Concerning the Author of “Eros and Evil”

Some might have found the facts and ideas that R. E. L. Masters offers in Eros and Evil: The Sexual Psychopathology of Witchcraft to be intriguing, as I have. If so, perhaps they would be equally interested to learn something about the author’s life.

An early pioneer in the human potential movement, after studying at the University of Marburg, Masters earned a doctorate from the University of Missouri. He taught philosophy for a while, before moving to New York City, in 1962, where he became the editor for Julian Press’ Library of Sex Research in 1962, publishing many volumes related to sexual topics, including Eros and Evil. In 1965, he married Jean Houston, who has a Ph.D. in religion from Columbia University, with whom he later founded The Foundation for Mind Research. He was interested in paranormal and extrasensory perception, especially as these disciplines relate to education and learning, and he was the founder of the Association for the Masters Psychophysical Method, of which he was president emeritus.

During his lifetime, Masters hobnobbed with several famous men and women, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Elvis Presley.

A pioneer in the study of the effects of LSD on research subjects who claimed to have ESP, Jean is better known for her relationship with former president Bill Clinton’s wife, the current secretary of state and former first lady, whom Jean urged to imagine herself (that is, Hillary) holding conversations with former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, one of Hillary’s heroines, which led to charges in the media that Hillary was engaged in necromancy, channeling the spirits of the deceased.

Following her husband’s death, Jean founded the Mystery School, which taught that life is essentially a mystery. Life involved suffering, she believed, but, through proper training in the techniques she taught, men and women could overcome their misery and learn from their painful experiences, becoming better persons.
Robert T. Carroll is one of several who have criticized Jean’s beliefs for being facile and self-serving (she has made a good deal of money as a human potential movement guru). Her claims to have been friends with Albert Einstein and Tielhard de Chardin, to be the adopted daughter of Margaret Mead, and to learn her basic teaching techniques from ventriloquist Edgar Bergan have also been viewed with skepticism by some, as have her claims to hold multiple doctorates.

Like her late husband, Jean is the author of many books and has held many posts associated with New Age thought, human potential, “mind research,” parapsychology, and other esoteric disciplines. Her scholarship is debatable, her critics contend, calling her more an amateur than a serious student of psychology or any of the many other studies she pursues. Radio journalist Scott London’s interview with her sheds some light--and, perhaps, much darkness--on the person, thought, and beliefs of Jean Houston.

It is with at least a passing awareness of the worldviews and mindsets of both R. E. L. Masters and Jean Houston that one should consider the claims, ideas, and speculations of Evil and Eros Whatever factual and intellectual status a reader might judge the volume to have (or not to have), it remains an interesting, enjoyable, even, at times, fascinating read.

Summary of, and Excerpts from, “Eros and Evil,” Part VII

In chapter 16 of Eros and Evil: The Sexual Psychopathology of Witchcraft, R. E. L. Masters comes to grips with “sources of the witch belief.” It is a mistake, he implies, to ascribe purely superstitious, religious, or psychological explanations to the origin and sustaining of the hysteria that underlay the phenomenon that the Church and the Inquisition sought to suppress by any means necessary, including torture and execution. One must examine history to account fully for the belief in witches and witchcraft and one must, in doing so, not neglect political considerations or the relationship, often imagined, between perverse sexuality and blasphemy and between human’s consorting with demons and heresy. However, it is clear, also, that sex itself was at least one major source of the witchcraft craze.

As Masters implies earlier in his study, pornography was probably a contributing factor to the phenomenon. While the Middle Ages had no pornographic industry anything like the contemporary one, it, nevertheless, was influenced by the knowledge of fertility cults, worship of the phallus, orgies, human sacrifices, cannibalism, and “erotic cults” such as the Flagellants, “the nudist Adamites, and their offshoot, the Picards,” Italy’s Fraticelli, the Cathars, the Waldensians, and other (142), and these historical and religious organizations and their practices, like the ribald stories of legend, folklore, and fairy tales, perhaps inspired some of the accounts of demon sex that accused witches related during their trials and under torture by sadistic and lascivious tormentors. Ultimately, for Masters, however, the witchcraft hysteria has a psychological explanation: the repressed id erupts.

