Prudish religious types have always cooked up hot, lethal female demons to make everyone think twice about sex. Where we’ve got the hook man warning us to stay out of Lover’s Lane, your medieval Briton or, say, Silesian or Venetian had warnings of the succubus. And if he was a she, the incubus was out there, ready to impregnate her with its demonic seed.
According to some commentators and demonologists, the succubus and incubus were the same demon in two shapes. As a succubus, the demon harvested sperm from its victims, often killing them in the process. Changing shape and becoming male, the demon then passed the sperm along. Since demons couldn’t reproduce on their own, they had to be a little ingenious.
Like a lot of other old stories, the succubus one has a noticeable tang of misogyny about it, especially because so many authorities connected succubi to the world’s first femme fatale herself: Lilith.
Either Adam’s first wife or some kind of proto-feminist demon or both—in some stories she is said to have left Adam because she didn’t see any reason why they couldn’t swap around their, ahem, standard sexual roles—Lilith has become an archetype of the female demon.
In certain strains of Hebrew myth, incubi and succubi are even called LILIN and LILITH. They are said to be the children of Lilith and to die at a rate of one hundred per day because she would not come back to Adam. They can prey on children—boys until circumcision at eight days, and girls for twenty days—but also attack women by causing infertility and difficult births, even miscarriages. Men become victims of the LILITH by being ridden at night, the seed being used to create more demonic children.
An amulet inscribed with the initials of the three Magi—Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar—is said to protect children from LILIN and LILITH.