The seductive demon—the succubus or incubus—has long been a fantasy staple from the original Dungeons and Dragons to webcomics to video games such as Nethack and Baldur’s Gate III. Far, however, from being something that sprang fully formed from Gary Gygax’s fevered mind, this fantasy trope has a long history.
In the Middle Ages, if you were a Christian—and most everyone was—you perforce believed in angels and, by extension, fallen angels and a whole bestiary of spiritual, immaterial intelligences. Moreover, if you believed in the authority of the Bible and the Church Fathers—which, again, if you were a Christian, was mandatory—then you believed that supernatural beings sometimes had sex with humans. Tertullian (c. 155–c. 220), in his On the Apparel of Women, quotes the apocryphal Book of Enoch on fallen angels teaching their human lovers how to dress immodestly, while Augustine of Hippo (354–430), in his City of God (XV:23), expounded on Genesis 6:4 and concluded since the “sons of god” could have children with mortal women, they must therefore have had bodies. (I’ll discuss the nature of these bodies later.) It is by authorities such as these that ancient Jewish, Mesopotamian, and Hellenistic beliefs about supernatural sex were transmitted to the Latin West.
Of course, Christianity also added its own context. If fallen angels seek to lead human beings into temptation, it naturally follows that this includes sexual temptation. The trope of the seductive demon appears in several places in early Christian writing, such as the Lives of the early medieval desert fathers. Athanasius, in his biography of St. Anthony (written c. 360), for instance, writes that the desert saint was tempted by a demon in the form of a seductive woman: “And the devil, unhappy wight, one night even took upon him the shape of a woman and imitated all her acts simply to beguile Antony.” Augustine’s contemporary John Cassian (c. 360–345), in his twenty-second Conference, likewise holds that diabolic action is one possible cause of otherwise pure monks having nocturnal emissions.
These tropes passed into medieval belief. No less an authority than Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274), in the fifty-first question of the first part of his Summa Theologica, continues on Augustine’s argument, conflating Satan’s minions with elements of classical mythology:
As Augustine says (De Civ. Dei XV): “Many persons affirm that they have had the experience, or have heard from such as have experienced it, that the Satyrs and Fauns, whom the common folk call incubi, have often presented themselves before women, and have sought and procured intercourse with them. Hence it is folly to deny it. But God’s holy angels could not fall in such fashion before the deluge…. Still if some are occasionally begotten from demons, it is not from the seed of such demons, nor from their assumed bodies, but from the seed of men taken for the purpose; as when the demon assumes first the form of a woman, and afterwards of a man; just as they take the seed of other things for other generating purposes, as Augustine says (De Trin. II), so that the person born is not the child of a demon, but of a man.”
While early medieval penitential manuals saw nocturnal emissions as polluting but not necessarily sinful, as they were involuntary, high medieval authorities such as Aquinas, Caesarius of Heisterbach (late 12th–early 13th century), Guillaume of Auvergne (d. 1249), and St. Bonaventure (1221–1274) began to emphasize the diabolical element: demons take the form of succubi to steal the seed of men as they slept, or that they spilled in masturbation, then take the form of incubi to impregnate women.
By the fifteenth century, sex with demons had become a major theological obsession, particularly among the Dominican order—the men primarily responsible for the Inquisition. Moreover, its concerns had shifted from preserving men’s purity to becoming a means of persecuting women. Part of this belief was that witches, organized into heretical cults, gained their supernatural powers by voluntarily copulating with the Devil and his minions. This conspiratorial conflation of sex, magic, and infernal forces was a key part of the larger witch-craze that swept Europe. How did this obsession come to be? What does it say about late medieval mentalities? And how does the trope continue to affect us today?
Witches as Heretics
Medieval beliefs about witches were an outgrowth of beliefs about heresy. To the medieval mind, it went without saying that, as heresy was unnatural belief, heretics perforce had unnatural sex. For instance, the early fourteenth-century Fournier Register recording the interrogation of suspected Cathars in the Languedoc is replete with gay sex in unusual and disgusting places, such as on manure piles. (The register would later form the primary source for Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie’s classic study Montaillou.) Likewise, the Templars were famously accused of both heresy and homosexuality.
Of course, these “confessions” can’t be taken as literal truth, as they were extracted under torture, but rather reflections of a common narrative. The idea of depraved orgies in service to dark powers ultimately originates in Roman slanders against Christians, repeated by Church Fathers against fellow Christians they disagreed with, applied to heretics through history.
BnF MS Français 961 fol. 1r
This is not to say that people did not believe in Satanic witches, or that such witches had sex with demons. The first recorded case of this type took place in Ireland in 1324. Alice Kyteler, whose real sin was most likely being wealthy, four times married, thrice widowed, and running afoul of Richard Ledrede, Bishop of Ossery, was accused of witchcraft in the form of animal sacrifice, making potions and unguents with disgusting ingredients that included the corpse of an unbaptized child, flying on a wooden stick, and having sex with an incubus named “Robin, son of Art,” who sometimes appeared as a cat, sometimes as a “black, hairy dog,” and sometimes as an “Ethiopian” with two associates and bearing iron rods.
Alice, being wealthy and well-connected (she was the sister of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland), was able to fight the charges and ultimately fled Ireland, though her alleged associate Petronilla of Meath was burned at the stake. Ledrede, for his part, fell into royal disfavor for his excesses. We come away with the feeling that this sort of witch-narrative was something already in existence, drawing on anti-Semitic tropes (as the child-sacrifice and use of the term “sabbat” or “synagogue” for witches’ gatherings implies), but that it was something that educated minds rejected and did not see as dignified enough to commit to writing. Several changes had to occur before those in power—the ones who left us written records—were willing to accept it.
