The Devil’s Butthole

In a mud‑splattered hut on the outskirts of a village that would later be christened “London,” a nameless peat‑stained peasant stared at the empty pen where his prized flock of three chickens used to roost.

He was dazzled, hungry, and angry relatively speaking.

A wolf, hungry for both poultry and drama, had swooped in the night before, snatched the birds, and left behind only a faint scent of fur, a deep sense of existential dread, and arrogance. Clutching his wooden tally‑stick, began the ancient ritual of “counting out his losses.” People did a lot more losing than gaining in those days. Hence the peasantry.

He tapped the stick once for the first chicken—clack. Gone. Twice for the second—clack‑clack. Double-gone. Thrice for the third—clack‑clack‑clack. Thrice the amount of gone as when he started. Then he hesitated. The pen was bare. His stick hand slackened slightly. The stick; idle. He licked his thumb, rubbed it on the stick, and whispered, “What the hell is the count when there's nothing to count?!”

A shiver ran down his spine—not from the chill of the morning mist, but from the terrifying realization that he was now attempting to quantify nothing. In his mind, a shape coalesced. He knew not where it came from, just that his mind had shown him a symbol. An empty circle.

Later it become the symbol “0” but for now, it yawned like a black maw, a devil’s butthole waiting to swallow his soul, his arithmetic, and perhaps the very fabric of Christian order. It also represented "no chickens." He dropped the stick, crossed himself three times, and fled to the nearest monastery, shouting, “The void is upon us! Repent, for the zero cometh! It's taking all the chickens!”

Thus began humanity’s long, awkward love‑hate relationship with the concept of nothing—a relationship that would see philosophers, priests, merchants, and even mathematicians stare into the abyss and, more often than not, scream. Also, that previous recounting of "zeros" origins may be slightly exaggerated and dramatized. Nobody knows for sure.

Babylonia, circa 300 BCE – The first whisper of a placeholder appeared on cuneiform tablets. Scribes, tired of writing “| | |” for thirty‑two and then having to invent a new symbol for thirty‑three, inserted a tiny wedge‑shaped gap to indicate “no value here” or something like that.

The point is, it was not a number; it was a typographical sigh of relief. The Babylonians, ever pragmatic, called it “šumma” – “the thing that is not there.” No demons were invoked; they simply shrugged and moved on to tallying barley rations, as one does.

Meanwhile, in ancient Greece (the 5th century BCE to be vaguely exact)– the Greeks, lovers of geometry and lofty philosophy, and going Greek, recoiled at the idea of a void that could be quantified or used. Aristotle famously declared that “nothing cannot be, for non‑being is not a thing, dummies.”

To them, zero was less a number and more a metaphysical insult—a middle finger of a challenge to the very notion that being could be counted. The idea lingered in the shadows of their academies, whispered about only when a particularly bored student tried to prove that a line could have zero length.

India, the Gupta Era (≈ 5th century CE) – Enter the brilliant mathematician Brahmagupta, who, in his treatise Brahmasphutasiddhanta, gave zero a full‑blown arithmetical personality:

a + 0 = a

a – 0 = a

a × 0 = 0

0 ÷ a = 0

He even audacity to define a ÷ 0 as a fraction (though he admitted the result was “infinite,” a concept that would later make medieval theologians sweat like a medieval theologian next to a model of the solar system. ZING!). For the Indians, zero (śūnya) was not a demonic portal but a philosophical concept akin to the void from which the universe emerged; a fertile emptiness, a thought exercise on the nature of existence born of nothing, not a frightful one born of a demonic nothing.

Meanwhile, over in China, during the Han Dynasty (that was around the  2nd century CE for us western civilization year counting types). Those Chinese mathematicians used a blank space on their counting rods to signify zero, calling it líng (“spirit” or “clear”). A symbol was later used to solidify the concept, as a small circle during the Tang dynasty, but the Chinese never seemed to lose sleep over it, because, well, their philosophical traditions already embraced the idea of wu (nothingness) as a complementary force to you (being). You shouldn't really get upset over something you've already, basically been doing, right? Plus, there's almost a Wu Tang reference in there. Did you catch that? Almost awesome. So close.

