s were burned alive by Adrian Ferreus, general
vicar of the Inquisition.
Magdalena Crucia of Cordova, an abbess, was more fortunate.
Suspected by her nuns of magican accusation convenient
when a superior was at all troublesomeshe anticipated
their charge. Going before Pope Paul III, she confessed a 30-
year intimacy with the devil and obtained pardon.
Old rabbinical writings relate the legend of how Adam was
visited during a 130-year period by female demons and had intercourse
with demons, spirits, specters, lemurs, and phantoms.
Another legend relates how, under the reign of Roger,
king of Sicily, a young man was bathing by moonlight. He
thought he saw someone drowning and hastened to the rescue.
Having drawn from the water a beautiful woman, he became
enamored of her, married her, and had by her a child. Afterward
she disappeared with her child, which made everyone believe
that she was a succubus.
The historian Hector Boece (14651536), in his history of
Scotland, relates that a handsome young man was pursued by
a female demon who would pass through his closed door and
offer to marry him. He complained to his bishop, who enjoined
him to fast, pray, and confess his sins, and as a result the infernal
visitor ceased to trouble him.
The witchcraft judge Pierre de Lancre (15531631) stated
that in Egypt an honest blacksmith was occupied in forging
during the night when a demon appeared to him in the shape
of a beautiful woman. He threw a hot iron in the face of the
demon, which at once took flight.
More Accounts of Incubi and Succubi
Among the many writers who reflected upon the incubus
succubus were Erastus, in his tract de Lamiis; Jakob Sprenger
and Heinrich Kramer in Malleus Maleficarum (1486), which
contains a report of a nun who slept with an incubus in the form
of a bishop; H. Zanchius in de Operibus Del, (1597, 16, 4); G.
Dandini in Aristotelis Tres de Anima (1610); J. G. Godellman in
Tractatus de Magis (1591); M. A. Del Rio in Disquisitionum Magicarum
(1599); and F. M. Guazzo in Compendium Maleficarum
An interesting treatise on the subject is the nineteenthcentury
hoax Demoniality or Incubi and Succubi, supposedly by
one Fr. L. M. Sinistari of Ameno, first translated and published
by the bibliophile Isidore Liseux in Paris in 1879. It was later
translated into English by Montague Summers (Fortune Press,
London, 1927; reprinted B. Blom, New York, 1972).
In the early nineteenth century the issue of the incubus
succubus, which had been dismissed by many as outdated superstition
was raised again by the emerging science of psychoanalysis.
Possibly the most important discussion is that of Ernest
Jones, a Freudian psychoanalyst in his famous treatise On
the Nightmare (1951).
Barrett, Francis. The Magus. 1801. Reprint, New Hyde Park,
N.Y. University Books, 1967.
Jones, Ernest, On the Nightmare. New York Liveright Publishing,
Robbins, Rossell Hope. The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology.
New York Crown Publishers, 1959.