Succubus: An Essay of Sexual Positioning

by
Marrah

This essay is a treatise on the sexual positioning and societal corralation of the inccubus/succubus deamon of European mythos. It is not, and I repeat NOT pornographic, also mature material is discussed. Human beings are inherently sexual creatures and so are our demons. Any attempt to deny this would result in a corruption of the forthright, sometimes blatant, information this site was set up to provide. That said, this essay is not a published theory or scientific work. It is a matter of the author's gathered opinion, and any use of the ideas contained within should be backed up with more fact-based materials. Nothing contained within is known to be false, as nothing can ever be proven true, it is all we have to rely upon.

Succubus: a night fiend that visits men in their sleep to torment their dreams and to engage in sexual relations. Has definite vampiric characteristics, including its night time activities that render the victim totally exhausted and weakened by incessant carnal performances.

The male and female varieties of the European daemon are noted as inccubus and succubus. These names give telling indications of the culture that named them. (I am currently researching their earliest origins and will append this essay as neccessary.) They exemplify the position of each of the sexes within the culture as a whole, as determined by their sex and position in the relatively small framework of their society. Social parallels can be drawn to the positioning of these daemon myths and the fear that ultimately caused their conception. The term 'inc' means above or over, while 'suc' denotes under or beneith.
The male incubus was known to invade the dreams of women and forcibly having intercourse with them. The experience was said to be quite painful and wholly unenjoyable. We know from a variety of period texts that women were not supposed to enjoy the experience of sexual intercourse. Sex was a duty to be endured by the wife for her husband, (Today, we would call it rape. At the time, they called it marriage, and duty, respectively. The rationale for this was a ludicrious belief that the man should not be held accountable for that urge to procreate which was invariable caused by the original female birthing process, which means it was the womans fault from the beginning, of course) and anyone who found pleasure in the act was branded a wanton and a whore, as well as a host of other lables intended for those unworthy of polite society. The most telling characteristic of the incubus was his rather blatant habit of crushing the life from his victims, smothering them to death.
The societal parallel for this is, of course, the way men in Victorian society (note: not just Victorian society) smothered all aspects of woman-kind he could not understand or control. The utter domination of male sexuality over that of their female counterpart suggests a deep-seated, probably ingrained, faer of a return to a way of life that included the female as equal partner, or even more radical, as a dominant force.
This radical viewpoint is supported by the legend of the succubus. As a polar opposite of the incubus, the female succubus is the most prominent member of the women's liberation movement. As a female, her plae is submissive or under the male, as the name implies, both sexually and in society, but she is always portrayed in written word and pictoral image as looming over or straddling her victim. Her posture is defiant and she holds all the power over him. It was her place to steal into the dreams of teh unwary and push him into a carnality that is forbidden by the Christian church, but never the less, was and is widely practiced. In the repressed Victorian society, sex was only for the purpose of procreation, and the spilling of man's seed outside his wife's womb was sinful. Therefore, the image of the succubus was in actuality a way for men to remove the blame for their natural lust onto a female figure, and to receive a pardon from a sin that couldn't possibly be considered his fault. It gave them an excuse to indulge in masterbation (and other sexual outlets) without guilt while at the same time explaining the contented feeling of the climactic release as an exhaustion brought about by the incessant carnal acts forced on him by the daemon. Also, the creature had to be daemonized because her domination of man upset the natural order and balance of the world. It was in this way that Victorian men put a name and an image to their unreasoning fear, and thereby gathered a measure of control over it.
Somehow, modern culture has determined that men have always been the only dominant force in society. Archaeological evidence, as well as disernable patterns developed from pre-patrilineal societies, shows that almost all pre-historical cultures figured the female mother-earth goddess as a supreme deity and the cult of her fertility as the ultimate symbol of this. The female body, especially a pregnant one, was a symbol of fertility and strength, or prosperity. The nomadic lifestyle of these people makes it difficult to determine their relationship to othehr peoples, but one can a ssume a more congenital relationship between people who band together in order to survive, and a more violent one when their survival is limited by the availiable resources.
Females of the Celtic people were as fierce warriors as their male counterparts until weel into Christian Europe. And only with the Christianization of the people did women lose their prominant status. In retrospect, it seems rather silly to base the achievement level of an entire species on the posession of a more prominant, waste-excreting sexual organ. It does, however, provide an ample explaination for the somewhat over used proverb of a man's brains residing in his pants.
While it would be a simple matter to blame the downfall of women-kind on the advent of the Christian religion, my own bias must be put aside in the interest of truth. The subversion of women was evident in human cultures long before Christianity came into existence. In the ancient cultures of the Meditteranean and Egypt women held a secondary status role. While it was not an unknown practice for women to hold power, it was a rather unusual and deceitful cercomstance that put them there, ie. as pharoah.
One trend seems to hold true, though. The more a society was forced to defend itself, ie. the more warrior-like it became, the more male-dominated culture seemed to take over. And although I could probably make a theoretical argument for female-dominated pre-societies having been a more idellic and natural period inhuman history, the background eveidence just isn't availiable to support it. (It is worthy to note that there is no evidence to refute it either.) And in any case, I am not firmly convinced it would have occurred that way. Huamn beings from time beyond memory do not support a theory for a time when there was not some form of conflict occurring. As a race, peace is against our nature. We are bent on a path of self-destruction that seems almost beyond our control. Almost as if we have created a living presence from out of our destructive tendencies and it has separated itself from us. It feels nothing and influences everything. Perhaps this is taking away our fundamental responsibility. And that would be a greater crime than anything a presence could accomplish.
In any case, I digress. In returning to the incubus and succubus, it becomes obvious with wide-eyed contemplation these daemons that plagued the Victorian populace were creations of their fear and guilt, manifested from the repression of their sexuality and the secret, guilty indulgence in masterbation. The condemnation of society forced daemons to bare the guilt and resposibility of a sexual expression that is completely inseparable from human nature.