Now, when Arabic scholars translated Indian texts in the 8th century, they inherited both the numeral and its philosophical baggage. Al‑Khwārizmī (the man whose name gave us “algorithm”) wrote Kitab al‑Jabr wa‑l‑Muqābalah, treating zero as a regular digit. The Arabic word ṣifr (“empty”) traveled westward, eventually becoming “zero” in Latin.

Yet, Islamic theologians, waiting in the wings somewhere, were not entirely comfortable. Some Sufi mystics likened the void to the divine nothingness that precedes God’s creative utterance—kun (“be!”). Yet others warned that playing with nothing could lead to zandaqa (heresy), ala demonic nothing talk, ala, the Devil's butthole (that last one was added).

The tension was palpable: zero was a powerful tool for astronomy and commerce, yet its philosophical implications tickled the edges of orthodoxy, and if you know anything about orthodoxy, it does not like to be tickled, no matter how sexy the intentions.

By the 12th century, Arabic numerals, complete with their pesky zero, began to seep into European markets via Italian merchants. The reaction? A mixture of awe, suspicion, and outright terror, because that pesky zero started to look an awful lot like like a portal to Hell

Imagine a monk in a scriptorium at Cluny Abbey, hunched over a vellum ledger, trying to reconcile the donation of zero gold coins from a particularly stingy lord. He stares at the hollow circle, his ink‑stained fingers trembling. To him, the zero is not a mere placeholder; it is a gaping maw—the devil’s butthole—but on a ledger. A stinky wretched thing through which the soul of accounting might be sucked straight down into Hell.

Chronicles from the period record sermons warning the faithful: “Beware the empty circle, for it is the sign of the antichrist’s arithmetic, a void that devours virtue and summons the infernal reckoners.” Some monasteries went so far as to ban the use of zero in their accounts, preferring clunky Roman numerals (which, incidentally, made adding anything beyond XII a nightmare). All feared the implications of Satan's sphincterly wrath.

The scholastic theologians, ever eager to reconcile faith with reason, convened at the University of Paris around 1225 to debate the ontological status of zero. Thomas Aquinas, ever the diplomat, argued that zero could be considered a privatio, a lack of quantity rather than a substance, thus not inherently evil.

Yet his contemporaries, like Bonaventure, warned that treating nothing as a number risked slipping into the heretical notion that God could be non‑being—a direct contradiction of the doctrine of ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes from nothing).

The debates were less about mathematics and more about whether the symbol threatened the metaphysical destabilized the fragile balance between the created and the uncreated. In the end, the Church tolerated zero—reluctantly—so long as it stayed confined to the ledger books and never dared to appear in a liturgical chant.

Outside the cloisters, the fear took on a more nutty, earthy flavor. In 1248, a market riot erupted in York when a merchant tried to sell a sack of grain for “zero shillings.” The crowd, convinced that the seller was attempting to summon a demonic bargain, tore the stall apart, shouting, “No price, no purchase—only the devil’s price!”

Kind of seems like it was a lost opportunity to use the word: "free", but who's going to split hairs now, right? Hindsight is 20/20.

Town criers began issuing warnings: “Let none beguiled by the empty figure; for he who counts naught walks with the damned.” Even children’s rhymes reflected the anxiety:

Zero, zero, the devil’s hole,

If you count it, you’ll lose your soul.

By the late 13th century, Italian bankers—most notably the Medici—realized that zero was indispensable for double‑entry bookkeeping. The ability to denote a balance of zero allowed them to detect errors, track profits, and, crucially, avoid the embarrassment of accidentally owing the Pope a negative number of florins.

