Succubus

A succubus is, according to medieval and early-modern Christian demonology, a female-presenting non-human intelligent being said to seduce sleeping men — the mirror-image counterpart to the male-presenting incubus, from the Late Latin succubāre, "to lie beneath." The figure is traced by scholars of comparative demonology to the Mesopotamian night-spirit lilitu, absorbed into later Jewish tradition as Lilith and her demonic daughters the lilin — making the succubus, on this account, an older and more continuously attested figure than the specifically Christian theological elaboration of the incubus that developed alongside it. The 1487 inquisitorial manual the Malleus Maleficarum treats the incubus and succubus as capable of being the same demon performing either role in sequence — first collecting semen from a man as a succubus, then delivering it to a woman as an incubus — on the theological premise, argued by Thomas Aquinas, that demons are themselves sterile and can only effect human reproduction by this two-stage transfer.

If the classical demonological and comparative-mythological account is taken at its word, the succubus is among the oldest continuously attested classes of alleged female non-human contact with humanity — its lineage traced from Mesopotamian cuneiform sources through Jewish, Christian, and Islamic demonology and into the present-day paranormal and abduction literature — rather than a late medieval invention or a simple mirror-image afterthought to the incubus. Peter Levenda holds that the sexual deviance once expected of succubi and incubi reappeared in the modern bedroom alien abduction, while the psychologist Susan Clancy reads the same nocturnal visitors as one episode of sleep paralysis successively named for Satan, witches, vampires and, in her own day, extraterrestrials.

Mesopotamian and Jewish antecedents

The Sumerian lilitu is recorded in cuneiform sources as a class of nocturnal spirit, distinguished in some texts from the related ardat lili (which specifically visits men) and idlu lili (which visits women) — figures originally classified among storm demons before later reinterpretation as nocturnal, bedroom-specific assailants. Jewish tradition absorbed and elaborated this figure as Lilith, described in later rabbinic and kabbalistic sources as the mother of the lilin — a lineage of demonic offspring distinct from, though sometimes conflated with, the half-human cambion offspring attributed to unions between humans and incubi or succubi in the separate Christian tradition.

Medieval Christian demonology

Augustine raised the theological question of nocturnal sexual demons as early as the fifth century, and by the height of the medieval period the succubus was fully integrated alongside the incubus into inquisitorial demonology; the Malleus Maleficarum's account of a single demon alternating between succubus and incubus roles was the dominant scholastic explanation for how an otherwise sterile demon could still be credited with fathering human offspring. The succubus shares with the incubus the same prescribed Church remedies, the same dissenting scholarly view that such demons "do not obey exorcists," and the same cambion offspring concept exemplified by the legend of Merlin, whose father is named specifically as an incubus rather than a succubus in the surviving medieval account.

Modern occult and popular usage

Since the twentieth century, the succubus has been widely adopted in occult, neopagan, and popular fiction as a demon or spirit ally that can be deliberately invoked rather than an unwanted nocturnal assailant, and has become — considerably more than the incubus — a recurring figure in modern fantasy and horror fiction, a popular-culture elaboration distinct from the classical demonological tradition documented above.[citation needed] In the contactee literature the succubus and incubus appear instead among the negative beings said to take advantage of human distraction: the walk-in and contactee Mark Brinckerhoff tells humans to stop feeding energy to "those negative beings who are utilizing it around us," naming "succubi, incubi, those kind of beings" among them.

Nocturnal assault and the bedroom-abduction report

The succubus, alongside the incubus, is one of several cross-cultural names reported for the assailant figure in the nocturnal paralysis-and-pressure experience — the same reported episode named the Old Hag in Newfoundland and attributed to jinn in Egypt. The folklorist David Hufford generalised such supernatural-assault accounts as "Mara attacks" and, in Bullard's summary, recognised that the experience's consistency of phenomenology and independence from tradition posed a head-on challenge to the prevailing academic consensus on anomalistic encounters; Hufford himself takes an agnostic view on the origin of the attacks. Tom DeLonge and Peter Levenda titled their own chapter on the modern bedroom-abduction report "The Succubus in the Saucer," naming the incubus/succubus tradition directly as its historical antecedent.

The monk Rodolfus Glaber recorded a visitor at the foot of his bed, "a manikin-like being of terrible aspect," and the folklorist Thomas E. Bullard hears Church demonology echoing through the account. Bullard notes that, in the Malleus Maleficarum, demons perverted natural reproduction when the succubus stole semen from men and the incubus impregnated women with the stolen seed, and finds "witchlike characteristics" persisting in the current portrayal of aliens: a clandestine secret society menacing mankind, a xenophobic fear of an alien Other, and a superhuman threat to the well-being of children. Levenda calls the witches' Sabbat "a perfect example of a fifteenth-century perspective on twentieth-century alien abduction," and holds that the sexual deviance once expected from congress with the Devil, in succubi and incubi said to take semen and create "hybrids," reappeared in the beings Whitley Strieber calls the Visitors. In his account of Strieber's 1985 encounter Levenda writes "A succubus in the saucer": among the different types of beings Strieber saw was at least one that he felt was feminine.

The abduction researcher Karla Turner describes a variant in which the seducer is a mask. She tells of a young man compelled out of his house at night to meet a beautiful Nordic-looking woman waiting with open arms; as he embraced her the image dissolved, and "what was holding him was not blonde, beautiful, or human." Turner holds that the beings "can and do give us any illusion they choose during abduction scenarios," and that showing humans attractive figures fosters a belief in the beings' beauty and compassion.

Clancy reads the assault continuity the other way: the sensed presence, immobility and crushing pressure have been interpreted at other times as Satan, demons, witches and vampires, and "today, it's extraterrestrials"; the phenomenology is shared, but "sleep paralysis is a fact; alien abduction isn't." Clancy writes that the episode first happened to her just after she had written a paper on the topic.

Open questions

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