The first change in mentality that had to be made was that any consorting with spirits for divination, enchantment, or other magical purposes was itself a form of heresy. To judge from surviving medieval grimoires, medieval sorcerers were educated men who operated in a Christian context. While some books contained spells for gaining wealth or love, most were for benign purposes. For instance, the thirteenth-century Ars Notaria was for “downloading” university-level knowledge through mystical means, while the primary purpose of the fourteenth-century Sworn Book of Honoratus was, like kabbalah, to gain direct knowledge of God. (Interestingly, though there is mention of love-spells in some medieval grimoires, there is no demon-summoning for sex. This should not be surprising, considering that medieval magicians operated within a normatively Christian milieu.)
The reputation of magic and magicians began to change during the fourteenth century. The second Avignon Pope, the Dominican-educated John XXII (r. 1316–1334), was particularly concerned with sorcery. (This was, remember, also the era of the Templar persecution.) His 1326 Super illius specula declared sorcerers to be heretics and empowered the Inquisition to seek them out. An example as to how far this could go is the Catalan inquisitor Nicholas Eymerich. Eymerich wrote his Directorium Inquisitorum in the 1370s while in exile in Avignon for his overzealous persecution of “heretics”—specifically, for endorsing a rebellion against King Peter IV of Aragon, who had tried to limit his activities. As an example of Eymerich’s zeal, even though Jews could not possibly be heretics (that required being Christian in the first place), he accused a Jew named Astruc Dapiera of being a sorcerer in 1370. Dapiera was forced to confess in the cathedral, and was thereafter sentenced to life imprisonment.
Simultaneous with this, people began to believe that the tropes commonly associated with witches, such as flying to orgiastic sabbats on brooms or other sticks of wood or riding on animals, were not merely Satanic hallucinations but really happened as part of an organized heretical cult. The previous orthodoxy, the so-called capitulum Episcopi, had been set down in the early Middle Ages against remnant pagan beliefs and codified by twelfth-century canon lawyer Gratian in his Decretum. It held that “wicked women” believed themselves to be transported to cavort with the “pagan goddess Diana” or other heathen gods, but this was only one of Satan’s illusions. However, by the turn of the fifteenth century, opinion had changed: these women were transported, not in their minds, but in fact, to these sabbats where they would be initiated into the coven by denying Christ and the Church, trampling upon a cross, and giving the osculum infame, the “shameful kiss,” to a toad or a cat “under its tail.”
These tropes began to become widespread in the literature and were most especially associated with heretics such as the Waldensians, an established, but persecuted, religious movement that, much like other spiritual traditions that had emerged in the thirteenth century, preached apostolic poverty. (Unlike many such movements deemed heretical, the Waldensians persist until today.) It was from the conflation of heresy, magic, and illicit sex that the satanic witch as a member of an organized cult whose orgiastic rituals involved sexual liaisons with diabolical forces emerges.
Early Accounts of Demonic Sex
Image from Johannes Praetorius’ Blocksbergs Verrichtung, 1668
Our first documentary witnesses to sex as part of the witch-cult emerge in the 1430s, a century after Alice Kyteler’s trial. Of the five early sources that survive, three mention demonic sex—the royal magistrate Claude Tholosan’s account based on the trials he presided over in the rural Dauphiné in the 1430s, and two anonymous accounts of witch “interrogations” that took place in the late 1430s, the Errors of the Gazarii from northern Italy and La Vauderie de Lyonois from Lyon, France. The link between witchcraft and heresy is shown by the titles of the sources: Gazarii was Italian for “heretics,” while Vauderie, or “Waldensians,” is synonymous with “witchcraft.” A fourth early source, the Swiss chronicler Hans Fründ’s account of the witch trials in Valais in 1430, does not mention sex with devils, nor does the Dominican Johannes Nider’s influential Formicarius—though Nider was influential in other ways. Interestingly, all of these sources hail from the same rough area of the western Alps encompassing what is now France, both French- and German-speaking cantons of Switzerland, and northern Italy. Was this folk belief trickling its way up to the lower levels of the administrative state, and thence to the Church hierarchy? Or was it something that took hold amongst lower-level magistrates and churchmen and then was imposed on hapless peasants?
(A note here on primary sources: Joseph Hansen’s 1901 sourcebook (in Latin and German) remains a monument in the field, while P. G. Maxwell-Stuart has translated some of theseand Michael D. Bailey has a “diplomatic” translation of relevant sections of the five earliest.)
The three sources that detail sexual activity—Tholosan, the Gazarii, and the Vauderie—all share a common narrative of witches’ debauchery being demonically commanded and violating all taboos and norms—though, interestingly, lesbian sex is not mentioned (though it is in a later document from Arras in 1460). According to Tholosan, at the presiding devil’s command, witches “have carnal knowledge of each other, and they mingle with demons, sometimes even against nature.” The Vauderie likewise states, “at a signal known to them, every man and woman lies down and mingles together in the manner of brutes or sodomites. And even the devil, as an incubus or succubus, takes whatever man or woman he wishes,” while the anonymous author of the Gazarii similarly states that at the demon’s signal, they “join together carnally, man with woman, or man with man, and sometimes father with daughter, son with mother, brother with sister, and with the proper order of nature scarcely being observed.” (Translations are from Bailey.)
