If I had a talking picture of you
I’d play it everytime I felt blue
I’d give ten shows a day
And a midnite matinee
If I had a talking picture of you.
—A Song from the Twenties
During the period that I was seeing a great deal of William in New York, I began to have some extremely intense, what appeared to me to be sexual, hallucinations. I decided that he was the only person whom I could safely approach on this matter and told him what had happened to me on a recent morning.
BOCKRIS: I woke up around 5:00 A.M. and lay on my side looking out the window. I knew I was awake because I remember looking at my watch, thinking that I had woken up early. The next instant I was aware of a body, reclining on its side, descending upon me from approximately two feet above the bed. I immediately recognized and accepted the presence of a girl about whom I’d been having the most intense sexual fantasies morning and night for three months. Confused, I initially thought she’d come over to see me and wondered how she had gotten in. Then I realized that this “wasn’t really her,” but whatever it was, here she was and my strong sexual desire for her was being fulfilled. The creature’s presence was extremely delicate and I realized that I must move slowly and calmly, making no sudden lunges, or she would evaporate. Now what was that?
Bill first expressed surprise again at my ignorance about such a visitation, explaining that this was clearly “a visit by the demon lover, my dear!” He ran an exasperated hand through his thinning hair as he adjusted his spectacles in preparation for explaining the phenomenon to me. Bill always takes on an air of complete amazement when he comes upon the comparative ignorance of the majority of his companions. He has read omnivorously since he was a young child and attended all sorts of universities, and medical schools, doing graduate work in anthropology, and published papers in medical journals. The breadth and depth of his knowledge is remarkable, as is his ability to talk informatively about any subject ranging from the succubus to the sweet potato! “No,” said I, “I don’t know anything about this, Bill. What is a succubus?”
BURROUGHS: My dear, according to the dictionary, a succubus is “a female demon supposed to descend upon and have sexual intercourse with a man while he sleeps.” In the male form it is called an incubus. Basically, it’s any form of “other being” who visits a human sexually. It may come in the body of a person you recognize, as in your account, or in an unrecognizable human or other form. Sometimes you can feel it, but it’s invisible. However, all these visits are exclusively sexual.
BOCKRIS: I’ve never heard anything about this. It was such a startling experience for me that I really want to find out all about it.
BURROUGHS: Much has been written about these creatures, but only in scattered sources. There is no single definitive work on them, although they continue to visit us regularly today as they have throughout history. See, most people don’t want to talk about it because they think you’ll think they’re bananas. I’ve spoken to many people about it who didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. It’s the same thing with journeys out of the body. We urgently need explorers who are willing to investigate these uncharted possibilities and at least consider taking a positive attitude toward sex with other beings. There is Robert Monroe, who wrote in 1971 a bestseller called Journeys Out of the Body. He’s an American businessman in his sixties who lives in Virginia. Monroe did a series of experiments in which he seemed, on the edge of sleep, to leave his body and go to other places. On some of these journeys he met people with whom he had sexual encounters. In a chapter called “Sex in the Second State,” he describes some sexual contacts he had.
Now, in my opinion, in attempting to delineate the physical feelings of these sexual encounters, Monroe constructs the most objective modern description of sex with a succubus: “If the opposite charged poles of two stationary electric images could ‘feel’ as the unlike ends approach one another,” he writes, “they would ‘need’ to come together. There is no barrier that can restrain it. The need increases progressively with nearness. At a given point of nearness, the need is compelling; very close, it is all-encompassing; beyond a given point in nearness, the attraction need exerts tremendous pull and the two unlikes rush together and envelop one another.
“The sexual action-reaction in the physical seems a pale imitation or a feeble attempt to duplicate the very intimate form of communion and communication in the second state. The act itself is an immobile rigid state of shock where the two truly intermingle, not just at a surface level and at one or two specific body parts, but in full dimension, atom for atom, throughout the entire second body. In an immediate moment there is a mind-shaking interflow of electrons, one to another, unbalanced charges become equalized, peaceful contented balance is restored, and each is revitalized. All this happens in an instant, yet an eternity passes by. Afterwards, there is a calm serene separation.”
Monroe concludes that we are missing our real sexual opportunities: “We continue to evaluate sexuality as good or bad strictly in terms of inhibitions, restrictions and social structure.” And he chastises the Freudians’ sexual-dream-fantasies-caused-by-early-sex-repression theory as an easy way out. He calls it “a mislabeling to avoid facing uncharted possibilities.”
BOCKRIS: But why are these possibilities so uncharted?
