Incubus

Incubi - Justin Martyr, Clement, and Tertullian believe the incubi are "corporeal angels who allowed themselves to fall into the sin of lewdness with women."  [Rf.  Sinistrari, Demoniality; or Incubi and Succubi.]  (a)

The Incubus:  According to the church fathers, the incubus was an angel who fell from grace because of his insatiable lust for women.  As a demon, the incubus continued with his carnal desires, preying upon vulnerable women, raping them in their sleep or provoking in them sexual desires that only the incubus (sometimes known as the demon lover) could satisfy.

Since demons, according to the traditional wisdom, were only spirits and had no corporeal form, the incubus was presumed to come upon his physical form in one of two ways:  he either reanimated a human corpse, or he used human flesh to create a body of his own, which he then endowed with artificial life.  Especially mischievous and clever incubi were often able to make themselves appear in the persons of real people - a husband, neighbor, the handsome young stablehand.  In one case, a medieval nun seem to have been sexually assaulted by a local prelate, Bishop Sylvanus, but the bishop defended himself on the grounds that an incubus had assumed his form.  The convent took his word for it.

So how could a woman tell for sure if her lover was a demon or not?  There were a few clues.  If she freely admitted the incubus to her bed, it would have the power to put everyone else in the house into a deep sleep - even her husband, who might be lying right beside her.  Other clues were even more obvious - the incubus often proved to be a nasty lover, with a sexual organ that was painfully large, freezing cold, made of iron, or even double-pronged.

Occasionally, these unholy unions were thought to create offspring.  Any children who were born with a deformity were automatically suspect.  Twins were looked at askance, too.  The magician Merlin was believed to be the fruit of demonic intercourse.  And medieval records are filled with graphic accounts of half-human, half-animal creatures that were reputedly sired by incubi.

But even with all the attention that was paid to them, there never seemed to be a foolproof way of warding off these demon lovers.  Sometimes prayer worked, sometimes exorcism and benediction, but in many cases, even these proved futile.  According to Ludovico Sinistrari, the seventeenth-century Franciscan friar who authorized Demoniality, incubi "do not obey the exorcists, have no dread of exorcisms, show no reverence for holy things at the approach of which they are not in the least bit overawed...Sometimes they even laugh at exorcisms, strike at the exorcists themselves, and rend the sacred vestments."  If they were sufficiently irritated by these attacks, incubi could respond with random violence and mayhem.  When Sinistrari himself tried to free a virtuous matron from one persistent incubus, the demon gathered hundreds of roofing stones and with them erected a wall around the woman's bed.  When it was finished, the wall was so high, Sinistrari reports, "the couple were unable to leave their bed without using a ladder." (c)

Incubus:  An incubus, according to Judeo-Christian legend, is a masculine DEMON sent to bring the souls of young maidens to hell through sexual depravity.  Medieval accounts of such diabolical couplings claim that intercourse with these fiends is usually painful and unpleasant, yet women often find incubi irresistibly seductive despite the physical agony.  Elders warn against such blasphemous carnal unions, declaring that to have relations with an incubus is the "quickest path to hell."

Men are similarly admonished to avoid the SUCCUBUS, the female version of this notorious demon.  They, too, have overwhelming sexual powers and could easily lead men to damnation. (o)

Incubus (etymologically, one who presses upon or crushes) is generally described as a condition appearing while the subject sleeps, and is characterized by three main features: agonizing dread, a sense of oppression or weight upon the chest interfering with respiration, and the illusion of helpless paralysis.  In antiquity, the incubus was thought to be lustful and was given various names: e.g., ephialtes (the one who jumps or rests upon, especially in dreams) and faunus (a lustful being).  By and large, the Greeks believed that the appearance of these beings in dreams was caused by over-indulgence in eating and drinking, epilepsy, and other diseases - in essence, the consequence of somatic disorders - and treatment was prescribed accordingly.  In the Old Testament the incubus was viewed as a voluptuous being eager to mate with women.  For Augustine, "Sylvans and Pan [lesser deities of field and forest], who are commonly called incubi, had often performed obscenities on women and attacked and sought congress with them" (De civitate Dei 15.23).  This view was perpetuated by the Church Fathers and acquired dramatic representation in the temptations of Anthony, the famous anchorite; it persisted in medieval literature, as in Isidore of Seville's encyclopedic Etymologiae.

Although incubi were considered dreams and illusions by the "Canon Episcopi" (c. 900) and by Gratian's "Decrees" (1140), the Church eventually came to accept their existence as genuine and by equating sorcery with heresy found a way through the Inquisition to exterminate those convicted of being involved with incubi.  This position acquired official recognition in the Malleus maleficarum* (1487) and was also accepted by Protestant leaders and by demonologists.  In literature, allusions to the incubus appeared in Shakespeare and, later on, among representative Romantic writers.

In the mid-nineteenth century, a psychological interpretation of the incubus was first proposed by the Frenchman Moreau de Tours and by the German Spittberger.  The sexual etiology of the symptoms already hinted at (e.g., Robert Burton in his seventeenth-century Anatomy of Melancholy [1.2.2]), became paramount in Freud, who attributed it to the expression of mental conflict over incestuous desire.  In his book On the Nightmare, Ernest Jones, one of Freud's staunchest followers, attributed to unresolved sexual conflicts the belief in nightmares, incubi, the vampire, and witches. (q)

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621; repr. New York: Dutton 1932; New York: Random House, 1977); E. Jones, On the Nightmare (New York: Liverwright, 1931; 2nd ed, 1951).  R. H. Robbins, The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology (New York; Crown, 1959), pp. 254-59; H. Daniel, Devils, Monsters, and Nightmares.  An Introduction to the Grotesque and Fantastic in Art (New York: Abelard-schuman, 1964); Nicholas Kiessling, The Incubus in English Literature: Provenance and Progeny (Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press, 1977).

Resource List - all entries are taken verbatim from the original source:

(a) "The Dictionary of Angels" by Gustav Davidson, © 1967

(c) "Fallen Angels...and Spirits of the Dark" by Robert Masello ©1994. 

(o) "The Encyclopedia of Hell."  Miriam Van Scott.  St. Martin's Press.  ©1998

(q) "Essentials of Demonology."  Edward Langton.  Epworth Press. London. ©1949.