Demography
How many demons? We have several differing answers to that question from the cultures surveyed above. Do demons operate as individuals or in small groups, or in ‘gangs' (as in Pharaonic Egypt) or in tribes or clans (as in early Islam).[1205] That is, how far does their presumed organization reflect or invert contemporary social structures? In pre-classical Mesopotamia or the late antique Mediterranean they seem to be figures of chaos.
Are they ever seen as more threatening because orderly? Are they more numerous in some periods than in others? Dodds attached the term ‘age of anxiety' borrowed from his friend the poet W H. Auden to late antiquity, the second to fourth centuries of the Common Era. Demons seem more prominent then. Some have seen the fourteenth century as a new phase in thinking about demons and the devil in the medieval Christendom. Others would nominate the age of the witch craze as a period of heightened diabolism, in which the self-styled expert demonologist attains a high degree of prominence. Can such changes over the longue duree really be measured?
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