However, Masters also argues that the witchcraft trials themselves were also contributors to the unofficial, but pervasive, body of pornographic lore that spread, with the witchcraft hysteria itself, from one land to another, crossing even the Atlantic Ocean, to Salem, Massachusetts:

Looking back upon the sex lore of witchcraft, it is not unintuitive to regard the whole as a vast and complex pornographic phantasm or collective art work. As such, it might be regarded as the ultimate esthetic expression of an era notable for its excesses: the combination of an impossible ideal of asexuality, accompanied by a hatred of the flesh, with a practical libertinism seldom rivaled in all of history. This gigantic phantasm was a delusion insofar as it was mistaken for objective reality, leading to the most savage attempts at suppression of the imaginary offenses accepted as authentic by both the offenders and those who judged and punished them. It may be that largely as a result of intolerable pressures (the antisexual morality) the forces of the unconscious rose up in revolt, overpowering consciousness or threatening so to do, and that the extravagant cruelty of the attempted suppression was in fact an effort of consciousness, battling desperately for survival, to repress the black teeming hordes of the barbarian invaders and restore the forces of the unconscious to their traditional place in the psychic scheme (146-147).

Perhaps, in 1962, when Eros and Evil was first published, Masters’ Freudian account of the phenomenon seemed convincing. Today, when Freudian psychology itself is considered pseudoscience at best, such an explanation is not as persuasive to most. However, leaving aside Freud’s theory of a tripartite personality and his dubious notions of its battling components or dimensions or aspects, it seems likely that much of what Masters contends with respect to the pornographic elements of witchcraft and demonology bears consideration:

All of the elements usually found in the pornographic or obscene work of literature are to be found in the witch lore. Perversions of almost every kind are dealt with here and there is a preoccupation with excrement and filth. Tape, defloration, other violence, incest, the profanation of the sacred--all are present. To consider some of the criteria offered by the Kronhausens, the victim is often more or less a “willing collaborator.” The sexual organs and physiological sex responses are emphasized--the size of the penis, the feel of the penis in the vagina, the sensation produced by the ejaculation of the semen. There is the “permissive-seductive parent figure”--in this case the parent who hands over the child to the incubus to be sexually used, and who may participate in the orgy. There are :”supersexed males”--demons of limitless potency, with outsized penes; and “nymphomaniac females”--witches in perpetual rut, and succubi who drain their human lovers to the point of impotence and even death. Voyeurism and exhibitionism, homosexuality and bestiality, necrophilia and fetishism--all are part of the picture. Much pornographic writing was produced in Europe during the period of the witch persecutions, but the efforts of no single writer could rival in scope and intensity the obscene and pornographic work of art that is witchcraft in its totality (147).

A puzzling consideration with respect to the pornography that developed during he witchcraft craze, Masters declares, is the ugly appearance that is often attributed to sex fiends. Why were they frequently depicted, in art, as “hideous and grotesque,” he wonders (147). His view is that these figures represent a need, on the part of men and women to submit to a masochistic impulse: “the masochistic craving for self-degradation. . . may manifest itself in the choice of an ugly, deformed, or otherwise seemingly unattractive or repulsive sex partner” (148). The belief that such a figure is also evil may add to his or her masochistic appeal: “The raptures of sexual love, many a guilt-ridden voluptuary has noted, are intensified by the feeling that one is doing evil. It is this sense of sin, here pushed to its most intense, that does much to explain the sexual allure of demons” (148). Finally, for the Freudian Masters, sex demons, both incubi and succubae, perform another psychological function for victims of the sexual psychopathology peculiar to witches, demons, and their victims: they are the means by which, however temporality, sinners find a moment’s catharsis from their own sexual needs and desires, especially the more extreme, perverted, and forbidden ones that “celibates of the Church” attempted, at times unsuccessfully, to repress and society, in general, sought to suppress:

It is no more romantic to propose that the incubi and succubi, and the gamut of sexual activities attributed to witches and those demons, were the faulty repressed cravings of the frustrated celibates of the Church, projected in symbolic form upon the people; and that, for the Inquisitor, to kill a witch (usually and appropriately by burning) was to kill, also, for the moment, the lust that intolerably tormented him. But only for the moment; and then a new witch had to be found and killed, to put down the resurgent inadmissible desire (149).

