Chapter 22: On Demons

In which we learn that Hello Kitty would be an ideal demon.

Humans usually imagine demons as kind of reddish humanoid with horns, tail and optional dragon wings:

In my very first blog entry, I used the elements "horns" and "tail" for myself to despict what I might look like - if I looked like anything. Of course I don't, I'm a spirit and not detectable for senses like vision.

But let's face it: This image of demons is ridiculous. First, a material creature of the size of a man would never be able to lift of with wings - that's pure mathematics. (If you resize a flying creature by the factor 10, it's weight is multiplied by 1000 but it's wing surface only by 100. So, the bigger a creature is, the more problems it will have to fly with wings.)  

Then the reddish color. The demon is thought to be a predator, a soul hunter. For predators, stealth is key. No predators has an alerting color like red - he wouldn't be able to approach it's prey. So, red demons are pure nonsense. The same holds for the hooves - any prey would hear the predator coming from far.

But the most ridiculous part are the horns. In the animal kingdom, only herbivores have horns (to defend against predators). Did you ever see a predator with horns? Predators may have fangs, claws and such, but horns would only encumber them.

All things considered, the "demon", as humans imagine him, looks not like a predator, he looks rather like an inoffensive herbivore with useless wings. Not really frightening.


If you want to know what an efficient predator looks like, look at cats:

 

If humans were logical beings, depictions of demons would look like this. But if there is one thing I've learned since I'm on earth, it's that humans are anything but logical.

[Inspired by the french blog "Bouletcorp"]