One will note that all of this irregular sex required the presence of men—much against what the image of the witch came to be. The change to the witch-cult being a female phenomenon is, in part, thanks to the work of Johannes Nider. Nider was born in Swabia, educated in Paris, and taught as a professor of theology at the University of Vienna before becoming prior of several Dominican convents. His Formicarius (“Anthill”), written between 1436 and his death in 1438, is often cited as the first to set down a unified witch narrative by identifying witches as primarily female and heretical. (Professor Justin Sledge’s video on this is very informative.) Nider, influenced by witch-hunters he met at the Council of Basel (held as a reaction against the Hussite heresy), saw uneducated women as the pathway by which demons fought against the Catholic faith—a new sort of heresy, instigated by the Devil himself. (Of course, male magical practitioners’ use of both sacred and profane magic continued in both reality and the popular imagination.)
Nider ultimately aimed to avert spiritual disaster by reforming the Church and by the public-education project that was Dominican preaching. Likewise, he allowed that there were goodly women who were beneficial influences. However, by putting what was clearly becoming a widespread popular trope into learned late Scholastic argumentation and associating it with women, his Formicarius became hugely influential—most especially on the following generation’s most famous of witch-hunting manuals, Heinrich Kramer’s 1486 Malleus Maleficarum. Kramer, however, added a healthy dose of misogyny to his sources: for him, the primary motivator of why women became witches was their inordinate lust. As it says in Book 2, Question 2: “…it is common to all of them [witches] to practice carnal copulation with devils; therefore, if we show the method used by this chief class in their profession of their sacrilege, anyone may easily understand the method of the other classes.”
Kramer did not make up his fantasies about demonic sex out of whole cloth. By the 1460s, earlier doubt seems to have evaporated and the narrative of sabbats being real seems to have become commonplace in the Dominican order in France and its borderlands. For instance, Pope Nicholas V mentions bestiality taking place in sabbats in a 1451 letter to the Dominican Inquisitor-General of France, Hugo Lenoir. The broomstick likewise took on sexual connotations: the Dominican theologian Jordanes of Bergamo wrote in about 1470 that “the vulgar believe, and the witches confess, that on certain days or nights they anoint a staff and ride on it to the appointed place or anoint themselves under the arms and in other hairy places.” Kramer even managed to get Pope Innocent VIII to issue a bull, Summis desiderantes affectibus, endorsing his witch-hunting efforts after running into opposition when he had made the mistake of accusing a well-connected Innsbruck woman, Helena Scheuberin. Despite being run out of Innsbruck, Kramer was tireless in promoting his witch-hunting efforts, and to a large extent, he was responsible for the misogynistic nature of the witch-hunts of early modern Europe.
Why did witchcraft, including sabbats and demonic orgies, become such an obsession in the late Middle Ages and early modern period? Walter Stephens, in his Demon Lovers, argues (following Marc Bloch) that touch is the surest measure of reality, and by “proving” that humans have sex with demons, Kramer and his fellow witch-hunters also proved the reality, and the power, of the supernatural realm. Witch-hunting, in short, was an intellectual antidote for the crises of faith and questioning of the Church’s teachings that plagued late medieval Europe. Miri Rubin argues in her Corpus Christi that the veneration of the Eucharist served a similar purpose in the late Middle Ages: tangible evidence of the reality of the supernatural. Another, seen in both witch-hunting and exorcism manuals, involves a healthy dose of millennialism: the rise of the Satanic cult was a sign of the end-times. (This apocalyptic vision was first explored by Norman Cohn.)
Sex with Demons: The Mechanics
With all that being said, what was believed about sex with demons? The first question one might ask is obvious: how does an immaterial being have a body to have sex with? Aquinas (again in Summa I:51) provides us with an answer, writing that angels (and therefore devils) create their bodies out of air, “condensing” them so that they are solid.
One might also ask: did demons, though genderless and only assuming male and female forms, engage in same-sex relations? Tholosan seems to indicate this happened, and the account of witch-trials that happened in Arras in 1460 is gruesomely explicit:
At the sabbats of the Vaudois, the presiding devil took aside the neophyte and carried her off to one side of the grove, so that in his own fashion he might make love to her and have carnal knowledge of her; to whom he said maliciously that he would lay her down on the ground supporting herself on her two hands and feet, and that he could not have intercourse with her in any other position; and that was the way the presiding devil enjoyed her, because at the first sensation by the neophyte of the member of the presiding devil, very often it appeared cold and soft, as very frequently the whole body. At first he put it in the natural orifice and ejaculated the spoiled yellowing sperm, collected from nocturnal emissions or elsewhere, then in the anus, and in this manner inordinately abused her….
Upon her return to the sabbat, the neophyte, before the banquet, entered into sexual relations with any other man…. Then, the torches, if there are any, being extinguished, each one at the order of the presiding devil takes his partner and has intercourse. Sometimes indeed indescribable outrages are perpetrated in exchanging women, by order of the presiding devil, by passing on a woman to other women and a man to other men, an abuse against the nature of women by both parties and similarly against the nature of men, or by a woman with a man outside the regular orifice and in another orifice….
Indeed a man experiences no pleasure with a she-devil, neither a woman with a he-devil; but they only consent to copulate out of fear and obedience…. In the second intercourse, however, the woman neophyte herself is known carnally by some demon, intimately and thoroughly, in the same way it was first done by the presiding demon; but in other succeeding copulations no more by a demon; except when on account of the paucity of men to complete the pairings (which happens whenever the greater part of the group there consist of women rather than men) the demons take over the part of the men in copulation, as it happens sometimes, though only occasionally. When the women are fewer, the complement is filled by she-devils, and this happens very frequently in other unions, in addition to the first two couplings, in the first of which, after admission to the group, in returning to the presiding devil, a man has intercourse with a female devil….