Again, one may or may not accept Masters’ conclusions regarding the psychodynamics and the psychological and social ramifications of witchcraft and the sexual behaviors associated with it (at least in the imaginations of its persecutors), but, it must be admitted, his book is an interesting, if, sometimes, rather prurient, study of the craze, its causes, and its consequences.


Note: In the final installment of this series, I will provide information concerning the life and work of both Dr. Masters (1927-2008) and his widow, Dr. Jean Houston. Some of the material concerning them is itself bizarre and esoteric enough to qualify as mystical rather than scientific and may affect one’s perceptions of the validity of Masters’ opinions on the topics of interest to him (mostly sex and the supernatural).

Summary of, and Excerpts from, "Eros and Evil," Part VI

 

In chapter 7, “Demoniality: forms of the union,” of Eros and Evil, R. E. L. Masters points out that “in seeking to understand the erotic pathology of witchcraft one should pay particular attention to the forms of the sexual unions in which witches and demons participated, and to the various roles assumed by the witches and the demons in different relationships” (58). This sounds like as good an excuse as any to examine the sex lives of witches and demons up close and personal.

Sex with sex demons had a benefit for the wanton women, witches, who participated in such activity, Masters suggests: with the devil or a demon as one’s sexual partner, “since at first embrace one has given oneself over completely to evil and damnation, all restraints may be cast aside, all cravings indulged. There is nothing more to lose, and so all becomes permissible--and, with the aid of the Devil’s supernatural powers, possible” (58). The witch’s only limitation is her imagination, and what she, in fact, does (or fantasizes as having done) is often suggested, Masters suggests, by “what she would wish to do with her man--if she were not a good woman, if she were not afraid, if repression and suppression did not frustrate and inhibit her” (58). These repressed desires and secret cravings may have been the sources for the material that such a woman, tortured by the Inquisition, would confess concerning her relationship with the devil or demons.

Regarding the witches’ admission to Inquisitors that sex with sex demons was both painful and repulsive, Masters points out that these women, nevertheless, persisted in engaging in these acts, and, he believes, that “it seems clear that in the great majority of demon-human sex relations there is neither conscious, unalloyed pleasure nor pure revulsion and pain, but a mixture of the two, as indeed is the case, though less pronouncedly, with most sexual relationships between humans,” (59) especially those which involve a measure of infidelity, real or imagined, to one’s spouse. Indeed, some thinkers, Pico della Mirandola included, “believed that copulation with demons gave witches much more greater pleasure than they could possibly achieve with human lovers. . . . because the demon took a form consistent with the witch’s ideal of beauty and sexual attractiveness, and because his penis was ;larger than a man’s,” providing her with “an intensity of delight in the most private parts,” especially since a demon was adept at agitating “their members inside the vagina, causing them to spin” or “throb” (60). Moreover, their union might be prolonged by their becoming “locked together, like a pair of dogs. . . for some time” (61).

Although men typically remained faithful, as it were, to one succubus, women “often had successions of
demon lovers, or they might even retain several incubi at a time, or whole harems of them,” (61) a situation that would definitely not have been otherwise permissible to them in the Western world of medieval times. If a particular witch seemed reluctant to engage in sex with her demon or proved “jaded” about doing so yet again, some fiends showed surprising solicitude and patience, acting as “pornographers” and “painting erotic pictures, or singing songs” by which to serenade their lovers (62).

Demons seemed to “prefer” to engage witches vaginally, from behind, possibly, some claimed, because God forbade them to employ the missionary position, reserving it only “for those joined in holy wedlock” (63). However, God didn’t limit them from the array of sexual perversions in which the demons and witches otherwise indulged themselves.

