Q. What Is An Incubus?
A. The incubus, also called “follet” in French and Catalan (*see Follar = To Fuck), “alp” in German, “duende” in Spanish, and “folletto” in Italian, was an angel who fell because of lust for women according to many of the Church Fathers. This being appears to women often in the form of a sexual dream/nightmare, and in fact the Latin word for nightmare is “incubo”, meaning to lie upon. Its counterpart is the succubus, “sucubo” -meaning to lie below, who use to appear to males. When a witch or sorcerer is associated with it, it is called a magistellus or familiar.
According to Devilism, an Incubus is a type of spirit, daemonic and possessing certain skills, that can interact with this mundane plane. This type is a sub-type of daemonic vampire, a vampire who feeds mainly or preferably on sexual energy. However, like all vampires, the incubus may also be able to feed on other energy sources.
Descriptions of Incubus: An early definition appears in the ‘Description of Wales’ in Caxton’s “Chronicle” as:
"That fiend that goth a-night
Women full oft to guile,
Incubus is named by right;
And guileth men other while,
Succubus is that wight. "
Guazzo described the incubus in his “Compendium Maleficarum (1608)” as:
“The Incubus can assume either a male of a female shape; sometimes he appears as a full-grown man, sometimes as a satyr; and if it is a woman who has been received as a witch, he generally assumes the form of a rank goat.”
-Here it is clear that the Incubus can or does shapeshift.
Incubus As Physical Beings: Sinistrari, a demonologist of the 17th century (d. 1701) explained how a spirit could become a body:
“As if we seek to learn from the authorities how it is possible that the Devil, who has no body, yet can perform actual coitus with a man or woman, they unanimously answer that the Devil assumes the corpse of another human being, male or female as the case may be, or that, from the mixture of other materials, He shapes for Himself a body, endowed with motion, by means of which body He copulates with the human being.”
-This operation, quite complex, can only be performed by skilled spirits and must have a very good reason to be carried out (this violates the cosmic pact -Shemiroth- and is a forbidden practice). And usually, daemons don’t require this kind of physicality to achieve their goals or desires. It’s important to note that consensual possession is allowed and does not violate any pact.
St. Augustine of Hippo states in his book “On The Trinity (400-416)”:
“Devils do indeed collect human semen, by means of which they are able to produce bodily effects; but this cannot be done without some local movement, therefore devils can transfer the semen which they have collected and inject it into the bodies of others. Caesarius of Heisterbach (b. 1170) believed that incubi got their semen by collecting semen emitted during nocturnal emissions or masturbation. They could then use that to create new bodies for themselves”.
-This carrier of life, semen (spirits in the form of spermatozoa), can be energetically altered to welcome different daemonic spirits, filling the empty bodies of the spermatozoa or simply replacing the existing spirits on a micro-cosmic level/plane.
Pregnancy In Incubus Encounters: Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) wrote:
“Nevertheless, if sometimes children are born from intercourse with daemons, this is not because of the semen emitted by them, or from the bodies they have assumed, but through the semen taken from some man for this purpose, seeing that the same daemon who acts as a succubus for a man becomes an incubus for a woman.”
-Summa Theologica.
Bonaventura (Cavalieri 1598-1647) wrote:
“Devils in the form of women [succubi] yield to males and receive their semen; by cunning skill, the daemons preserve its potency, and afterwards, with the permission of “God”, they become Incubi and pour it out into female repositories.”
Sinistrari also summarized two late 16th century writers, the Dominican Thomas Malvenda and Dr. Franciscus Valesius:
“What Incubi introduce into the womb is not any ordinary human semen in normal quantity, but abundant, very thick, very warm, rich in spirits and free from serosity. This, moreover, is an easy thing for them, since they merely have to choose ardent, robust men, whose semen is naturally very copious, and with whom the succubus has relations; and then the incubus copulates with women of a like constitution, taking care that both shall enjoy a more than normal orgasm, for the greater the venereal excitement the more abundant is the semen.”
Incubus As Figments Of The Imagination: Only by the 18th century did the hype die down and did physicians like Louis XV ’s personal physician, De Saint Andre suggest that Incubi were the result of the imagination:
“The incubus is most frequently a chimera, which has no more basis than a dream, a perverted imagination, and very often the invention of a women… Trickery has no less a place in the history of the Incubus. To conceal her sin, a woman, a girl, a nun in name only, a debauchee, who affects the appearance of virtue, will palm off her lover for an incubus spirit which haunts her.”
-“Lettres au sujet de la magie, de malefices et des sorciers, 1725”
Church’s View of Women: The Church was concerned with the nature of the women and as early as the late 15th century, there were three distinctions published in the “Malleus Maleficarum (1486)”:
- Those who submit voluntarily as witches.
- Those brought against their will by witches to sleep with Incubi.
- Those assaulted against their will.
One account given by a priest said that:
“In 1643 I was ordered by my ecclesiastical superiors to exorcise a young girl of twenty years of age, who was pursued by an incubus. She acknowledged without evasion everything this impure devil had done with her. But after what she told me, I came to the opinion that in spite of her denials she had given the daemon some indirect encouragement. Indeed, she was always forewarned of his coming by a violent over-excitement of the sexual organs, and then, instead of having recourse to prayer, she ran straight to her room and threw herself on her bed. I tried to rouse in her some feeling of trust in “God”, but I did not succeed, and she seemed almost to be afraid of being delivered from the devil .”
-Delassus, “Les Incubes, 1897”.
Related / Links of Interest:
+ Article: The Incubi & Succubi: Incubus/Succubus: Daemonic Beings Of Lust & Lore