Indeed, as sometimes happens, yet only occasionally, a certain man always has copulation with a she-devil, and it is an indication of extreme vileness in him; and likewise in any woman who has all her unions with a devil rather than with a man. (Translation by John Atkins from Hansen’s Latin text)
On the other hand, Kramer’s answer was that homosexuality was apparently too sinful for demons. To quote the Malleus Maleficarum I.4: “…though the Scripture speaks of Incubi and Succubi lusting after women, yet nowhere do we read that Incubi and Succubi fell into vices against nature. We do not speak only of sodomy, but of any other sin whereby the act is wrongfully performed outside the rightful channel. And the very great enormity of such as sin in this way is shown by the fact that all devils equally, of whatsoever order, abominate and think shame to commit such actions.” Even the names given to succubi and incubi refer to normative, missionary-style sex: incubus “that which lies above,” while succubus means “that which lies below.” Apparently, Kramer’s idea of sex with demons wasn’t very adventurous.
Malleus Maleficarum in a 1669 edition.
Demonic intercourse might or might not have been vanilla, but was it pleasurable? Similar to the homosexuality question, opinions shifted over time from it being extremely good to extremely bad. Guillaume of Auvergne, the thirteenth-century Bishop of Paris, reported in his De Universo (“On the Universe”) that demons could delude women that intercourse had happened fifty or sixty times, when it had in fact happened only once or twice. (Remember, medieval people thought women were more carnal and had much greater capacities for sex than men.) The Dominican inquisitor Nicholas Jacquier, in his 1458 A Scourge for Heretical Witches (Flagellum haereticorum fascinariorum), wrote that sex with demons was “inordinate carnaliter,” that is, “extremely fleshy” and wore them out. Similarly, the Italian theologian Paolo Grillandi likewise wrote in his 1536 Treatise on Heretics and Fortunetellers (Tractatus de hereticis et sortilegiis) that the witches he had tried “confessed” that sex with the devil was very pleasurable.
Counter to this, La Vauderie de Lyonois and the 1460 Arras account claim that the devils took horrible or animalistic forms and that witches only had sex with them fearfully. Similarly, later accounts, from the sixteenth century onwards, indicate that demonic phalluses, no matter whether the demons were in animal or humanoid form, were of painfully enormous size, freezing cold, and even bifurcated. Professor Justin Sledge, whose YouTube Esoterica channel is well worth checking out if you’re interested in the scholarly history of magic, writes, “The demonic phallus was invariably described as ice cold and most demonic sex with men was described as profoundly emasculating”—that is, the male partner is paralyzed, prone, and passive, rather than active. The English theologian Henry More (who coined the term “the fourth dimension”), in his 1653 Antidote Against Atheism, gives a scientific reason why witches experienced extreme cold: since demonic bodies were formed of congealed air, much like water is congealed ice, it makes sense that they would be cold.
In all, sex with demons was a mockery of the divinely mandated order, much as the sabbat was an inversion of the Mass. It was non-procreative, unnatural, and painful. While medieval scholastics pointed out that demonic sex could engender children (i.e., by transporting semen, or even the legend of Merlin being fathered by an incubus), early modern writers maintained that a major use of witches’ power was against generation and fertility. Witches could cause impotence and miscarriages in people and livestock. The children created in sabbat orgies were doomed to be sacrificed, unbaptized, for blasphemous purposes, and, moreover, witch-cults killed babies and young children and rendered their fat into unguents with which they anointed their broomsticks. Kramer went so far as to say that witches’ emasculating powers extended to stealing men’s penises, keeping 20 or 30 of them in boxes, and feeding them oats.
The Legacy of Medieval Demonic Sex
Succubus from the 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual
While witch-persecutions eventually ended, the trope of the lustful demon and his Satanic followers never really went away. The romantic nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet tried to portray magic as a rebellion against the upper classes in his lurid and pseudohistorical Satanism and Witchcraft, while the appeal of demonic deviancy has fueled romantic art and gothic horror from Francisco Goya to Rosemary’s Baby. Margaret Murray published her much-refuted The Witch-Cult in Western Europe in 1921, giving a romantic history that asserted pagan cults, contrary to all evidence, survived, and that the witch-hunters’ documents give a true accounting of their practices. Gerald Gardner, the founder of the Wiccan neopagan movement, used this idea of a surviving witch-cult to give his hermetic sex-magic practices a “witchy” veneer. Similarly, San Francisco eccentric Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan in 1966, playing off the legend to gain fame, money, and female attention (notably, that of Jayne Mansfield).
But the orgiastic sabbat has also had a darker afterlife. The idea of Satanic sex-abuse cults, and the idea that they especially preyed on children, had a resurgence in the 1980s, fueled by the book Michelle Remembers and no shortage of “experts” who made money giving talks to police departments and PTAs. The most notable incident in this “Satanic panic” was the tragic McMartin Preschool case—though others have had their lives ruined as recently as the 1990s. Child sacrifice and depravity are similarly a major part of modern conspiracy theories: in late 2016, 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch conducted an armed invasion of the Comet Ping Pong pizza parlor in Washington, D.C., claiming to be looking for the Hillary Clinton-led “child sex trafficking ring” that right-wing media had claimed existed in the restaurant’s basement. “Pizzagate” later merged with the QAnon conspiracy theory, alleging the existence of a widespread Satanic child abuse and murder conspiracy led by the rich and powerful and, like medieval witch-hunters, situated it in the context of an apocalyptic struggle between good and evil.
As in the past, this millennial vision has been used by those claiming authority: pediatrician, conspiracy theorist, and preacher Stella Immanuel has linked gynecological problems to demon sperm, while Trump-linked preacher Paula White has called for “Satanic pregnancies” to miscarry. While more rational minds in both the past and present have discounted it, it seems the theory of demonic sex is still alive and well on the alt-right.
