COUNTING
( tusent selen siczen in dem himelrich uff einer nadel spicz * )
no don't ask me
how many
let's just say...a lot
angels dancing on
a pin or on a needle's point
doing their angel thing
now swing
now the Charleston
now a Black Bottom
"Oi! Angels! No!
Keep it quiet
for Heaven's sake
but would they
listen - oh no
*******
making it impossible
for me to try to thread
this &@%/ needle
oh God now
they're dancing
the Can-Can...again
"Dónall son. . ."
me poor auld Mam pleads
"...that needle threaded yet?"
"I'm working on it Mam
I'm working on it!"
the angels snigger at my efforts
"Ok..let's begin then
that's one. . .
. . .a million and one!"
me Man snatches
the needle from me
"Oh give it here son!"
she licks the end
of the bright red
thread
passes it through
the eye of
the needle
a million and two
angels fall from its point
answering this needless question
**
James Franklin has raised the scholarly issue, and mentions that there is a 17th-century reference in William Chillingworth's Religion of Protestants (1637), where he accuses unnamed scholastics of debating "whether a Million of Angels may not fit upon a Needle's point?"This is earlier than a reference in the 1678 The True Intellectual System Of The Universe by Ralph Cudworth.
Helen S. Lang, author of Aristotle's Physics and its Medieval Varieties (1992), says
The question of how many angels can dance on the point of a needle, or the head of a pin, is often attributed to 'late medieval writers'.... In point of fact, the question has never been found in this form….
Peter Harrison (2016) has suggested that the first reference to angels dancing on a needle's point occurs in an expository work by the English divine, William Sclater (1575–1626) in his An exposition with notes upon the first Epistle to the Thessalonians (1619),
Sclater claimed that scholastic philosophers occupied themselves with such pointless questions as whether angels "did occupie a place; and so, whether many might be in one place at one time; and how many might sit on a Needles point; and six hundred such like needlesse points."
Harrison proposes that the reason an English writer first introduced the "needle’s point" into a critique of medieval angelology is that it makes for a pun on "needless point".
A letter written to The Times in 1975 identified a close parallel in a 14th-century mystical text, the Swester Katrei.
However, the reference is to souls sitting on a needle:
tusent selen siczen in dem himelrich uff einer nadel spicz *
— "in heaven a thousand souls can sit on the point of a needle."