Demon sex often involved rape, pedophilia, incest, pimping, and prostitution. Occasionally, it was spiced with homosexuality or bestiality. According to masters, “the year 1400 is often given as an approximate turning point in the Devil’s career as a carnal consort of human females. Previous to that time, he was for the most part a rapist, prevailing by force, by threat, or by chicanery” (64). However, during the Middle Ages, rape was considered to be motivated primarily by the rapist’s experience of pleasure both in dominating his victim and in his physical enjoyment of the sexual act itself, and “the belief that demons committed rape seems to have been abandoned, as a consequence of the abandonment at about the same time of the belief that demons are sexually attracted to mortals. (If demons experienced no desire, they would not rape)” (64).
Instead, “from the fifteenth century on,” demons were held to engage in sex with men and women “in order to lead them into sin,” which required the human participant’s participation to be “voluntary” (64-65).

Demons sometimes had sexual relations with children as young as three--and, in one case, according to a
64-year-old witch’s confession, while she was but a fetus in the womb--and would sometimes conclude with the cannibalization of the victim. Children older than seven were held accountable for their sin in participating in such sins and executed, along with adults, after being tried and tortured. Judges and lawyers, Masters observes, were outraged at this: the age of seven was, to their minds, “unrealistically lenient,” especially since it was clear, “as theologians pointed out,” that “God permits even infants to die, without being baptized, so that although seemingly innocent of even the slightest wrongdoing they are denied entrance into heaven” (68).
It was usually the child’s parents who remanded their son or daughter to the authorities to be tried for these sins. Many children were executed: “In any case thousands of children are reported to have been executed for lewdly coupling with incubi and succubi. In Wurtzburg alone more than three hundred children of such ages as three and four years confessed to sexual intercourse with demons,” and those over the age of seven were held to be “sufficiently corrupt and incorrigible to be put to death” (68).

Apparently, neither the Church nor the state were “respecters of person” when it came to enforcing the morality of their Christian faith.

Another favorite type of sexual union for demons involved incest. Although they, as demons, were unable to participate directly in this type of sex, they could inspire humans to do so, and the charge of incest was a favorite allegation of the Church against heretics such as “the Cathars“ and “the Luciferians,” among others (71). Favorite forms of this pastime were unions between parents (fathers and daughters or mothers and sons--with the goal of the son‘s impregnating his mother) and siblings, and, at witches’ sabbats during which such sexual relations between relatives took place, the presiding demon was “kissed under His tail,” that is, upon his anus. Refreshments included the flesh of children, and attendees “were sworn to try to prevent marriages,” the better “to encourage fornication, or to create a group of frustrated persons who would fall easy prey to the proffered orgies of the Sabbat” (71).

Demons also pimped and prostituted themselves. Supposedly, the devil attempted to tempt Jesus to sin with prostitutes, as he did lesser holy men, including Saint Anthony, Saint Benedict, Saint Elizabeth, Saint Martin, and Saint Victorinus, with only the last having “succumbed” (72). The magician Faust was also tempted in this manner. Some apparently did ‘a thriving business amongst the clergy” (74). Sex fiends also “both patronized human brothels and operated bawdy houses of their own,” although one was more interested in his own sexual pleasure than he was in making money from the desires of others, for he “ejected the human customers from one brothel, so that he could have all the women for himself.” Another demon brothel manager favored succubi over human women as his prostitutes, staffing “a notorious house of prostitution” in Bologna “entirely. . . by succubi” (74).

Some demons kept prostitutes as mistresses, paying them in gold and jewels for their services, although the demons sometimes tricked their concubines; one paid his in the fold coin that she demanded, but when she tried to spend it, the gold coins were transformed into “black dung” (74).

Homosexual sexual relations between demons and humans were uncommon, although the book of Genesis alludes to demons who lusted after the men of Sodom, and “there is also an account of a Witches’ Sabbat, held atop Mount Tonale, at which beautiful youths were provided for the sexual pleasures of the all-male gathering.”