By Ken Mondschein
The seductive demon—the succubus or incubus—has long been a fantasy staple from the original Dungeons and Dragons to webcomics to video games such as Nethack and Baldur’s Gate III. Far, however, from being something that sprang fully formed from Gary Gygax’s fevered mind, this fantasy trope has a long history.
In the Middle Ages, if you were a Christian—and most everyone was—you perforce believed in angels and, by extension, fallen angels and a whole bestiary of spiritual, immaterial intelligences. Moreover, if you believed in the authority of the Bible and the Church Fathers—which, again, if you were a Christian, was mandatory—then you believed that supernatural beings sometimes had sex with humans. Tertullian (c. 155–c. 220), in his On the Apparel of Women, quotes the apocryphal Book of Enoch on fallen angels teaching their human lovers how to dress immodestly, while Augustine of Hippo (354–430), in his City of God (XV:23), expounded on Genesis 6:4 and concluded since the “sons of god” could have children with mortal women, they must therefore have had bodies. (I’ll discuss the nature of these bodies later.) It is by authorities such as these that ancient Jewish, Mesopotamian, and Hellenistic beliefs about supernatural sex were transmitted to the Latin West.
Of course, Christianity also added its own context. If fallen angels seek to lead human beings into temptation, it naturally follows that this includes sexual temptation. The trope of the seductive demon appears in several places in early Christian writing, such as the Lives of the early medieval desert fathers. Athanasius, in his biography of St. Anthony (written c. 360), for instance, writes that the desert saint was tempted by a demon in the form of a seductive woman: “And the devil, unhappy wight, one night even took upon him the shape of a woman and imitated all her acts simply to beguile Antony.” Augustine’s contemporary John Cassian (c. 360–345), in his twenty-second Conference, likewise holds that diabolic action is one possible cause of otherwise pure monks having nocturnal emissions.
These tropes passed into medieval belief. No less an authority than Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274), in the fifty-first question of the first part of his Summa Theologica, continues on Augustine’s argument, conflating Satan’s minions with elements of classical mythology:
As Augustine says (De Civ. Dei XV): “Many persons affirm that they have had the experience, or have heard from such as have experienced it, that the Satyrs and Fauns, whom the common folk call incubi, have often presented themselves before women, and have sought and procured intercourse with them. Hence it is folly to deny it. But God’s holy angels could not fall in such fashion before the deluge…. Still if some are occasionally begotten from demons, it is not from the seed of such demons, nor from their assumed bodies, but from the seed of men taken for the purpose; as when the demon assumes first the form of a woman, and afterwards of a man; just as they take the seed of other things for other generating purposes, as Augustine says (De Trin. II), so that the person born is not the child of a demon, but of a man.”
While early medieval penitential manuals saw nocturnal emissions as polluting but not necessarily sinful, as they were involuntary, high medieval authorities such as Aquinas, Caesarius of Heisterbach (late 12th–early 13th century), Guillaume of Auvergne (d. 1249), and St. Bonaventure (1221–1274) began to emphasize the diabolical element: demons take the form of succubi to steal the seed of men as they slept, or that they spilled in masturbation, then take the form of incubi to impregnate women.
By the fifteenth century, sex with demons had become a major theological obsession, particularly among the Dominican order—the men primarily responsible for the Inquisition. Moreover, its concerns had shifted from preserving men’s purity to becoming a means of persecuting women. Part of this belief was that witches, organized into heretical cults, gained their supernatural powers by voluntarily copulating with the Devil and his minions. This conspiratorial conflation of sex, magic, and infernal forces was a key part of the larger witch-craze that swept Europe. How did this obsession come to be? What does it say about late medieval mentalities? And how does the trope continue to affect us today?
Witches as Heretics
Medieval beliefs about witches were an outgrowth of beliefs about heresy. To the medieval mind, it went without saying that, as heresy was unnatural belief, heretics perforce had unnatural sex. For instance, the early fourteenth-century Fournier Register recording the interrogation of suspected Cathars in the Languedoc is replete with gay sex in unusual and disgusting places, such as on manure piles. (The register would later form the primary source for Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie’s classic study Montaillou.) Likewise, the Templars were famously accused of both heresy and homosexuality.
Of course, these “confessions” can’t be taken as literal truth, as they were extracted under torture, but rather reflections of a common narrative. The idea of depraved orgies in service to dark powers ultimately originates in Roman slanders against Christians, repeated by Church Fathers against fellow Christians they disagreed with, applied to heretics through history.
This is not to say that people did not believe in Satanic witches, or that such witches had sex with demons. The first recorded case of this type took place in Ireland in 1324. Alice Kyteler, whose real sin was most likely being wealthy, four times married, thrice widowed, and running afoul of Richard Ledrede, Bishop of Ossery, was accused of witchcraft in the form of animal sacrifice, making potions and unguents with disgusting ingredients that included the corpse of an unbaptized child, flying on a wooden stick, and having sex with an incubus named “Robin, son of Art,” who sometimes appeared as a cat, sometimes as a “black, hairy dog,” and sometimes as an “Ethiopian” with two associates and bearing iron rods.
Alice, being wealthy and well-connected (she was the sister of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland), was able to fight the charges and ultimately fled Ireland, though her alleged associate Petronilla of Meath was burned at the stake. Ledrede, for his part, fell into royal disfavor for his excesses. We come away with the feeling that this sort of witch-narrative was something already in existence, drawing on anti-Semitic tropes (as the child-sacrifice and use of the term “sabbat” or “synagogue” for witches’ gatherings implies), but that it was something that educated minds rejected and did not see as dignified enough to commit to writing. Several changes had to occur before those in power—the ones who left us written records—were willing to accept it.