BURROUGHS: In view of the similarities in descriptions about the experience of having sex with an incubus or succubus—the magnetic attraction, moving together, overwhelming orgasm, and gratification with balance restored—plus a vast amount of religious, psychic, and psychiatric writings reporting similar activities over thousands of years, which I’ll give you some pointers on later, it would seem unreasonable to flatly deny, as many people do, that these things do exist in some way. But many people are still embarrassed to talk about their experiences with them, and none of the current interpretations even attempt to explain the very intimate sexual form of communion and communication you’ve described in your experience, or Monroe describes in his. I think we have to attempt to relate to these beings from a more balanced and objective point of view than the dogmas of authority allow. As I see it, an incubus or succubus can be harmless, or it can be destructive. Like any sexual situation, the danger depends on how you handle it. Not to control such a situation can undoubtedly lead to negative effects, but we need not adopt the uniformly negative opinions of the church, psychics and psychiatrists that these are necessarily evil or dangerous beings. All sex is potentially dangerous. In the early cave paintings, for example, we see the animals on the wall killed after having sex, and many sexual myths involve one or both persons being killed. Our sexual feelings make us vulnerable. How many people have been ruined by a sexual partner? Sex does provide a point of invasion and the incubi and succubi simply make us intensely aware of this.
BOCKRIS: How dangerous do you think these creatures are?
BURROUGHS: Certain things are clear to me: I would say that people who are visited by someone they want to fuck in the form of an incubus or succubus usually stop having sex with the body of the desired person. The obsession itself would seem to become more important and desirable. The magnetic nature of the sexual attraction between these beings and their subjects interferes with other physical sexual forces. Any strong sexual hallucination I have had has cut down on my actual sexual experience, and has proven to be quite destructive from that point of view. Secondly, I believe it is wise not to let the person who has visited you in the form of a succubus know about it because they may realize the power they have over you and use it. Thirdly, anyone attempting to make contact with a succubus should know that they are apt to be a nuisance, difficult to get rid of, and can be exhausting if they get out of control. A succubus can be a good servant. He or she is always a bad master.
BOCKRIS: How would you sum that up?
BURROUGHS: Any aspect of relating to them is clearly one of degree. At what point does the fantasy become more than a fantasy? When does the ventriloquist’s dummy start talking on its own? When does a cancer cell become a separate and immutable process?
BOCKRIS: People seem not to know about this phenomenon. What kind of documentation has there actually been?
BURROUGHS: This phenomenon has been going on since the beginning of time. “Adam was having sexual intercourse with Lillith, Adam’s first wife and the Princess who presided over these demons known as succubi, for 130 years before the creation of Eve.” That’s a direct quote from Lewis Spence’s 1960 Encyclopedia of Occultism. This Lillith character is known as “the Queen of the Succubi” because she was the first succubus. Of course the Immaculate Conception is an incubus legend. Remember: “The Angel came in unto Mary and said ‘Hail thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women.’” Then he told her not to be afraid, she was such a favorite of God she would soon have his son. She said, “‘How? I haven’t had sex with anyone.’” And (I’m quoting from Luke, Chapter 1): “The Angel answered and said unto her, ‘The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee.’” Now, in this case the Holy Ghost is an incubus. You’ll find that people’s attitudes toward these things change, but their visits remain constant. We know that the Greeks also had gods and goddesses who occasionally came down on humans. In the story of Leda and the Swan, Zeus descended as a swan.
BOCKRIS: Surely in more modern times there must have been some scientific investigation of the phenomenon?
BURROUGHS: Yes, the next thing was the interpretation of the nineteenth-century rationalists—Freud and his ilk. They came along and flatly rejected the whole idea of demonic invasion. So they dismissed the corporeal conception of incubi, saying they were simply creations of the subject’s mind, or hallucinations. It’s a basic postulate of Freudian psychiatry that all voices, hallucinations, are of endogenous origin and that these hallucinations of sexual beings were caused by severe sexual repression in infancy. So they were considered to be, and still are considered by many psychiatrists, a form of illness.
BOCKRIS: What do the psychics have to say about it?
BURROUGHS: Their most articulate spokeswoman, Dion Fortune, who was a leading member of the London-based psychic Society of Inner Light, identifies the succubus in her book Psychic Self Defense [1930]: “The psychic is of the opinion that the lustful imaginings of men’s hearts do indeed produce artificial elementals and that these elementals are something more than subjective images and have an objective etheric existence.” Now, although she was an adept explorer into the occult and wrote at great length about it through her adult life, Dion Fortune’s attitudes toward sex were still bound by the period she lived in, so she was always outraged by the lewd sexual approach of these creatures.
BOCKRIS: Everybody is in agreement that these beings, or whatever one wants to call them, have a negative effect.