Bestiality was more common; however, the animals who copulated with men and women were really demons in disguise, and, as such, they retained the ability to speak. From the earliest days, theologians reported, demons in the guise of animals have been able to speak intelligibly, as the serpent (really, the devil, Satan) who tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden indicates. Demons took the forms of many animals I order to commit bestiality with human beings, assuming the shapes of “whatever walked, crept, crawled, swam, or flew” (76), and werewolves “ravished helpless little girls” (76). Witches also assumed a variety of animal forms, Masters says, to copulate with men or women, including such forms as “wolf, cat, dog, sheep, cow, ass, pig, fox, chicken or insect.” As an insect, she was sometimes “a loathsome black or green beetle,” but a witch might also become a moth or a butterfly. Likewise, “serpents and toads, owls and crows--and especially the raven, who might nip off a woman’s clitoris with a single snap of his beak--were sometimes witches transformed” (76). Perhaps to take the unwary unaware, “some practitioners of the black arts assumed the shapes of plants, and of such objects as sticks, brooms, wagon wheels, and old wooden buckets” (76-77).

Should one wonder what enjoyment a witch could have in the form of an animal as small as a cat, Maters reminds his readers that, “when the cat form was assumed, the cat would be one of the size of a large dog, or a goat,” and, besides, the animal would have “sexual organs like those of humans--those most excellently proportioned instruments of their kind” (77).

Although demons might take upon themselves the shape of a serpent to commit bestiality, their favorite form, Masters says, “was that of the goat,” the same animal shape in which the devil himself usually appeared when he presided over a sabbat (77). In Demonolatry, Nicholas Remy lays out his theory as to why demons are fond of appearing as goats. This form most suits their true nature, he argues, because goats, like demons, stink, are lascivious, are pugnacious, are fierce-looking, and have a grotesque appearance overall (77-78).

Masters disagrees, seeing the depiction of demons as goats as having “obviously derived from pagan literature, mythology, and history, with the Devil-as-goat a transparent relative of the Goat of Mendes on the one hand, the satyrs on the other” (78). There seems to have been another important reason for demons’ assumption of the goat’s form, Masters adds: bestiality was a sin punishable by execution, Leviticus XX requiring that any man or woman who lies with a beast--and for the animal itself--to be “put to death.”

Apparently, incubi, who often experienced satyriasis, fancied themselves to be quite the stallions, for, according to Masters, their favorite companions in bestiality were mares. The sex fiends provided well for fillies who responded to their sexual advances, but starved and otherwise punished mares who resisted them, with the result that farmers and ranchers could tell, by which of their mares were fat and which skinny, the mares among them that had submitted to the demons’ perverted desires.

Father Sinistrari of Ameno, apparently something of an expert concerning bestiality, argued that it is the demon, and not the human, who commit’s the act, for which reason, the demon might one day decide to kill his or her human sex partner for the same reason that a man who copulates with a beast might slay the animal:

The reason being that, being liable to sin whilst on the way to salvation, in via, they must likewise be open to repentance; and in the same manner as a man, who habitually sins with a beast, is enjoined by his confessor to destroy that beast, with a view to suppressing the occasion of relapsing, it may likewise happen that the penitent Demon should slay the animal with which it sinned, whether man or beast; nor will death thus occasioned to a man be reckoned a sin to the Demon, any more than death inflicted on a beast is imputed as a sin to man; for, considering the essential difference between a Demon of that kind and man, the man will be the same thing to the Demon as the beast is to the man (81).

Summary of, and Excerpts from, “Evil and Eros,” Part V

Does the offspring of demonic-human unions have a soul? This is one of the issues that R. E. L. Masters discusses in chapter 4, “Offspring of demoniality,” of Eros and Evil: The Sexual Psychopathology of Witchcraft. The answer to this question became urgent for Christians who feared that the birth of the antichrist would usher in the apocalypse that would destroy the world. “Some,” Masters writes, “attribute the ferocity of the witch trials to the fear that a witch, united with an incubus, would bring forth the Anti-Christ” (42-43), a fear that approached the “fever pitch” of hysteria “during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries” and led the pope to issue a bull forbidding “all preaching to the effect that the coming of the Anti-Christ was imminent” (43).

