Abstract
This chapter gives a history of incubi and succubi, with the former imaged as red-haired goat-like creatures, and the latter, flaming red-haired and buxom females, both excessively sexually charged and obsessed with securing illicit sex with humans of the opposite or same gender. The first recorded depiction is in the Bible, followed by The Epic of Gilgimesh (2800–2500 BC), Augustine of Hippo’s On the City of God Against the Pagans (400–430), Beowulf (975–1025), the study of Franciscan friar Ludovico Maria Sinistrari (1622–1701), and the paintings by Henry Fuseli (1781) and Charles Walker (1870). The chapter also notes the widespread appearance of the incubus in early Germany, Brazil, Africa, Sweden, India, and Turkey. The presence of red-haired incubi and succubi pervade eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and literature. The chapter finishes with an analysis of Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and the current TV series Evil.
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Notes
- 1.
See The Scapegoat by William Holman Hunt (1854–1856) at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoat#/media/File:William_Holman_Hunt_-_The_Scapegoat.jpg. You may be interested in knowing that there are several neo-Gothic novels titled Scapegoat, with the most famous being by Hall Caine (1891) and Daphne du Maurier (1957).
- 2.
The dictionary is by A. Barrèrre and C. G. Leland. See OED.
- 3.
See Genesis 15:20; Deuteronomy 2:10–21, 3:11; Joshua 12:4, 13:12, 15:8, 17:15, and 18:16; 2 Samuel 5:18–22, 23:13; and 1 Chronicles 11:15, 14:9, and 20:4.
- 4.
For Fuseli’s paintings mentioned in this chapter, see: The Nightmare (1781) at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:John_Henry_Fuseli_-_The_Nightmare.JPG and https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-henry-fuseli-the-nightmare-2-75459224.html; The Camp of Two Sleeping Girls (1793) at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Johann_Heinrich_F%C3%BCssli_014.jpg, and The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches (1796) at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lapland_witches.jpg; and The Nightmare Leaves the
- 5.
Shakespeare’s father was a senior alderman.
- 6.
Lapland witches appear in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors (1594) and in James VI’s Daemonologie (1597) It has been believed that “the Sami (formerly known as Laplanders of Laps/Lapps), who live in the northern part of Russia, Finland, Norway and Sweden” were very superstitious people and had an abundance of witches (Hagen 142).
- 7.
The Prose Brut is a collection of medieval chronicles that begins with the founding of Britain by Brutus of Troy, descendant of the Trojan hero Aeneas, who was the son of prince Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite.
- 8.
Apuleius (AD 124–70), a Platonist philosopher, wrote De Deo Socratis (On the God of Socrates), a book on demonology.
- 9.
Edward Donald Kennedy, for one, points out Tennyson’s rendition of Arthur in “The Passing of Arthur”: “My God, thou hast forgotten me in my death: / Nay—God my Christ—I pass but shall not die” (quoted in xxxiv from Tennyson’s Idylls 2.27–28), or at least, Arthur is “a Christian leader fighting the heathen” (xxxiv) and who, like the Second Coming of Christ, people would hope that he would one day return again to save Briton. In Tennyson’s “Guinevere,” Arthur’s mission is “to break the heathen and uphold the Christ” (1996, 467).
- 10.
Jehu, the tenth king of the northern Kingdom of Israel, ordered the murder of all worshippers of Baal, and that if anyone escaped, the persons responsible would forfeit their own lives (2 Kings 10: 18–28). This report follows: “Then all the people went to the house of Baal, and brake it down, and brake his altars and his Images in pieces, and slew Mattan the priest of Baal before the altars” (2 Chron. 23:16–17). A few additional references are 1 Kings 16:32, 1 Kings 22: 53, Judges 6:32, Jeremiah 19:5, and Hosea 13:1.
- 11.
For Ashtoreth see Judges 2:13 and 10:6, 1 Samuel 7:3–4 and 12:10, 1 King 11:5 and 33, and 2 Kings 23:13. For Astaroth see Deut. 1:4; Joshua 9:10, 12:4, and 13:12 and 31; Judges 3:3 and 10:6; 1 Samuel 2:13, 7:3–4, 12:10, and 31:10; and 2 Kings 23:13.
- 12.
See 1 Samuel 2:10, 7:3–4, and 31:10; 1 Kings 11:5 and 33, 18:19, and 33; 2 Kings 23:13; Judges 2:13, 3:7, and 10:6; Jeremiah 44:17 and 25.
- 13.
The Book of Abramelin, a book of Kabbalistic magic, was written by Abraham of Worms, a Jewish scholar who lived in Worms, Germany, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and studied magic in Egypt.
- 14.
- 15.
Keats coined this phrase in a letter to his brothers in December 1817. See Rollins (1958, 1.193).
- 16.
In a note in Walter Jackson Bate’s book on Keats (1963), Georgiana Keats said his hair was a “golden red.” Clarke, Hunt, Bailey, and Severn remembered it as being brown but the “women” described it “as auburn to red.” “The surviving locks, despite Amy Lowell’s rapt description of one as ‘lighter than the shade known as “Titian red” … a red sunset comes nearest to the colour’ (1925, 1.95), are all rather faded; but they seem to suggest a russet or reddish brown” (114 n. 15). Lowell’s information is in the bibliography.
- 17.
- 18.
This must have been a book of Levin’s invention because it is not listed in WorldCat.
- 19.
The Visitation and Mary is found in Luke 1:28: “And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art though among women.”
- 20.
For more on Rosemary’s Baby, see my “The Devil’s in It: The Bible as Gothic” (2020, 175). I also discuss the incubus in the television series Evil by Robert King and Michelle King, which first aired on September 26, 2019 (176–80).
- 21.
See Deuteronomy 18:10–14, 1 Samuel 15:23 and 22:23; 2 Chronicles 33:6; Leviticus 19:31, 20:6 and 20:27; Isaiah 8:19–22, 19:1–4 and 47:8–14; Micah 5:10–12, Galatians 5:19–20, 5:19–21, Acts 8:9–13 and 19:17–20; Revelation 18:23, and 21:8 (Ayres 2020, 183n3).
- 22.
For a fuller discussion of Boggs’ interaction with an incubus, see my chapter, “The Devil’s in It” (2020, 169–86).
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Ayres, B. (2021). “Real are the dreams”: Red Hairy Incubi and Unheavenly Succubi. In: A Vindication of the Redhead. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83515-6_3
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