Incubus and Succubus: The Night Demons That Feed on Desire
You wake in the dark and cannot move. Something heavy presses on your chest, and a shape seems to stand at the edge of the bed. You try to cry out, and no sound comes. For countless people in countless centuries this has been the beginning of a night visit, and for much of European history the visitor had names: the incubus, "he who lies upon," and the succubus, "she who lies beneath."
They are among the most persistent demons of folklore, and their story says as much about human fear and shame as it does about the supernatural.
The Words and Their Roots
Incubus comes from the Latin incubare, "to lie on," and the word was used in Roman times for a nightmare spirit that weighed on sleepers. The female form, succubus, is a medieval coinage built to match, from the sense of "lying under." Both came into wide use among churchmen of the later Middle Ages.
Augustine of Hippo, in The City of God, wrote that there was a widespread report of woodland spirits, which Romans called incubi, who molested women, and he treated the reports as common but left the matter open. This passage became a standard citation for later writers.
Older Night Spirits
The idea is much older than the Christian words. Mesopotamian texts name a class of demons called lilu and lilitu, who were thought to haunt the night and prey on the young. A later figure, Lilith, appears in Jewish tradition as a night demon, and in the medieval period she was linked to stories of nocturnal seduction. Greek writers told of Empusa and Mormo, frightening female spirits who preyed on travelers and children.
Folklore across Europe had its own versions. The German word Mahr gives us the English "nightmare," and in Scandinavian and Slavic lands, similar beings pressed on the sleeper's chest. In these older beliefs, the creature was a source of fear and exhaustion, not necessarily of desire.
The Scholastic Theory
By the thirteenth century, theologians were trying to explain how a demon, who has no body, could do such things. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae discussed the question and followed an earlier opinion: a demon might take on a female form as a succubus, gather semen, then pass it as an incubus into a woman. In this way, he reasoned, a child might be born without the demon being its true father.
Such stories were used to explain unusual births. The legend of Merlin, in the medieval tellings of Robert de Boron, made the wizard the son of an incubus and a mortal woman. In this story the Church's account of evil and its fascination with prophecy meet.
The Hammer of Witches
In 1486, two Dominican friars, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, published the Malleus Maleficarum, a manual on witchcraft. It discussed incubi and succubi at length and treated them as real. The book was widely read, and its claims helped fuel the witch trials that followed, in which many innocent people, mostly women, were tortured and killed. This is the dark side of the subject: beliefs about night demons were used as weapons against real persons.
Sleep and the Night
Modern medicine offers a plain explanation for many accounts. During sleep paralysis, a person wakes while the body's natural paralysis of dreaming is still in force. They may feel pressure on the chest and see or hear things that are not there.
The experience is frightening, yet researchers find that a sizable minority of people have it at least once in life. It usually passes within a minute or two, and it is harmless in itself. It is also fairly common, and it has been described in many cultures under different names.
Henry Fuseli's painting The Nightmare, of 1781, captures it: a sleeper with an imp crouching on her body, and a ghostly horse looking on.
A Word of Care
If frightening nighttime experiences recur, a doctor can help, since poor sleep, stress and some medicines make them more likely. They are not a sign of moral failing, and no one should feel shame about them. Persistent distress is a good reason to speak with a health professional.
Closing
The incubus and the succubus show how a culture speaks about what it cannot say aloud. They gave a name to the weight on the chest and to the dream that left a person ashamed. Today we have a clearer account of the sleeping brain, yet the old figures still teach something: that fear and desire are neighbors in the dark, and that naming a terror is often the first step to bearing it.
Related Esoteric Inquiries
- The Undine: The Symbolism of the Spirit of the Water
- The Sylph: The Symbolism of the Spirit of the Air
- The Satyr: The Symbolism of the Vital Life
Lux Esoterica.
2026.
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