According to some, the antichrist had, in fact, already made an appearance in human history, as Romulus and Remus, the “founders of Rome” (Livy and Plutarch); as Servius-Tullius, “the sixth king of Rome” (Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Pliny the Elder); as Plato (Diogenes Laertius and Saint Hieronymus); as Alexander the Great (Plutarch and Quintus-Curtius); as Seleucus, “king of Syria” (Justinus and Appianus); as Scipio Africanus the Elder (Livy); as Cesar Augustus (Suetonius); as Aristonenes the Messenia, “an illustrious Greek commander”) (Strabo and Pausanias); as Merlin; and as Martin Luther (Cochloeis, as quoted by Maluenda). Several of these claims were supported, anecdotally, at least, by legends that explained how the forebears of these anti-christs were seduced or raped by sex fiends, Plato as a result of sex between a virgin and Apollo; Martin Luther, after a demon, disguised as “a traveling salesman (jewel merchant)” seduced “the daughter of Luther’s grandfather,” and Merlin following the rape of one of his grandmothers three daughters during “an enchanted slumber.” The demon meant to produce the anti-christ as a result of his rape of the daughter, “but Merlin was baptized at birth, and the Devil’s plot was foiled,” Merlin becoming a magician rather than the anti-christ (43-44).

Molitor offered a different explanation for Merlin’s conception:

Molitor. . . denied that Merlin was the son of an incubus (or of the Devil), although he conceded that Merlin’s mother believed such to be the case. But Merlin’s mother, Molitor believed, was deceived by her incubus, who made her think she was pregnant by causing her to fill with flatulence. Then, when the time for childbirth arrived, the demon deflated her and placed a stolen infant in her bed, so she honestly believed herself to have borne it (45).

The demon was as adept at sleight of hand as Merlin himself would later become, it appears. Moreover, their trick was popular enough to become routine: “Such false pregnancies, no more than gas bloating the belly, were not infrequently visited upon women by demons who for one reason or another wished to deceive their human paramours” (44). The Malleus Maleficarum even exposed how such a feat was effected: “By taking ants’ eggs in drink, or the seeds of spurge or of the black pine, an incredible amount of wind and flatulence is generated in the human stomach” (44).

Likewise, Belkis, Queen of Sheba, was also considered the offspring of a demon, as attested to, among other things, by her “luxuriant shag of silky black pubic hair that raged upward to her navel and extended downward to her knees” (43-44). The entire tribe of the Huns were also “descended from demons after Filmer, King of the Goths,” drove prostitutes who were attempting to seduce his soldiers into the forest, where, “lacking human lovers. . . they mated with devils” (44).

Masters includes an incident that is unusual, even for his book’s study, an incident which, furthermore, suggests subterfuge, perhaps, more than it does demonic activity:

It would surely be inexcusable not to recall here that in 1545 at Esslingen a young woman named Margaret experiences a most remarkable and distressing pregnancy following intercourse with her demon lover. So immense did her belly become that it was with difficulty visitors to her bedside were able to find her face and feet. From within her stomach, cacophonous, and against all nature, a veritable chorus of animal cries were heard--cocks crowing and hens cackling and the bowwowing of dogs, the baaing of sheep and the whinnying of horses. . . . By some accounts of the event this was all a fraud. It is claimed that she was afterward discovered to be wearing a skin stretched tight over hoops, and so to have deceived a large host of eminent physicians and learned ecclesiastics who came from around the countryside to have a look at her. Inside of the fraudulent contraption, it is said, was the body of a young woman most delectably formed. Others, however, say that he pregnancy was entirely authentic and that she bore all manner of strange, loathly, and bestial; creatures (46).

Although the hybrid children of demonic-human unions “might at first” seem “quite normal,” they were sooner or later “detected,” whether by their “puny appearance,” but unusually heavy weight; by their early deaths; by their “many disagreeable traits of character”; or by their abnormally quick rate of growth (46-47). Some were not truly children, whether demon, human, or otherwise, but “effigies” that demons employed so as to fool women into believing they had actually “given birth.” These “effigies” would often vanish “in a few hours or days or weeks,” so that “a woman could not really be certain (if she had lain with a demon) whether her child was authentic or merely an effigy” (47).

Other beliefs are also associated with the birth of children as a result of demon-human unions: sometimes, these unions would result in the birth of elves, “usually. . . as twins”; the offspring of these couplings were often stillborn; and demons had learned a way to ensure the eventual size of the children whom they fathered upon women:

The method was simple. Since it was thought that the amount of semen injected into the womb determined the size of the child, all that was needed was a sparse ejaculation to produce a pygmy, a copious one to yield a giant (48).