The first change in mentality that had to be made was that any consorting with spirits for divination, enchantment, or other magical purposes was itself a form of heresy. To judge from surviving medieval grimoires, medieval sorcerers were educated men who operated in a Christian context. While some books contained spells for gaining wealth or love, most were for benign purposes. For instance, the thirteenth-century Ars Notaria was for “downloading” university-level knowledge through mystical means, while the primary purpose of the fourteenth-century Sworn Book of Honoratus was, like kabbalah, to gain direct knowledge of God. (Interestingly, though there is mention of love-spells in some medieval grimoires, there is no demon-summoning for sex. This should not be surprising, considering that medieval magicians operated within a normatively Christian milieu.)
The reputation of magic and magicians began to change during the fourteenth century. The second Avignon Pope, the Dominican-educated John XXII (r. 1316–1334), was particularly concerned with sorcery. (This was, remember, also the era of the Templar persecution.) His 1326 Super illius specula declared sorcerers to be heretics and empowered the Inquisition to seek them out. An example as to how far this could go is the Catalan inquisitor Nicholas Eymerich. Eymerich wrote his Directorium Inquisitorum in the 1370s while in exile in Avignon for his overzealous persecution of “heretics”—specifically, for endorsing a rebellion against King Peter IV of Aragon, who had tried to limit his activities. As an example of Eymerich’s zeal, even though Jews could not possibly be heretics (that required being Christian in the first place), he accused a Jew named Astruc Dapiera of being a sorcerer in 1370. Dapiera was forced to confess in the cathedral, and was thereafter sentenced to life imprisonment.
Simultaneous with this, people began to believe that the tropes commonly associated with witches, such as flying to orgiastic sabbats on brooms or other sticks of wood or riding on animals, were not merely Satanic hallucinations but really happened as part of an organized heretical cult. The previous orthodoxy, the so-called capitulum Episcopi, had been set down in the early Middle Ages against remnant pagan beliefs and codified by twelfth-century canon lawyer Gratian in his Decretum. It held that “wicked women” believed themselves to be transported to cavort with the “pagan goddess Diana” or other heathen gods, but this was only one of Satan’s illusions. However, by the turn of the fifteenth century, opinion had changed: these women were transported, not in their minds, but in fact, to these sabbats where they would be initiated into the coven by denying Christ and the Church, trampling upon a cross, and giving the osculum infame, the “shameful kiss,” to a toad or a cat “under its tail.”
These tropes began to become widespread in the literature and were most especially associated with heretics such as the Waldensians, an established, but persecuted, religious movement that, much like other spiritual traditions that had emerged in the thirteenth century, preached apostolic poverty. (Unlike many such movements deemed heretical, the Waldensians persist until today.) It was from the conflation of heresy, magic, and illicit sex that the satanic witch as a member of an organized cult whose orgiastic rituals involved sexual liaisons with diabolical forces emerges.
Early Accounts of Demonic Sex
Our first documentary witnesses to sex as part of the witch-cult emerge in the 1430s, a century after Alice Kyteler’s trial. Of the five early sources that survive, three mention demonic sex—the royal magistrate Claude Tholosan’s account based on the trials he presided over in the rural Dauphiné in the 1430s, and two anonymous accounts of witch “interrogations” that took place in the late 1430s, the Errors of the Gazarii from northern Italy and La Vauderie de Lyonois from Lyon, France. The link between witchcraft and heresy is shown by the titles of the sources: Gazarii was Italian for “heretics,” while Vauderie, or “Waldensians,” is synonymous with “witchcraft.” A fourth early source, the Swiss chronicler Hans Fründ’s account of the witch trials in Valais in 1430, does not mention sex with devils, nor does the Dominican Johannes Nider’s influential Formicarius—though Nider was influential in other ways. Interestingly, all of these sources hail from the same rough area of the western Alps encompassing what is now France, both French- and German-speaking cantons of Switzerland, and northern Italy. Was this folk belief trickling its way up to the lower levels of the administrative state, and thence to the Church hierarchy? Or was it something that took hold amongst lower-level magistrates and churchmen and then was imposed on hapless peasants?
(A note here on primary sources: Joseph Hansen’s 1901 sourcebook (in Latin and German) remains a monument in the field, while P. G. Maxwell-Stuart has translated some of these and Michael D. Bailey has a “diplomatic” translation of relevant sections of the five earliest.)
The three sources that detail sexual activity—Tholosan, the Gazarii, and the Vauderie—all share a common narrative of witches’ debauchery being demonically commanded and violating all taboos and norms—though, interestingly, lesbian sex is not mentioned (though it is in a later document from Arras in 1460). According to Tholosan, at the presiding devil’s command, witches “have carnal knowledge of each other, and they mingle with demons, sometimes even against nature.” The Vauderie likewise states, “at a signal known to them, every man and woman lies down and mingles together in the manner of brutes or sodomites. And even the devil, as an incubus or succubus, takes whatever man or woman he wishes,” while the anonymous author of the Gazarii similarly states that at the demon’s signal, they “join together carnally, man with woman, or man with man, and sometimes father with daughter, son with mother, brother with sister, and with the proper order of nature scarcely being observed.” (Translations are from Bailey.)
One will note that all of this irregular sex required the presence of men—much against what the image of the witch came to be. The change to the witch-cult being a female phenomenon is, in part, thanks to the work of Johannes Nider. Nider was born in Swabia, educated in Paris, and taught as a professor of theology at the University of Vienna before becoming prior of several Dominican convents. His Formicarius (“Anthill”), written between 1436 and his death in 1438, is often cited as the first to set down a unified witch narrative by identifying witches as primarily female and heretical. (Professor Justin Sledge’s video on this is very informative.) Nider, influenced by witch-hunters he met at the Council of Basel (held as a reaction against the Hussite heresy), saw uneducated women as the pathway by which demons fought against the Catholic faith—a new sort of heresy, instigated by the Devil himself. (Of course, male magical practitioners’ use of both sacred and profane magic continued in both reality and the popular imagination.)
