.webp)
In modern day folklore, the incubus is usually associated with stories of sexy demons (or at least, sexually motivated demons). That's generally what people mean when they talk about an incubus now: “A demon assuming human physical dimensions, and sexually cohabiting with a woman,” as Bob Larsen the modern evangelist defines them. Sometimes folks talk about them just in a traditional mythology sense, but other times people insist they've experienced them in some form – Larsen himself claims to have dealt with “hundreds” of them, and one can find people on YouTube today recounting their experiences with them.
What is the actual history of the incubus? Like most mythology, it has varied and evolved over the centuries.
'That fend þat gooþ a nyȝt, Wommen wel ofte to begile, Incubus hatte be ryȝt.' - Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, translated by John Trevisa, ca. 1375
Some sources try to link incubi with Mesopotamian or Jewish demonic entities, but this seems to be the result of later authors trying to find Biblical backup for their argument that these entities exist. (Nota: there are no entities called incubi anywhere in the Bible, not even in the Vulgate. Anyone who says otherwise is misapplying the term to other kinds of demons.)
The first actual mention of an incubus I’ve personally been able to find is in the work of 1st century Roman physician Scribonius Largus. His book is a medical text, and already in the 1st century he makes clear he doesn’t really believe the claims that these are supernatural visits, but he does acknowledge a legitimate medical issue is behind it. “This compound [hyssop or horehound tea] works well for labored breathing, for loss of voice, and for sudden suffocations arising from whatever cause, and for those who are repeatedly thought to be teased by an incubus; they are nonetheless so tormented that they sometimes face danger to their life: for it is an affliction not to be dismissed, especially in advancing age.” The sexual element is not mentioned, nor so when the author Tertullian mentions the same phenomenon a couple centuries later. These early references are basically the old creature known in English as the nightmare or mære, an entity who puts its weight on a sleeper’s chest and causes them to experience breathing difficulty (understood in modern medicine to be sleep apnea – a treatable condition.) Because it is a genuine medical phenomenon, it is known in cultures across the globe and called by many names. Indeed, in modern Italian, which is derived from Latin, the word incubo is still used to refer to nightmares, even in the medical/psychological sense.
It seems to be with St. Augustine of Hippo (born in the 4th century) that the sexual elements of an incubus are first noted:
"There is, too, a very general rumor, which many have verified by their own experience, or which trustworthy persons who have heard the experience of others corroborate, that sylvans and fauns, who are commonly called 'incubi,' had often made wicked assaults upon women, and satisfied their lust upon them; and that certain devils, called Dusii by the Gauls, are constantly attempting and effecting this impurity is so generally affirmed, that it were impudent to deny it. From these assertions, indeed, I dare not determine whether there be some spirits embodied in an aerial substance (for this element, even when agitated by a fan, is sensibly felt by the body), and who are capable of lust and of mingling sensibly with women; but certainly I could by no means believe that God's holy angels could at that time have so fallen."
Note however what Augustine is talking about: he’s naming something he doesn’t immediately try to present as incubi but instead speaks of by another name (“Silvanos et Panes” in the original Latin.) These are not nightmare demons of the Bible – these are traditional folkloric creatures from pagan Europe.
Scholar Ronald Hutton, in his book Queens of the Wild, writes of “a tradition widely distributed across western Europe, which like the Anglo-Saxon elves, must derive from pre-Christian culture, of woodland beings which could take the form of beautiful people, of either gender, and have sexual intercourse with the humans whom they encountered and seduced. These seem to have been the equivalent to the classical Greek and Roman nymphs and satyrs, and were variously described by clerical authors as silvani (wood beings), Pans, agrestes feminae (wild women), fauns or Dusii. The authors concerned naturally equated them with demons, and wrote condemn the belief in them.” Arnobius Afer (4th century) also refers to them with the term fatua, meaning these entities are the same that would later evolve into the European fairies.
These early European incubi are not the incarnate Satan of later lore. Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12th century tells of the magician Merlin’s conception through an incubus visit, as allegedly reported by his mother in the time of King Vortigern (approximately 5th century):
"My sovereign lord," said she, "by the life of your soul and mine, I know nobody that begot him of me. Only this I know, that as I was once with my companions in our chambers, there appeared to me a person in the shape of a most beautiful young man, who often embraced me eagerly in his arms, and kissed me; and when he had stayed a little time, he suddenly vanished out of my sight. But many times after this he would talk with me when I sat alone, without making any visible appearance. When he had a long time haunted me in this manner, he at last lay with me several times in the shape of a man, and left me with child. And I do affirm to you, my sovereign lord, that excepting that young man, I know no body that begot him of me."
In other medieval texts, Merlin’s silvani origins are emphasized, as in the 13th century Roman de Silence where he is thus describes:
Car Merlin prendrés vus bien.
Jo vos dirai tolt son affaire,
Et se maniere, et son repaire.
