succubus
posted by Krista | 5/23/2004 7:38:26 PM | Permalink | 
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Succubi are the female version of incubi, although the word is actually masculine in medieval Latin because demons were supposedly sexless. The feminine form is "succuba". It was supposed that incubi outnumbered succubi by 9 to 1.Francis Barret described succubi as wood nymphs in his book "The Magus"
"And seeing the fauni and nymphs of the words were preferred before the other [spirits] in beauty, they afterwards generated their offspring among themselves, and at length began wedlocks with men, feigning that, by these copulations, they should obtain an immortal soul for them and their offspring but this happened through the persuasions and delusions of Satan to admit these monsters to carnal copulation, which the ignorant were easily persuaded to and therefore these nymphs are called succubi although Satan afterwards committed worse, frequently transchanging himself, by assuming the persons of both incubi and succubi in both sexes for they conceived not a true young by the males, except the nymphs alone."
One story of a succubus was told by Walter Mapes in his "De Nugis Curialium [Courtier's Trifles] (approx 1185)" about Gerbert of Aurillac, who became Pope Sylvester II (999-1003).