Nider ultimately aimed to avert spiritual disaster by reforming the Church and by the public-education project that was Dominican preaching. Likewise, he allowed that there were goodly women who were beneficial influences. However, by putting what was clearly becoming a widespread popular trope into learned late Scholastic argumentation and associating it with women, his Formicarius became hugely influential—most especially on the following generation’s most famous of witch-hunting manuals, Heinrich Kramer’s 1486 Malleus Maleficarum. Kramer, however, added a healthy dose of misogyny to his sources: for him, the primary motivator of why women became witches was their inordinate lust. As it says in Book 2, Question 2: “…it is common to all of them [witches] to practice carnal copulation with devils; therefore, if we show the method used by this chief class in their profession of their sacrilege, anyone may easily understand the method of the other classes.”
Kramer did not make up his fantasies about demonic sex out of whole cloth. By the 1460s, earlier doubt seems to have evaporated and the narrative of sabbats being real seems to have become commonplace in the Dominican order in France and its borderlands. For instance, Pope Nicholas V mentions bestiality taking place in sabbats in a 1451 letter to the Dominican Inquisitor-General of France, Hugo Lenoir. The broomstick likewise took on sexual connotations: the Dominican theologian Jordanes of Bergamo wrote in about 1470 that “the vulgar believe, and the witches confess, that on certain days or nights they anoint a staff and ride on it to the appointed place or anoint themselves under the arms and in other hairy places.” Kramer even managed to get Pope Innocent VIII to issue a bull, Summis desiderantes affectibus, endorsing his witch-hunting efforts after running into opposition when he had made the mistake of accusing a well-connected Innsbruck woman, Helena Scheuberin. Despite being run out of Innsbruck, Kramer was tireless in promoting his witch-hunting efforts, and to a large extent, he was responsible for the misogynistic nature of the witch-hunts of early modern Europe.
Why did witchcraft, including sabbats and demonic orgies, become such an obsession in the late Middle Ages and early modern period? Walter Stephens, in his Demon Lovers, argues (following Marc Bloch) that touch is the surest measure of reality, and by “proving” that humans have sex with demons, Kramer and his fellow witch-hunters also proved the reality, and the power, of the supernatural realm. Witch-hunting, in short, was an intellectual antidote for the crises of faith and questioning of the Church’s teachings that plagued late medieval Europe. Miri Rubin argues in her Corpus Christi that the veneration of the Eucharist served a similar purpose in the late Middle Ages: tangible evidence of the reality of the supernatural. Another, seen in both witch-hunting and exorcism manuals, involves a healthy dose of millennialism: the rise of the Satanic cult was a sign of the end-times. (This apocalyptic vision was first explored by Norman Cohn.)
Sex with Demons: The Mechanics
With all that being said, what was believed about sex with demons? The first question one might ask is obvious: how does an immaterial being have a body to have sex with? Aquinas (again in Summa I:51) provides us with an answer, writing that angels (and therefore devils) create their bodies out of air, “condensing” them so that they are solid.
One might also ask: did demons, though genderless and only assuming male and female forms, engage in same-sex relations? Tholosan seems to indicate this happened, and the account of witch-trials that happened in Arras in 1460 is gruesomely explicit:
At the sabbats of the Vaudois, the presiding devil took aside the neophyte and carried her off to one side of the grove, so that in his own fashion he might make love to her and have carnal knowledge of her; to whom he said maliciously that he would lay her down on the ground supporting herself on her two hands and feet, and that he could not have intercourse with her in any other position; and that was the way the presiding devil enjoyed her, because at the first sensation by the neophyte of the member of the presiding devil, very often it appeared cold and soft, as very frequently the whole body. At first he put it in the natural orifice and ejaculated the spoiled yellowing sperm, collected from nocturnal emissions or elsewhere, then in the anus, and in this manner inordinately abused her….
Upon her return to the sabbat, the neophyte, before the banquet, entered into sexual relations with any other man…. Then, the torches, if there are any, being extinguished, each one at the order of the presiding devil takes his partner and has intercourse. Sometimes indeed indescribable outrages are perpetrated in exchanging women, by order of the presiding devil, by passing on a woman to other women and a man to other men, an abuse against the nature of women by both parties and similarly against the nature of men, or by a woman with a man outside the regular orifice and in another orifice….
Indeed a man experiences no pleasure with a she-devil, neither a woman with a he-devil; but they only consent to copulate out of fear and obedience…. In the second intercourse, however, the woman neophyte herself is known carnally by some demon, intimately and thoroughly, in the same way it was first done by the presiding demon; but in other succeeding copulations no more by a demon; except when on account of the paucity of men to complete the pairings (which happens whenever the greater part of the group there consist of women rather than men) the demons take over the part of the men in copulation, as it happens sometimes, though only occasionally. When the women are fewer, the complement is filled by she-devils, and this happens very frequently in other unions, in addition to the first two couplings, in the first of which, after admission to the group, in returning to the presiding devil, a man has intercourse with a female devil….