Cho est uns hom trestols pelus
Et si est com uns ors velus;
Si est isnials com cers de lande.
Herbe, rachine est sa vïande.
(Translation: “For you will recognize Merlin well. I will tell you all about him, his manner and his dwelling place. He is a man entirely covered in hair, and he is like a shaggy bear; he is as swift as a stag of the heath. Herbs and roots are his food.”)
This is a pretty straightforward description of what is known in English as a wodewose or woodwose. It is sometimes glossed with incubus, silvanus, or satyrus in medieval texts. They were popular figures in medieval times – the King of France and some of his knights dressed up as them for a wedding celebration, royals claimed to be descended from them, and there are many records of valuable cups and embroideries featuring their images. One wouldn’t expect people to use images of Satan or witches in such a manner, so obviously these creatures weren’t considered too frightening. The woodwoses did have a reputation for abducting women, however. This would parallel other traditional figures like the ancient Greek Aristaeus, a demi-god of the wilderness and wisdom, sometimes depicted with wings, and in certain versions of the Orpheus story he is the cause of Eurydice’s death by trying to rape her. Aristeaus’s father was the god Apollo, who also was known to try to attack women in the woods, as in his famous encounter with Daphne the nymph (who preferred to become a tree rather than allow herself to be taken.) The Greeks also had the tradition of centaurs – half-men half-horse beings held to be notorious for raping women – and of the panes and satyrs, nature spirits who were often depicted as drunk and horny.
In short, the sexual incubus seems to derive from a totally separate tradition to that of the suffocating nightmare, and its natural evolution without the push of Christian theology went in a different direction already mentioned – fairies. The story of Tam Lin, famously rendered by Robert Burns but documented from the 16th century and potentially even older, is another supernatural lover of the type: Tam Lin impregnates the story’s heroine by supernatural means (I’ve never seen a version where any sex between the pair was admitted) but she later has to rescue him from the Fairy Queen’s subterranean world before he’s to be given up to Hell as an annual sacrifice for Halloween. Thus we see here attempts to tie up the Christian theology with the traditional fairy lore.
The modern concept of the incubus is based on the theological version mentioned and perhaps begun via the writings of St. Augustine. His is effectively a corrupted version of the pagan lore, rendered to match with his Christian understanding. Because of his influence, Augustine’s admission of them meant later theologians had to figure out what this really was and how it fit into their worldview. It seems to be with Thomas Aquinas (13th century) that the idea of “evil demon” incubi gets popularized.
Reginald Scot in his 1584 book The Discoverie of Witchcraft gives a telling account:
“Heretofore (they saie) Incubus was faine to ravish women against their will, untill Anno. 1400: but now since that time witches consent willinglie to their desires: in so much as some one witch exerciseth that trade of lecherie with Incubus twentie or thirtie yeares togither; as was confessed by fourtie and eight witches burned at Ravenspurge. But what goodlie fellowes Incubus begetteth upon these witches, is prooved by Thomas of Aquine, Bodin, M. Mal. Hyperius, &c.”
In Hutton’s book Queens of the Wild the author examines some early witchcraft cases, where fairies were named as having taught the practitioners the art of magic or else with assisting them towards achieving their ends. Assuming this was not a new belief and rather merely became better documented due to the era (ca. 1500) we can see that these fairies aligned with some contemporary ideas about demons. The main difference is that fairies were traditionally thought to have a sort of corporeal form, even if it was potentially mutable, whereas demons it was understood did not.
Christian demonology needs a quick explanation here. There are only a few Biblical references to “demons,” and the villainization of them is usually either imposed later onto neutral mentions (such as the lilit spoken of in Isaiah among the spooky animals of the desert), or is clearly due to their being gods in a rival religion (such as Beelzebub in 2 Kings). The concept of demons as a class of being defined by malice toward humans is a much later framework. A story that is based on a poor translation of a passage in the Vulgate Bible created a sort of fanlore about demons having been angels that “fell” from Heaven due to pride, and it’s been common conception for quite a long time despite the absence of scholarly merit. The Christian demons also are considered to not have actual bodies but be some kind of sexless incorporeal being, since in Christian lore they started as angels but fell from grace (and as Augustine said, “I could by no means believe that God's holy angels could at that time have so fallen.”)
Victorian-era audiences were especially fascinated and repulsed by the sexual aura of the incubi – they often have trouble finding the words for them in their sexless Victorian vocabularies, as this remark from Henry Charles Lea in his 1888 History of the Inquisition:
“Into the physiological speculations by which these possibilities [of incubus breeding] were proved, it is not worth our while to enter. There is nothing fouler in all literature than the stories and illustrative examples by which these theories were supported.”
Most respectable publications only talked of the incubi in a folkloric or mythological aspect, or else connecting it with the new-burgeoning science of psychology. Following Italian practice, the term incubus in 19th century sources often means just any nightmare, not necessarily a sexual one. It was also used in a general sense of “phantom.”
