Incubus

An incubus is, according to medieval and early-modern Christian demonology, a male-presenting non-human intelligent being said to lie upon a sleeping woman and force intercourse with her — a being the theologian Thomas Aquinas and the authors of the 1487 inquisitorial manual the Malleus Maleficarum treated as a genuine order of demon rather than a figure of speech, distinct from its female-presenting counterpart the succubus, which is held to target sleeping men in the mirror-image role. The Late Latin term derives from incubāre, "to lie upon," and the earliest documented figure of the type is the Sumerian lilu, a nocturnal night-visitor named in cuneiform sources predating the Christian tradition by roughly two thousand years. Medieval theologians debated the incubus's exact mechanism at length: Augustine raised the question of nocturnal sexual demons as early as the fifth century, and Aquinas, holding that demons are themselves sterile, argued that an incubus could only impregnate a woman by first collecting semen from a man as a succubus and then delivering it as an incubus — a two-stage transfer the Malleus Maleficarum likewise describes, with the same demon performing both roles in sequence.

If the classical demonological account is taken at its word, the incubus documents a continuous, doctrinally elaborated non-human presence in the human bedroom running from Mesopotamian antiquity through the height of the European witch-hunting era and into the present-day paranormal and abduction literature — one of the longest continuously attested categories of alleged non-human contact with humanity on record, and one the Roman Catholic Church itself treated as sufficiently real to prescribe formal remedies against.

Cambion offspring

Sexual union between an incubus (or succubus) and a human was held in medieval tradition to be capable of producing half-demon offspring known as cambions. The legendary magician Merlin, as recorded in Geoffrey of Monmouth's twelfth-century Historia Regum Britanniae, is the earliest and best-known cambion account in Western literature — the son of an incubus and a mortal woman, born with inherited supernatural knowledge and power as a direct consequence of his non-human parentage.

Prescribed remedies and dissent

The Malleus Maleficarum prescribed five remedies against incubus attack: sacramental confession, the sign of the cross, formal exorcism, relocation away from the site of the attacks, and excommunication of any human accomplice found to be facilitating the demon's access. Not every churchman of the period accepted that these remedies, or the Church's usual exorcism procedure, were effective against the incubus specifically: the Franciscan friar Ludovico Maria Sinistrari argued in his treatise Demoniality that incubi "do not obey exorcists" and have "no dread of exorcisms," treating them as a distinct and more intractable category of demon than the possessing spirits ordinary exorcism was designed to expel.

Cross-cultural parallels

Cognate nocturnal-assailant figures are independently attested well outside the Christian demonological tradition: the Germanic alp, the Hungarian lidérc (a fiery nocturnal apparition), the Assamese pori (said to seduce men and cause their health to deteriorate), and the Turkish karabasan — the last also named, alongside the jinn-attack tradition, in this corpus's own treatment of the sleep paralysis literature.

Relation to the sleep-paralysis assault tradition

The incubus is one of several cross-cultural names reported for the nocturnal assailant in the waking-paralysis-plus-pressure experience — the same reported episode named the Old Hag in Newfoundland, attributed to jinn in Egypt, and reported as the onset of an alien abduction in the modern literature. Tom DeLonge and Peter Levenda, in the chapter "The Succubus in the Saucer" of Sekret Machines: Gods, Man & War — 2: Man (2019), name the incubus/succubus tradition as the direct historical antecedent of the modern bedroom-abduction report, arguing that psychiatric explanations invoking sleep paralysis or hypnagogic hallucination are offered too readily and reflect "bias on the part of the observer" rather than settling what the reports actually describe.

Modern occult usage

Since the twentieth century, some occult and neopagan practitioners have reinterpreted the incubus outside its original demonological framing — as a spirit ally to be deliberately invoked and worked with under controlled conditions rather than an unwanted nocturnal assailant, a redefinition that parallels the similarly reworked modern usage of the familiar spirit.[citation needed]

Open questions

See also

References

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