Trivia: According to Masters, “Angela de Labarethe (or Angele de la Bathe), a 56-year-old noblewoman of Toulouse, stands out among witches bearing offspring of incubi for the reason that she was the first woman to be executed by the Inquisition (in 1275) for copulating with a demon” (46).

Summary of, and Excerpts from, "Eros and Evil," Part IV

 

As its title implies, chapter 4 of R. E. L. Masters’ Eros and Evil: The Sexual Psychopathology of Witchcraft, concerns “The semen and the demon.” Demonologists, the author writes, concur that demons may impregnate women, but exactly how the sex fiends manage to do so was open to debate among these students of the occult. Did the demon use his own sperm or inject semen he’d previously stolen, perhaps in the guise of a succubus. As an aside, such thinkers also wondered who had claim as the father of the demon’s offspring?

Some claimed that demons were fertile, but most took the opposite view, asserting that they were sterile. However, by fornicating with men in the shape of a succubus, a demon could obtain a man’s seed, transporting it to a woman’s bed, and then inject the fluid as an incubus. This was but one theory, however, as to how demons impregnated women. They might “recover semen spilled” during “masturbation” or in wet dreams, “which demons” themselves “caused for that purpose”; “coitus interruptus,” or the sin of onanism, provided another opportunity for demons to collect semen, as did their practice of “milking the penes [penises] of recently deceased males.” Hanged men ejaculated; therefore, they, too, provided a means for the collection of semen (34). Where there was a will, there was not merely a way, it seems, but many ways.

Some believed that keeping the semen “warm” and viable was an easy task for demons, because, the journey between visits to women as incubi and to men as succubi required the fiends “but an instant,“ during which the sperm would remain alive and well (35). Demons proved themselves devilishly clever in devising means by which to obtain the seed they needed to father children.

To prevent demons access to the semen of the dead, corpses were to be buried in a timely manner. This precaution also prevented the corpse’s seed from being blown about by the wind and inadvertently impregnating a hapless virgin or being submerged in the sea, wherein it might “fertilize fishes” who would then spawn “dreadful sea monsters” (35-36).

Nicholas Remy took issue with the idea of the dead men’s ability to father demonic offspring, stating that one species cannot reproduce upon or through another species (and, surely, demons and human beings were different species!) and arguing that only the seed of “a living man” could be viable. He raised other objections, too, such as the freezing temperature of the penetrated succubus--such a condition would hardly excite a man to the point that he would be capable of ejaculating--and that, even if semen were obtainable in this manner, it would become freezing cold inside the incubus and, as a result, “probably infertile” (36).

If ingenious, demons were also practical. They would not bother, it was believed, to collect, transport, and inject semen into “pre-pubertal girls” any more than they would do so when they were to have sexual intercourse “with withered and sterile crones, since that would have been a waste of both energy and sperm” (38).

The Reverend Father Sinistrari of Ameno supported the idea that demons were able to produce their own semen, With their infernal seed, they impregnated women.

Regardless of the source of demon semen, it was copious in ejaculation, according to witches. One woman claimed that her incubus discharged a volume of ejaculate “equal in quantity to the normal output of one thousand males” (40), which is to say, approximately 1,000 teaspoons, or 166.66 fluid ounces! If, in the guise of a succubus, this ambitious incubus obtained this fluid from men, he must have been one busy sex fiend, indeed.

Finally, in closing this chapter of his investigation into “the sexual psychopathology of witchcraft,” Masters suggests a source for at least some of the details concerning sexual relations with demons to which, often under torture, women accused of practicing witchcraft often confessed: pornography. The “superabundance of ejaculate,” he observes, “is a stock in trade of pornographic literature, and many. . . have noted in the witch testimony a substantial number of other details such as are found among the traditional pornographic stereotypes” (39-40). One must wonder whether it was the witches, their Inquisitors, theologians, or whores and pornographers whose imaginations were depraved enough to imagine the horrors of sexual relations with demons that litter the literature of witchcraft trials and theological treatises on such proceedings.