During this era, fictional and scholarly reports of incubi and analogous characters like Victorian style vampires were reintroducing the ideas of the night-visits to women. The scholarship noted that there were similarities in these stories to tales from cultures around the world, and those who took part in Theosophy began to speculate that there might be something meaningful to them. Helena Blatavsky in her influential Isis Unveiled argues they are “the reflection of our own wicked, depraved and polluted soul that we see, hear and feel. Like attracts like, they say [...] Hence some dreams and visions that are pure and beautiful, others that are fiendish and beastly.”
And so came the 20th century, when universal education was supposed to get rid of these superstitious beliefs. Maybe it was working; apart from the scholarly reports on historical incidents, there’s very little written in the 20th century about incubi outside of sci-fi/fantasy genre works. That is until the Satanic Panic of the 1990s.
Now, keep in mind that by in the 90s, the incubus was still a little-known enough term that Reebok named a shoe after it. Yet it is in Bob Larson’s 1995 S.W.A.T. tapes where the oldest mention I’ve found of the New and Improved Incubus Demon rests. Larson says himself that he’d “never heard of anything like this” until a teenager told him that she had sex with the Devil. “At first I didn't believe her,” he screamingly reports from his cassette, “I thought she was kidding! I thought it was just a teenager with an overactive sexual imagination who was bragging! I said ‘What do you mean?’ She said, ‘I have sex with the Devil! He comes to me at night and he has sex with me!’ Now, I was a novice at that point. I had never heard of something called Incubus – a demon assuming human physical dimensions, and sexually cohabiting with a woman! Succubus is the counterpart, when the demon assumes female proportions, and actually cohabits with a man! Now I have since dealt with hundreds of these sexual demons through the years, and the people who have undergone the experiences – actually go through the physical sensations of the sex act! I have watched people, physically being attacked by these demons, and of course the demon is invisible, but the victim's body is not invisible, and you could actually see the person's body responding sexually! Now, they were clothed, but you could see the gesticulations and the maneuvers of their body!”
Larson assures that he “evaluates” for schizophrenia before acknowledging people to be attacked by demons, though as he is not a psychiatrist himself his exact method on determining this is unclear and possibly not sound. As mentioned at the start of this article, Incubus Syndrome is a recognized psychiatric disorder where sexual simulation in the patient’s movement is a common symptom. Doctors Sandeep Grover and Aseem Mehra report on one incident they observed:
“A 45-year-old woman presented to the emergency department with organophosphorus poisoning. Evaluation of history revealed that she was suffering from a psychotic disorder since the age of 25 years. Her illness was characterized by delusion of reference, delusion of persecution, delusion of control, poor socialization, poor self-care, anhedonia, and apathy. Since the age of 36 years in addition to the aforementioned symptoms, she started to experience that someone was having sexual intercourse with her. As per patient while lying down, both during the daytime and night, she could feel that someone was touching, kissing her all over the body including the breast, lips, and genitalia. Often, she would wake up in the middle of the sleep (after few hours of going to sleep) and feel that someone had sexual intercourse with her. She held this belief with delusional conviction. She would attribute these experiences to black magic. She would remain very distressed due to these symptoms and would feel guilty, as it was against her sociocultural belief to have sexual intercourse with someone other than her spouse. She never experienced orgasm during any such episodes. Due to this, she also attempted to harm herself on multiple occasions. [...] She was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and was managed with risperidone 3 mg/day, with which her symptoms resolved.”
Unfortunately, a recognition of how these entities tie into medical conditions has sometimes had the opposite effect to creating educated reactions. In recent years an American doctor has been called out for claiming gynecological problems are caused by incubi.
There has been a surge of “incubus” reports since the internet spread the word about them, but in many cases it is the term being applied to a different kind of entity out of a separate tradition, or an effort to frame the psychiatric disorder in a deliverance ministry framework.
Due to taboos about people with psychiatric disorders, some folks prefer the story that demons are coming to rape them – at least if that is the case, it would be an external problem and not something wrong with yourself. That is, unless you go for the popular Pentecostal-influenced deliverance ministry preachers who say in fact it is your fault because the demons wouldn’t bother you to start with if you hadn’t invited them. Watching porn is often named as something you’ll have done to “invite” them. It actually matches Blatavsky’s claim that one only experiences these negative entities in a like-to-like.
HOW TO GET RID OF INCUBI: Historical Remedies
Scribonius advises drinking a tea of hyssop or of horehound, then taking some barely broth.
19th century nightmare sufferer E.H. Randle advises: “At such a time one should never fail to get up, light the lamp, and thoroughly rouse himself before going back to bed. A sip of whisky is a sure preventive of a return of the incubus that night.”
Reginald Scot gives this remedy against incubi: “For you shall find, that confession to a preest, and namelie this word Benedicite, driveth Incubus awaie, when Ave Maries, crosses, and all other charmes faile.”