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A strange name they have given these visitations, some might have given them a harsher name." Father Daly's thoughts went to certain literature of the Middle Ages. "The matter is, of course, one that is not entirely unknown to me; it is one of the traditional sins of the convent, one of the plagues of the Middle Ages. The early Fathers suffered from the visits of Succubi.
"If in addition they had declared that the Evil One had appeared to them, that they had been visited by succubi; if they had affirmed that they had heard voices, smelled odours, even touched a body; we might conclude that they had had hallucinations similar to those of certain Bicêtre subjects, but as it was there could have been no misfunctioning of the senses, no morbid visions, because the wounds, the marks of the blows, the material fact, visible and tangible, are present for testimony.
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.
An esoteric band of fabulous monsters these: harpies and vampires take tea at Sherry's; succubi and incubbi are observed buying opal rings at Tiffany's; fairies, angels, dwarfs, and elves, bearing branches of asphodel, trip lightly down Waverly Place; peris, amshaspahands, æsir, izeds, and goblins sleep at the Brevoort; seraphim and cherubim decorate drawing rooms on Irving Place; griffons, chimeras, and sphynxes take courses in philosophy at Harvard; willis and sylphs sing airs from Lucia di Lammermoor and Le Nozze di Figaro; naiads and mermaids embark on the Cunard Line; centaurs and amazons drive in the Florentine Cascine; kobolds, gnomes, and trolls stab, shoot, and poison one another; and a satyr meets the martichoras in Gramercy Park.
"For Sinistrari d'Ameno," observed Durtal, "the incubi and succubi are not precisely demons, but animal spirits, intermediate between the demon and the angel, a sort of satyr or faun, such as were revered in the time of paganism, a sort of imp, such as were exorcised in the Middle Ages.
Considering that there is need of a inquiry into her person, her wealth and her deportment, in order to verify if these effects of love are legitimate, and to not proceed, as would seem indicated by her manners, from a bewitchment of Satan, who often visits Christianity under the form of a female, as appears in the holy books, in which it is stated that our blessed Saviour was carried away into a mountain, from which Lucifer or Astaroth showed him the fertile plains of Judea and that in many places have been seen succubi or demons, having the faces of women, who, not wishing to return to hell, and having with them an insatiable fire, attempt to refresh and sustain themselves by sucking in souls;
They said there were no such horrid, unnatural, and disgusting beings as the incubi and succubi, and the innumerable grotesque imps that men had believed in for so many ages. Man was not surrounded with enemies like these, but with myriads of beautiful and beneficent beings, all anxious to do him service.
Certainly, for unction spiced with ferocity, for a madness which alternately kissed the Crucifix and trampled on it, for mandragora and fleurs de lys, saints and succubi, churches and lupanars commend me to Siena the red. You are not to suppose that she has not paid for all this, the red Siena. None of it is absolved; it is there floating vaguely in the atmosphere.
Perhaps, too, it was they who, as succubi, emotionalized the dreams of monks. Yet, in view of Ishtar, they could not have been very numerous in Babylon where, however, they had a queen, Lilît, the Lilith of the Talmud, Adam's vampire wife, who conceived with him shapes of sin.
It is not of one piece indeed. In that particular Pliny himself might be mistaken. "Opus omnibus et picturae, et statuariae artis praeponendum. Ex uno lapide eum et Liberos draconumque mirabiles nexus de consilii sententia fecere succubi artifices." "A work preferable to all the other Efforts of Painting and Statuary.
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