The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [61]
And what is it that demons do? In the Malleus, Kramer and Sprenger reveal that ‘devils... busy themselves by interfering with the process of normal copulation and conception, by obtaining human semen, and themselves transferring it’. Demonic artificial insemination in the Middle Ages goes back at least to St Thomas Aquinas, who tells us in On the Trinity that ‘demons can transfer the semen which they have collected and inject it into the bodies of others’. His contemporary, St Bonaventura, spells it out in a little more detail: succubi ‘yield to males and receive their semen; by cunning skills, the demons preserve its potency, and afterwards, with the permission of God, they become incubi and pour it out into female repositories’. The products of these demon-mediated unions are also, when they grow up, visited by demons. A multi-generational trans-species sexual bond is forged. And these creatures, we recall, are well known to fly; indeed they inhabit the upper air.
There is no spaceship in these stories. But most of the central elements of the alien abduction account are present, including sexually obsessive non-humans who live in the sky, walk through walls, communicate telepathically, and perform breeding experiments on the human species. Unless we believe that demons really exist, how can we understand so strange a belief-system, embraced by the whole Western world (including those considered the wisest among us), reinforced by personal experience in every generation, and taught by Church and State? Is there any real alternative besides a shared delusion based on common brain wiring and chemistry?
In Genesis we read of angels who couple with ‘the daughters of men’. The culture myths of ancient Greece and Rome told of gods appearing to women as bulls or swans or showers of gold and impregnating them. In one early Christian tradition, philosophy derived not from human ingenuity but out of demonic pillow talk, the fallen angels betraying the secrets of Heaven to their human consorts. Accounts with similar elements appear in cultures around the world. Parallels to incubi include Arabian djinn, Greek satyrs, Hindu bhuts, Samoan hotua poro, Celtic dusii and many others. In an epoch of demon hysteria, it was easy enough to demonize those we feared or hated. So Merlin was said to have been fathered by an incubus. So were Plato, Alexander the Great, Augustus and Martin Luther. Occasionally an entire people - for example the Huns or the inhabitants of Cyprus - were accused by their enemies of having been sired by demons.
In Talmudic tradition the archetypical succubus was Lilith, whom God made from the dust along with Adam. She was expelled from Eden for insubordination - not to God, but to Adam. Ever since, she spends her nights seducing Adam’s descendants. In ancient Iranian and many other cultures, nocturnal seminal emissions were believed to be elicited by succubi. St Teresa of Avila reported a vivid sexual encounter with an angel -an angel of light, not of darkness, she was sure - as did other women later sanctified by the Catholic Church. Cagliostro, the eighteenth-century magician and con man, let it be understood that he, like Jesus of Nazareth, was a product of the union ‘between the children of heaven and earth’.
In 1645 a Cornish teenager, Anne Jefferies, was found groggy, crumpled on the floor. Much later, she recalled being attacked by half a dozen little men, carried paralysed to a castle in the air, seduced and returned home. She called the little men fairies. (For many pious Christians, as for the inquisitors of Joan of Arc, this was a distinction without a difference. Fairies were demons, plain and simple.) They returned to terrify and torment her. The next year she