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We heard of all the witches, warlocks, incubi, succibi, harpies, devils, imps, and haunters of Avitchi, from all the teachings of history, sacred and profane, Hindu, Egyptian, Greek, mediaeval, Swedenborg, Rosicrucian, theosophy, theology, with every last ounce of horror, mystery, shivers, and creeps squeezed out of them.
In consequence of this, a belief sprang up, and spread from its original source into the outer world, in a class of devils called incubi and succubi, who roamed the earth with no other object than to tempt people to abandon their purity of life.
They invoked also their own Wit, by the name of Muses; their own Ignorance, by the name of Fortune; their own Lust, by the name of Cupid; their own Rage, by the name Furies; their own privy members by the name of Priapus; and attributed their pollutions, to Incubi, and Succubae: insomuch as there was nothing, which a Poet could introduce as a person in his Poem, which they did not make either a God, or a Divel.
"Well, pass the Coulommiers," he said to his wife, who was taking up the salad bowl and the plates. In silence they ate this Brie-type cheese. Des Hermies filled the glasses. "Tell me," Durtal asked Des Hermies, "do you know whether a woman who receives visits from the incubi necessarily has a cold body?
'Beetles in a kitchen. 'No, no-no, no! Victor shook head, pitiful over the good people likened to things unclean, and royally upraising them: in doing which, he scattered to vapour the leaden incubi they had been upon his flatter moods of late. 'No, but it's a rapture to breathe the air here! His lifted chest and nostrils were for the encouragement of Nataly to soar beside him.
When they were male, they were called incubi; and when female, succubi. They sometimes made themselves hideous; and at other times, they assumed shapes of such transcendant loveliness, that mortal eyes never saw beauty to compete with theirs. Although the devil and his legions could appear to mankind at any time, it was generally understood that he preferred the night between Friday and Saturday.
He was a cautious beast, and this may have arisen from his having been often bogged. These rides were, then, not much sought after, and when Solomon was placed at Dick's disposal he was voted by far the best, and the donkey was not long in finding that his young master had learned how to ride; as, with his long head he debated how he might best rid himself of such incubi as Dick and his friend.
The most powerful of present-day exorcists, the man who has gone most thoroughly into this matter, one Johannès, Doctor of Theology, told me that he had saved nuns who had been ridden without respite for two, three, even four days by incubi!" "I know that priest," remarked Des Hermies. "And the act is consummated in the same manner as the normal human act?" "Yes and no.
Paul Buys the governor-general had a whole set of incubi in the Norris family. Probably no two persons ever detested each other more cordially than did Leicester and Sir John Norris. Sir John had been commander of the forces in the Netherlands before Leicester's arrival, and was unquestionably a man of larger experience than the Earl.
The mediæval devil was, for the most part, himself little more than a prankish Rübezahl, or Robin Goodfellow; the new Satan of the Reformers was, in very deed, an arch-fiend, the enemy of the human race, with whom no truce or parley might be held. The old folklore belief in incubi and succubi as the parents of changelings is brought into connection with the theory of direct diabolic begettal.
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