Indeed, as sometimes happens, yet only occasionally, a certain man always has copulation with a she-devil, and it is an indication of extreme vileness in him; and likewise in any woman who has all her unions with a devil rather than with a man. (Translation by John Atkins from Hansen’s Latin text)
On the other hand, Kramer’s answer was that homosexuality was apparently too sinful for demons. To quote the Malleus Maleficarum I.4: “…though the Scripture speaks of Incubi and Succubi lusting after women, yet nowhere do we read that Incubi and Succubi fell into vices against nature. We do not speak only of sodomy, but of any other sin whereby the act is wrongfully performed outside the rightful channel. And the very great enormity of such as sin in this way is shown by the fact that all devils equally, of whatsoever order, abominate and think shame to commit such actions.” Even the names given to succubi and incubi refer to normative, missionary-style sex: incubus “that which lies above,” while succubus means “that which lies below.” Apparently, Kramer’s idea of sex with demons wasn’t very adventurous.
Demonic intercourse might or might not have been vanilla, but was it pleasurable? Similar to the homosexuality question, opinions shifted over time from it being extremely good to extremely bad. Guillaume of Auvergne, the thirteenth-century Bishop of Paris, reported in his De Universo (“On the Universe”) that demons could delude women that intercourse had happened fifty or sixty times, when it had in fact happened only once or twice. (Remember, medieval people thought women were more carnal and had much greater capacities for sex than men.) The Dominican inquisitor Nicholas Jacquier, in his 1458 A Scourge for Heretical Witches (Flagellum haereticorum fascinariorum), wrote that sex with demons was “inordinate carnaliter,” that is, “extremely fleshy” and wore them out. Similarly, the Italian theologian Paolo Grillandi likewise wrote in his 1536 Treatise on Heretics and Fortunetellers (Tractatus de hereticis et sortilegiis) that the witches he had tried “confessed” that sex with the devil was very pleasurable.
Counter to this, La Vauderie de Lyonois and the 1460 Arras account claim that the devils took horrible or animalistic forms and that witches only had sex with them fearfully. Similarly, later accounts, from the sixteenth century onwards, indicate that demonic phalluses, no matter whether the demons were in animal or humanoid form, were of painfully enormous size, freezing cold, and even bifurcated. Professor Justin Sledge, whose YouTube Esoterica channel is well worth checking out if you’re interested in the scholarly history of magic, writes, “The demonic phallus was invariably described as ice cold and most demonic sex with men was described as profoundly emasculating”—that is, the male partner is paralyzed, prone, and passive, rather than active. The English theologian Henry More (who coined the term “the fourth dimension”), in his 1653 Antidote Against Atheism, gives a scientific reason why witches experienced extreme cold: since demonic bodies were formed of congealed air, much like water is congealed ice, it makes sense that they would be cold.
In all, sex with demons was a mockery of the divinely mandated order, much as the sabbat was an inversion of the Mass. It was non-procreative, unnatural, and painful. While medieval scholastics pointed out that demonic sex could engender children (i.e., by transporting semen, or even the legend of Merlin being fathered by an incubus), early modern writers maintained that a major use of witches’ power was against generation and fertility. Witches could cause impotence and miscarriages in people and livestock. The children created in sabbat orgies were doomed to be sacrificed, unbaptized, for blasphemous purposes, and, moreover, witch-cults killed babies and young children and rendered their fat into unguents with which they anointed their broomsticks. Kramer went so far as to say that witches’ emasculating powers extended to stealing men’s penises, keeping 20 or 30 of them in boxes, and feeding them oats.
The Legacy of Medieval Demonic Sex
While witch-persecutions eventually ended, the trope of the lustful demon and his Satanic followers never really went away. The romantic nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet tried to portray magic as a rebellion against the upper classes in his lurid and pseudohistorical Satanism and Witchcraft, while the appeal of demonic deviancy has fueled romantic art and gothic horror from Francisco Goya to Rosemary’s Baby. Margaret Murray published her much-refuted The Witch-Cult in Western Europe in 1921, giving a romantic history that asserted pagan cults, contrary to all evidence, survived, and that the witch-hunters’ documents give a true accounting of their practices. Gerald Gardner, the founder of the Wiccan neopagan movement, used this idea of a surviving witch-cult to give his hermetic sex-magic practices a “witchy” veneer. Similarly, San Francisco eccentric Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan in 1966, playing off the legend to gain fame, money, and female attention (notably, that of Jayne Mansfield).
But the orgiastic sabbat has also had a darker afterlife. The idea of Satanic sex-abuse cults, and the idea that they especially preyed on children, had a resurgence in the 1980s, fueled by the book Michelle Remembers and no shortage of “experts” who made money giving talks to police departments and PTAs. The most notable incident in this “Satanic panic” was the tragic McMartin Preschool case—though others have had their lives ruined as recently as the 1990s. Child sacrifice and depravity are similarly a major part of modern conspiracy theories: in late 2016, 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch conducted an armed invasion of the Comet Ping Pong pizza parlor in Washington, D.C., claiming to be looking for the Hillary Clinton-led “child sex trafficking ring” that right-wing media had claimed existed in the restaurant’s basement. “Pizzagate” later merged with the QAnon conspiracy theory, alleging the existence of a widespread Satanic child abuse and murder conspiracy led by the rich and powerful and, like medieval witch-hunters, situated it in the context of an apocalyptic struggle between good and evil.
As in the past, this millennial vision has been used by those claiming authority: pediatrician, conspiracy theorist, and preacher Stella Immanuel has linked gynecological problems to demon sperm, while Trump-linked preacher Paula White has called for “Satanic pregnancies” to miscarry. While more rational minds in both the past and present have discounted it, it seems the theory of demonic sex is still alive and well on the alt-right.
Ken Mondschein is a scholar, writer, college professor, fencing master, and occasional jouster. Ken’s latest book is On Time: A History of Western Timekeeping. Click here to visit his website.
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Top Image: The Nightmare, by Henry Fuseli (1741–1825)
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