrived in English already wearing horns. A neighborly spirit demoted to a fiend by translation.
- word origin
- Greek daimon once meant guiding spirit, not villain
- counting them
- medieval scholars tallied exactly 7,405,926 demons
- famous name
- Beelzebub literally translates to lord of the flies
- casting out
- exorcism remains an officially sanctioned Catholic ritual today
- sleep paralysis
- explains many nighttime demon sightings across cultures
tasmanian devil — carnivorous marsupial native to tasmania, weighs up to 12kg and produces 107db vocalizations
demon shark — deep-sea frilled shark with 300 teeth discovered off coast of new zealand in 2009
demonic ground beetle — carabid beetle species found in north america, named for its aggressive predatory behavior