Religious and Scientific Accounts of Sex Demons

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

In Eros and Evil, R. E. L. Masters theorizes that the accounts of sex with demons that women often provided during medieval witchcraft trials, frequently while they were undergoing torture, included sexual practices that, until fairly recently, were considered unnatural and perverse. Indeed, Masters further suggests, contemporary pornography provides a release by which many of today's sexually repressed readers find release for their own pent-up passions.

For writers who enjoy offering their readers a choice as to whether the supposedly supernatural events in their stories actually are supernatural or are really nothing more than unusual natural events, science offers some ideas as to how some apparently supernatural events may be explained in rational, natural, or scientific terms; at the same time, however, readers who believe that there may be a supernatural order of existence transcendent to this world (or universe) also have recourse to the supernatural explanation of the same events.

For example, sex demons appear in several films and in a few written works (poems, short stories, and novels) as well. Incubi (singular “incubus”) are male demons who have sex with human females (or who could do so, at least); succubi or succubae (singular “succubus”) are female demons who have sex with human males (or who could do so, at least).

In The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects, Barbara G. Walker traces the origin of incubi to the feminization of the demonic among ancient Greeks, suggesting that incubi represent “men's fears of sexual inadequacy, since the demons were said to give [women] more pleasure than their husbands did” (241). Originally, incubi were “priests” who presided over the “womb chamber” with which each temple was equipped. By spending the night in this chamber, “people in search of enlightenment or healing could 'incubate' . . . in anticipation of a spiritual rebirth or vision.” When Christianity became the dominant religion in the Middle East and elsewhere, these priests were transformed into “incubi,” or “demons who seduced women” (260).

A well-known example of an incubus is the entity, who appears in The Entity.

A familiar instance of a succubus is the woman whom Jack Torrance (The Shining) sees in a suite of the Overlook Hotel. However, many other films and books include sex demons, especially those of the succubus type. (Hollie Horror lists many movies featuring sex demons of both varieties, complete with posters, plot summaries, and trailers.)

Mark Blanton's art often depicts incubi, in the form known to ancient Greeks as satyrs, engaged in activities with mortal women of a nature that, in today's parlance, would definitely be considered not safe for work (NSFW).

Lilith

The Greek myths of satyrs, he said, were examples of incubi. Such sex demons can be considered to be fallen angels who mate with mortal women. This view might have developed from an account of such a creature in The Epic of Gilgamesh and from the Biblical reference to “giants in the earth,” who were thought, by St. Augustine, to have been the offspring of incubi (the fallen “sons of God”) and mortal women (“the daughters of men”). Also, in Jewish folklore, Adam's first wife, Lilith, became a succubus after leaving Adam, and then had intercourse with the archangel Samael. “The daughters of Lilith,” Walker says, were “interpreted as demonic succubae.”

Thomas Aquinas and Augustine

St. Thomas Aquinas, however, disagrees with Augustine on this point, holding that such sex demons merely “assumed” bodies and used sperm that they had collected from men with whom they'd previously had intercourse as incubi to fertilize women to whom they appeared as succubi. (Yes, demon sex is complicated!)

Science offers a different explanation for such sex demons. Both the incubi and the succubi, according to the scientific view, might be caused by sleep paralysis, and, in men, nocturnal emissions may suggest the sexual component of the delusion.

The Skeptic's Dictionary offers a summary of sleep paralysis and how the condition might inspire a belief in one's having been visited by a sex demon (or, for that matter, extraterrestrials):

The condition is characterized by being unable to move or speak. It is often associated with a feeling that there is some sort of presence, a feeling which often arouses fear but is also accompanied by an inability to cry out. The paralysis may last only a few seconds. The experience may involve visual, auditory, or tactile hallucinations. The description of the symptoms of sleep paralysis is similar to the description many alien abductees give in recounting their abduction experiences. Sleep paralysis is thought by some to account for not only many alien abduction delusions, but also ghost sightings and delusions involving paranormal or supernatural experiences (e. g., incubus and succubus).

By allowing the possibility of a natural and a supernatural explanation for the same bizarre phenomenon and leaving it to their readers to decide on the explanation they prefer, horror writers can let their readers have their sex demon or their hallucination, as they see fit, and, at the same time, enrich the possibilities for their stories, resting assured that the sex demons (and their behavior) are both strange and horrific, whatever the explanation a reader adopts.

(By the way, Tzvetan Todorov offers an insightful discussion of these alternative sources of explanation, the scientific, or natural, and the supernatural, but uses the terms “uncanny” for phenomena that are explained scientifically and the term “marvelous for phenomena that are explained with recourse to the supernatural. Phenomena that cannot be resolved as either uncanny or marvelous, he says, remain “fantastic.”)