Martin Luther was a a seething little misogynistic antisemite who hated everyone and everything, but nonetheless I recall sitting at school learning about protestant reformation. I don't recall the exact details of how our teacher told this story, and now that I briefy looked it up, it's apparently considered more of a myth than an actual incident
but anyway
There was this anecdote that Martin Luther was staying up late at night translating the bible, saw the devil appear in his room, and threw his inkwell at it. The inkwell crashed into the wall, the devil disappeared but the stain remained. Even though there is a physical stain somewhere that was long presented to people as proof of the incident, apparently these days there's people arguing that the tale was more of a symbolic thing, a figure of speech about how he "chased away the devil with ink" by his writing.
It hadn't even occurred to me to interpret it that way. Everything I'd ever heard of the guy made it sound perfectly natural to me that he would both stay awake working long enough to start seeing shadow people without the aid of any kind of stimulants, and respond to seeing something of the sort with no comprehension of what the fuck that is by "attack on sight".
