Episode Details

Our episode continues from our last with more terrors of the night, the incubi, sucubi, and the most notorious succubus, Lilith — and the breeding of demons

We begin with a quick nod to the shoddy treatment the topic of the incubus has received in films, as represented by the 1981 misfire, Incubus.  From there, we jump to the Middle Ages, clarifying with a quick quote from Claxton’s Chronicle, the role of the succubus as seducer of men, and the incubus as threat to females.  A few words from St. Augustine make clear a connection with other pagan figures with lecherous reputations, and a quote from King Jame’s Daemonologie offers a more innovative notion that the incubus and succubus are two faces of the same demon.  Each fulfills what Augustine sees as the purpose of the paired demons — the succubus to collect the male’s semen and the incubus to convey this to the human female.

The offspring of these demonic/human pairings (with infants nursed by the succubi) are called “cambions” by the demonic-obsessed imagination clerics, but in secular folklore are virtually “changelings.”  We hear of some legendary cambions, including Merlin, the hero Hagen of the Völsung saga, and Alexander the Great (the last in a tale related by Wilkinson).

There follows another nod to the cinema’s sleazy representation of the succubi and Lilith (films linked below).  From there, we make a brief survey of Lilith in high culture, in Michelangelo’s “Temptation” mural depicting her in the Garden of Eden on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, her brief appearance at the Walpurgisnacht scene in Goethe’s Faust, a