BURROUGHS: Yes. But here we have to ask ourselves just how much more objective are scientists on this matter than priests. I suggested to a psychiatrist for example that witchcraft may have foundations in fact. “NO! The witch is an hysteric and the victim is a paranoid!” he screamed. “As a scientist, I must believe this.” Scientists turn out to be as emotional about their dogma as medieval ecclesiastics. If we are going to investigate incubi and succubi seriously, I really feel that we must begin by admitting that psychiatrists have no more objective proof that they come from our imaginations than priests have that they come from the devil. So in a sense we are completing a full circle, coming back to re-examining the basic positions the ecclesiastics took. If some of us are willing to consider, or at least examine, the old concepts of demonic possession and visitation, we may do so with the scientific equipment necessary to investigate the matter more precisely. For example, we may be able to throw some light on this mystery if we can learn anything from recent sexual research on the brain. We have only just become aware of the brain’s being the primary erotic zone in humans. The brain is divided in two halves called the right brain and the left brain. All the speech areas are located in the left brain. The areas in the right brain that correspond to the speech areas in the left brain don’t have any apparent function, but many people still hear voices in the right brain, and these are voices that they cannot control. Consider this: the most individual thing about anyone is their voice. If you are listening to someone, that person’s voice is inside your head. It has to some extent invaded and occupied your brain. Consequently, while you are listening to someone else speak, you are suspending your identity to make room for theirs. So voices coming through the right brain that cannot be turned off have a special power. Consider what could happen if the voice of somebody you loved or lusted after suddenly came on in the right brain and said, for example, “Hello. It’s me.” It would be able to exert a tremendous amount of authority, and possibly create visual hallucinations of desired sexual objects, like itself. So these unknown voices of sexual beings coming in through the right brain could be the auditory basis of incubi/succubi experiences. This is merely a suggestion. Perhaps it is a matter of to what degree the particular voice gets a hold on you.
BOCKRIS: But if these voices are creating visual sexual images, and so are in fact capable of creating these other beings, do they come from inside our minds, as scientists believe, or are they of extraneous origin? Everyone who masturbates creates pictures of someone else. But where do we get the original pictures to fixate on and become sexually excited by? What creates our sexual excitement?
BURROUGHS: Following my suggestion on the auditory origin of succubi visitations, it could be that the origins of sexual excitement are in, or come through, the right brain. If this were true, the extremely beautiful and sensitive erotic zone of the ear would provide the point of sexual invasion in the human. Yeats used this image of invasion through the ear describing the Immaculate Conception in a poem called “The Mother of God”: “The threefold terror of love/A fallen flare,/Through the hollow of an ear;/Wings beating about the room …” I think that’s very good. But if we have located the origins of these images in the nondominant brain hemisphere, I am still wondering whether they came from somewhere else before they arrived there. The whole question really steps across into the realm of science fiction. Particularly when we consider the possibility of electronic brain stimulation we could create an incubus or succubus of our choice at will, which would lead to the development of the Electronic Whorehouse, where anyone could get satisfied without the encumbrance of another physical body. You’d simply plug in your desire. Sex is physics. If anyone could push a button and receive an incubus or succubus, I believe that most people would prefer a phantom partner to the all-too-dreary real thing. Many of us might eagerly choose to break our conditioning by having sex with other beings if it were possible, particularly since they can make near-perfect sex partners, providing the hottest sex, disappearing immediately after their function is fulfilled, leaving the subject satisfied and gratified, presenting no practical problems and making no remarks or complaints. The Electronic Whorehouse would expand, everyone would be providing a landing point for a succubus, which, being of a parasitical nature, does need an individual human to attach itself to in order to establish habitation, and more and more of them would land, until everyone would be jacking off alone in a private toilet, crooning: “I’m a fool/but aren’t we all/each night it seems/that in my dreams/my darling comes to call.”
BOCKRIS: And sex would become completely illusory at last?
BURROUGHS: We can only speculate as to what further relations with these beings might lead to, my dear. You see, the bodies of incubi and succubi are much less dense than the human body, and this is greatly to their advantage in space travel. Don’t forget, it is our bodies which must be weightless to go into space. Now, we make the connections with incubi and succubi in some form of dream state. So I postulate that dreams may be a form of preparation, and in fact training, for travel in space. It’s possible then that, being of a parasitical nature, the rarefied form of these beings is dependent on contact with the denser human form in order to exist.
BOCKRIS: Are you suggesting that we collaborate with them in some way which would in fact benefit the future of our travel in space?
BURROUGHS: Well, I simply believe that we should pay a great deal of attention to, and develop a much better understanding of, our relations with incubi and succubi. We can hardly afford to ignore their possible danger or use. If we reject a relationship with them, we may be placing our chances of survival in jeopardy. If we don’t dream, we may die.