Because owing the Pope meant possibly paying with your life...AND afterlife.

The ledger’s legitimacy slowly washed away the superstition. When a Florentine merchant could finally show his ledger balanced at zero, the townsfolk whispered less about demonic portals and more about the miracle of accounting.

The Renaissance brought a revival of ancient texts, and with them a renewed appreciation for Indian mathematics. Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci (1202) had already introduced the Hindu‑Arabic numeral system to Europe, but it took another century for the zero to lose its diabolical reputation. The reasoning, of course, being that nothing has a stink that lingers, quite like the Devil's butthole, right? Artists began to depict the void not as a mouth of hell but as a circle of perfection—a symbol of eternity, echoing the ouroboros and the celestial spheres.

Eventually, even the Church softened. In the 15th century, the Council of Basel accepted the use of zero in computus (the calculation of Easter), acknowledging that the empty circle could indeed serve a holy purpose: marking the day when the moon’s age reset to nothing—a divine reboot, a godly reset, not a demonic breach exposed by lack of britches.

When Galileo turned his telescope to the heavens and Newton formulated his laws of motion, zero became the indispensable fulcrum of calculus. The concept of a limit approaching zero allowed mathematicians to describe instantaneous change—something the medieval mind could scarcely have imagined, let alone feared.

The once‑terrifying void was now the very foundation of modern physics, engineering, and computer science. The devil’s butthole had been transformed into the origin point of every graph, the neutral element of every algorithm, and the blank canvas upon which humanity paints its theories of the universe.

All things flowed from the Devil's southern most orifice, as it were.

Now that we’ve chased the zero from terrified monks to triumphant theorists, let’s finish with a couple of bite‑sized nuggets perfect for your next trivia night—or for slipping into a group chat to watch eyes widen.

Our modern Gregorian calendar jumps straight from 1 BCE to 1 CE, with no year zero in between. Odd and weirdly, right? This quirk stems from the way early Christian chroniclers (like Dionysius Exiguus) counted years based on the estimated birth of Jesus, using a system that had no concept of zero as a number.

Consequently, there is no “year zero”; the first century runs from 1 BCE to 100 CE, the second from 101 CE to 200 CE, and so on. The result? When you celebrate the millennium, you’re actually off by one—the year 2000 was technically the last year of the 2nd millennium, not the first of the 3rd.

Feel free to drop this at a party: “Did you know we’ve been living in a calendar glitch for over a millennium? Thanks, zero‑phobic monks! Let's all renounce Christianity right now!” You're sure to be the hit of party, and the talk of the night.

The word zero travels a scenic route from Sanskrit to Latin via Arabic. In Sanskrit, śūnya meant “empty” or “void.” Arab mathematicians rendered this as ṣifr (pronounced “se‑fir”), which also meant “empty.” When the term entered Medieval Latin, it became zephyrus—not to be confused with the gentle west wind Zephyrus—because scribes mistakenly associated the empty circle with a light breeze that carries nothing. Over time, zephyrus was clipped to zephir, then zero in Italian, and finally settled into English as we know it: zero.

So the next time you feel a soft wind on your cheek, remember: you’re literally feeling the etymological whisper of the number that once terrified monks and now powers your smartphone, or just a breeze and not the other stuff at all.

From a mud streaked peasant’s panicked stare at an empty chicken pen to the silent, omnipresent zero humming inside every microprocessor, humanity’s dance with nothing Devil has been a tale of fear, fascination, and eventual forgiveness. We once saw a devil’s butthole where now we see a blank slate—proof that even the most terrifying cheek bordered void can, with a little courage (and a lot of math), become the very foundation of all we build.

So the next time you stare at a zero on a screen, a clock, or a balance sheet, give it a nod. It’s not a portal to Hell; it’s the quiet promise that, even in all that nothing, there’s a lot of room for everything.

If you'd like to explore this more, listen to this episode of Elton Reads A Book A Week that talks all about it!