Succubus

Region/Culture: Pan-European
Mythos: Christian Mythology, Jewish Mythology, Medieval European Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Demons and Devils
Mythical Attributes: A female demon who visits sleeping men in their dreams to seduce them, drain their vitality, and in some traditions collect their semen for the production of demonic offspring.
Role in Mythos: She personifies sexual temptation and nocturnal danger in medieval Christian demonology, inheriting and adapting earlier Jewish traditions of Lilith and the lilin.
Relation to Humans: She targets sleeping men, with particular interest in clergy and the chaste, draining their life force through repeated nocturnal encounters until they sicken or die. In some accounts she also serves a reproductive function, collecting semen and passing it to an incubus to father a cambion upon another woman.

The most disturbing detail in the old folklore is the cold. The woman in the dream is beautiful and her weight settles onto the sleeper’s chest with strange precision, but when her skin meets his it feels like the wall of a cave in winter. By morning he wakes exhausted, the sheet damp, his memory of her already curdling into something he would rather not name.

She is the female demon who comes for men in their sleep. She has been doing this, under one name or another, for a very long time. The earliest versions trouble the cuneiform tablets of Mesopotamia, where the lilitu were night-spirits with a particular hunger for sleeping men and newborns. Jewish tradition refined the figure into Lilith, Adam’s first wife in the medieval Alphabet of Ben Sira, who left Eden after refusing to lie beneath him, mated with Asmodeus, and bred a host of daughters called the lilin. The lilin were the first succubi proper. By the time medieval Christianity had finished with the inheritance, she had become something closer to a category of demon than any single entity: a class of unclean spirits who entered houses through the unlocked door of sleep.

Her name comes from the Latin succubare, “to lie beneath,” and was given to her, with characteristic medieval precision, to describe her preferred position over a sleeping man. The English word arrives in the late fourteenth century. She is sometimes called the earth-wanderer. By then the Catholic clergy had been arguing about her existence for nearly a millennium, with Augustine raising the question of nocturnal sexual demons as early as the fifth century and Aquinas debating their reproductive logistics. The matter was settled, after a fashion, in 1486, when the German inquisitor Heinrich Kramer published the Malleus Maleficarum and proposed a mechanic so peculiar it has not been bettered since. Demons, Kramer wrote, cannot reproduce. But a succubus could collect semen from a sleeping man, change shape, become an incubus, and deliver that semen into a sleeping woman. The child of such a transaction is a cambion: deformed, prone to supernatural influence, and occasionally extraordinary. Merlin, the medieval romances claim, was one.

She is described, when she is described at all, as a woman of devastating beauty. Closer inspection has a habit of spoiling the effect. Some sources give her bird-like claws beneath the gown; others a serpentine tail trailing from beneath the bed. The wings, horns, and fangs that crowd modern depictions belong more to later painting than to medieval text. In some accounts she takes the form of a siren, calling sailors onto rocks; in others she is indistinguishable from a human lover until the moment her skin runs cold. The figure is, by design, hard to pin down. She is whatever the dreamer has not allowed himself to want in waking life.

A young monk wakes near dawn and finds the cell cold, the wick of his tallow candle gone to seed, and his body changed in a way he will spend the rest of the week confessing. The smell of beeswax from the chapel down the corridor is the first thing that brings him back to himself.

The succubus also appears in a register of stories that read now as essentially theological farce. In one beloved fifteenth-century anecdote, an incubus climbs into bed with a lady in the shape of the holy Bishop Sylvanus, is discovered there by her household, and the bishop’s reputation is ruined until a devil at Saint Jerome’s tomb confesses to the impersonation. The story circulated as a warning, but the comedy is unmistakable. The point behind it was serious enough. Succubi could not be trusted to look like demons. They preferred to wear the faces of the men a woman might be inclined to forgive.

Behind the theology, something more familiar is going on. Modern neurology has another name for the encounter: sleep paralysis. The dreamer is awake, the dreamer cannot move, a presence is in the room, the chest feels weighted. The condition is well documented across cultures, with parallels in the German alp, the Persian bakhtak, the Brazilian pisadeira, and the Scottish baobhan sith. The succubus is what Catholic Europe made of the same phenomenon.

Her powers follow directly from her function. She enters dreams with the ease of breath. She wears any face the dreamer’s appetite suggests, including the face of someone he loves, which is the cruelest version. She drains vitality at her leisure, and a man who keeps her company for long enough begins to fade visibly, sleeping more and more and waking less and less, until his death is written down as a wasting illness. She can carry his seed for her own purposes. She passes through walls, since a wall is no obstacle to a dream.

Her weaknesses are religious in character, and the prescriptions for them have not changed much in five hundred years. The Lord’s Prayer, sacramental confession, and holy water are all said to drive her off. The Ave Maria, also called the Angelic Salutation, is reported to scatter her with particular force. In one of the older stories she vanishes “like an arrow shot from a bow” at the first phrase.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a succubus?

The succubus is a female demon from medieval European Christian and Jewish folklore who visits sleeping men in their dreams to seduce them. Repeated encounters with a succubus were believed to drain the man’s vitality, often resulting in physical and mental decline or death. Her name derives from the Late Latin “succubare,” meaning “to lie beneath.”

What is the difference between a succubus and an incubus?

The succubus is the female version of the demon and targets men, while the incubus is the male version and targets women. According to the Malleus Maleficarum of 1486, the same demon could perform both roles, first collecting semen from a man as a succubus and then using it to impregnate a woman as an incubus. The half-human child born of such an encounter is called a cambion.

Where does the succubus come from?

The succubus traces back to Mesopotamian night-spirits called lilitu, who were absorbed into Jewish tradition as Lilith and her demonic daughters, the lilin. Medieval Christian demonology, particularly the Malleus Maleficarum written by the German inquisitor Heinrich Kramer in 1486, formalized her into the figure of the seductive nocturnal demon known today.

How do you ward off a succubus?

Medieval sources prescribe Christian sacramental remedies against a succubus, including the Lord’s Prayer, holy water, sacramental confession, and the sign of the cross. The Ave Maria, also called the Angelic Salutation, was said to be particularly effective, with one older story describing a succubus vanishing “like an arrow shot from a bow” at the first phrase of the prayer.

Is the succubus related to sleep paralysis?

Many modern explanations link succubus folklore to sleep paralysis, a condition in which the sleeper awakens unable to move and often experiences hallucinations of a presence in the room. Parallel demons of nocturnal assault appear in cultures worldwide, including the German alp, the Persian bakhtak, the Brazilian pisadeira, and the Scottish baobhan sith.