Among the hundreds of moral lessons collected by Caesarius of Heisterbach (ca. 1180–1240) in his Dialogue on Miracles was a cluster of stories about the dangers posed by incubi and succubi. Caesarius wrote in the aftermath of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), which mandated that Christians take responsibility for their spiritual well-being by attending mass and confessing their sins at least once per year. It is thus no surprise to learn that confession was foremost among the remedies to rescue the men and women who had succumbed to the temptations offered by lustful demons.
A woman in the region of Nantes had been tormented for six years with a voracious lust by a wanton demon to whom she had given her consent. That lascivious spirit had appeared to her in the guise of an especially handsome soldier and often misused her without being seen, while she was lying in the same bed as her husband. In the seventh year, terror seized her. When Saint Bernard, the abbot of Clairvaux, came to the aforesaid city, the wretched woman fell at his feet, confessed her horrible lust and the demon’s disdain with many tears, and entreated the saint’s help. Consoled by the saint and told what she had to do, the devil was no longer able to approach after she made confession, but nonetheless terrified her with words and threatened her most bitterly that after the abbot’s departure he would resume her punishments, so that the one who had been her lover now became her cruelest oppressor. After she had reported this news to the saint, he came back on the following Sunday. In the company of two bishops, amidst burning candles, and with the support of all the faithful who were in the church, he anathematized the fornicating spirit, forbidding it by the authority of Christ to approach not only this woman, but any woman. When those sacramental lights were extinguished, the demon’s every strength likewise went out. After making a general confession of her sins, the woman was freed completely from its influence. This happened in our own times.
A few years ago, in the parish of Saint Remigius in the city of Bonn there lived a certain priest, Arnold by name, who had a pretty daughter. He took the utmost care of her. Owing to her beauty, he was on his guard for her sake because of the threat of young men, and especially the canons of Bonn. As a result, whenever he left the house, he locked his daughter in the upper chamber. One day, the devil, appearing to her as a man, began to bend her mind toward love for him inwardly by silent suggestion and outwardly with flattering words. What more can I say? Won over and corrupted, the wretched girl afterward consented quite often to the demon to her own ruin. One day when the priest ascended to the upper chamber, he found his daughter moaning and crying, and he could barely compel her to reveal the cause of her sadness. She confessed to her father that she had been deluded and captured by a demon and therefore she had every reason to lament. Indeed, she had become so deranged and so divorced from her senses, both from sadness and from the demon’s machinations, that she would collect worms from the ground, put them in her mouth, and chew them. Her grieving father sent her across the Rhine, hoping that the change of air would improve her condition and the river would provide an obstacle that would free her from the incubus demon. After she had departed, the demon appeared to the priest and addressed him with plain words, saying, “You bad priest, why have you deprived me of my wife? You have done this to your own harm.” And then the demon struck him so hard on the chest that he vomited blood and three days later he was dead…
Novice: If demons are allowed to do such things, then women should especially be on their guard not to offer any opportunity to them nor to give them any hint of consent.
Monk: Not only should women be on their guard against them, but also men, because just as demons in the guise of men mock and corrupt women, as we have seen, so too in the guise of women, do they seduce and deceive men…I will also relate to you some other examples, by which you will see how men have been mocked by demons in the guise of women.
There was a certain scholar of Prüm, John by name, a man with some learning, but shallow and deceitful. It is said concerning him and I heard it directly from the abbot of his monastery that a certain woman had promised to rendezvous with him one night. At the appointed time, she did not arrive, but a demon mounted the clerk’s bed in her form and with a voice like hers. Believing the demon to be the woman who was well-known to him, he slept with it. Rising in the morning, when he urged the demon that he had mistaken for a woman to leave, it responded to him, “With whom do you think that you slept last night?” When he answered, “With such and such a woman,” the demon replied, “Not with her, but with a devil.” Upon hearing these words, John was shocked, and thus answered with a shocking word, which I am too modest to say, laughing at the devil, and caring not in the least concerning what had just happened…
Novice: If demons can mingle with human beings in assumed bodies, as these different examples show, I wonder if they can reproduce with women or conceive from men and give birth.
Monk: Concerning this question, I have no answer, but I repeat here what I have read in ancient histories.
When the race of the Goths migrated from Asia into Europe, as related in accounts of their histories, there were malformed women in their company, whom they cast out in fear that they might produce malformed children and thus deface the nobility of the Goths. Cast out from the camps, these women wandered into the forest, where incubus demons came upon them and produced with them sons and daughters. From these offspring proceeded the most stalwart race of the Huns. We read also that Merlin, the prophet of the Britons, was the son of an incubus demon and a holy woman. For the kings, who down to this day rule in Britain, which is now called England, are said to trace their descent from a phantom mother. Merlin was truly a reasonable man and a Christian, who foretold many future events, which are fulfilled as the days go by.
Novice: If human beings can only be conceived and born from the seed of both parents, how can they be called human beings, who draw the source of their flesh partly from a human and partly from a demon? Will someone rise at the Last Judgment who does not fully possess a genuine human nature?
Monk: I will relate to you what I have heard from a certain learned man pertaining to this very question. He says as follows: demons collect human semen that has been released contrary to nature, and from it they craft for themselves bodies in which they can be touched and seen by human beings, male bodies from the male seed and female bodies from the female seed. And so, the masters say that there is in fact a genuineness of human nature in those who are born from them and that they will rise at the Last Judgment truly as human beings.