Incubus and Succubus

In recognition of St Valentine’s Day, I thought I had better write about demon sex in the Middle Ages.

And Church theologians thought this actually happened, where demons could appear to a woman and have sex with her, making her pregnant. The character Merlin from Medieval Arthurian legend, was born from a woman and an incubus (male demon, from the words “incubare,” “to lie upon,” and “incubus” or “nightmare”), as featured in this image from around 1500.

You will be wanting to know that there were female versions in Christian ideology also. These were “succubae” from the English “paramore” and also Latin “succubare,” or “to lie under”. (Because I suppose even demons associated with the Church normative missionary position?)

The idea of incubus goes back far, to Ancient Mesopotamian history. But Medieval Christians added a theology to it that these male demons didn’t have working sperm (see St Augustine of the early 400s on the logic of that one). Eventually, two male clerics (Kramer and Sprenger of the infamous _Hammer of Witches_ that later was used in so many witchcraft trials) argued that what was *actually* happening when demons ejected sperm into women at night while they were asleep is that they had first turned into a succubus, then had nocturnal sex with a man. Then they took that sperm, turned into an incubus, and finally impregnated the woman.

Glad that these (celibate) guys could hammer out the logic on all this.