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.”)