If you lived in seventeenth century Italy and wanted to know about Demoniality – carnal relations with demons – the man to speak to was Father Lodovico Maria Sinistrari. As well as being a Franciscan monk, consultant to the Holy Inquisition and lecturer in philosophy and theology, he was the authority on demonic sex. In fact, sometime in the mid-seventeenth century, he wrote a book about it: Demoniality: Incubi and Succubi.[i]
Incubi (male) and Succubi (female) are demons who are supposed to have intercourse with humans as they sleep. Typically, the victim would wake up to feel a heavy weight crushing and suffocating them as well as a feeling of paralysis.[ii] Perhaps there would be weird or terrifying visions or apparitions…
Many would nowadays put experiences like this down to sleep paralysis, the fairly common sleep disorder, but Father Sinistrari had other ideas.
The handwritten book was discovered in London in 1872 and then translated into English, and it’s certainly a strange read. It covers everything from the qualities of demonic sperm to the moral distinctions between bestiality and demoniality.
Here’s one of the stories he uses to illustrate his learned tract.
Hieronyma and the Horny Demon
In Pavia, where Father Sinistrari was lecturer, there was a married woman of virtue called Hieronyma. One day she kneaded some dough and took it to the bakery to be baked. When it came back, the bread was accompanied by a large, oddly shaped cake. She told the baker it wasn’t hers, but the baker assured her it must have been ordered by someone from her household.
She ate the cake.
The next night she was awoken by a shrill voice hissing in her ear asking her if she had liked the cake. Hieronyma became scared, and began making the cross and calling on Jesus and Mary. The voice reassured her:
Be not afraid. I mean you no harm; quite the reverse. I am prepared to do anything to please you; I am captivated by your beauty, and desire nothing more than to enjoy your embraces.
She felt soft kisses on her cheek for an hour but resisted the demon and it finally left her.
The following day she called in a priest who provided her with some holy relics to protect her from the demon. These didn’t work. The incubus, for that is what it was, came and troubled her again the next night. She then went to see an exorcist, fearing she was demonically possessed. The exorcist blessed her house and demanded that the demon leave her.
But this demon was lovesick, or so he told Hieronyma, as he wept with love for her.
The incubus soon began to appear before her in the form of a handsome youth, sometimes when she was in company. He would kiss her hand and beg her to return his favours. Thankfully, only Hieronyma could see him, for he was invisible to everyone else.
As the months went by, and Hieronyma continued to refuse her demonic suitor, he became aggressive. He stole her jewellery and relics, beat her leaving her with bruises on her face and arms which appeared and then magically disappeared.
Even worse, the demon would snatch her three-year old daughter from her and place her in dangerous locations such as on the roof or in the gutter, though the child was never harmed. Furniture would be suddenly upset and plates would be smashed only to be miraculously restored.
The demon’s behaviour became more outrageous, according to Father Sinistrari. One night after coming to Hieronyma’s bed and being refused, the incubus disappeared only to return with some stones with which he built a wall surrounding the bed that almost touched the ceiling. The poor woman supposedly needed a ladder to get out of her bed. When the wall was torn down, many witnesses were said to have seen all the stones vanish.
However, the demon’s most audacious piece of mischief came when Hieronyma’s husband was entertaining some military friends. The company were about to sit down to eat when the whole table and everything on it simply vanished, as did all the pots, pans and crockery in the kitchen as well as all their bottles and glasses.
The guests were leaving when they heard a crash and returned to see the table was back, groaning with food and wine. The food was different to what had previously been there, so the guests were unwilling to try it, but when they overcame this, they found everything delicious and polished it off. It was only then that the original food miraculously appeared again, though by now everyone was too full to eat it.
Even more embarrassment followed for poor Hieronyma. She was walking past some crowds of people to hear mass, but as soon as she set foot on the church threshold, all her clothes fell to the ground before being blown away by a gust of wind leaving her stark naked before the astonished eyes of the congregation. Finally, two gallant cavaliers covered her nakedness with a cloak and escorted her home.
The incubus eventually gave up and left poor Hieronyma alone, but this was after several long years…
This tall story has both fairy tale elements (the mysterious cake) and odd dream-like elements (the vanishing food, finding oneself naked in church), as well as a kind of saucy slapstick humour, though I don’t think this was intentional.
Anyway, if you want to know more about the sex lives of Demons, read on…
Demon Semen
According to some experts on the matter, Father Sinistrari instructs us, demon semen is very thick, warm and rich. This is because the demon transforms into a succubus and extracts the sperm from a sleeping man and only the strongest men are chosen. It is this sperm that the demon uses to impregnate the woman of his choice. In other cases, the demon may animate a male corpse and use that to inseminate the object of his desire.
However, Sinistrati does not concur. His belief is that the incubus impregnates the woman – and only with her consent – with his own sperm. This is because demons are corporeal fallen angels rather than immaterial spirits. Because of this their sperm is ‘subtle’ rather than thick, and in Old Testament times liaisons between women and these fallen angels resulted in mighty giants (or the Nephalim, as they are referred to in the book of Genesis (6:1-4).
Sinistrari believed that demon-human hybrids were often bold, tall, strong, proud and wicked. Examples of people born from a demonic liaison include legendary founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, Pliny the Elder, Plato, Alexander the Great, Caesar Augustus and Merlin the wizard. And that ‘damned’ heretic, Martin Luther. Meow.
So, if demons are still consorting with human women, where are all the giants now, you might ask.
Well, Sinistrari has an answer. Demons can be aerial, aqueous, earthy and igneous. Since the great flood, the atmosphere of the earth has become much damper, so the variety of demons that fathered giants have moved to the upper atmosphere where they can no longer get up to mischief. The demons left behind father normal sized babies.
If you want to know what a demon-human hybrid looks like, according to demonologist Nicholas Remy in the sixteenth century:
It had a hooked beak, a long smooth neck, quivering eyes, a pointed tail, a strident voice, and very swift feet upon which it ran rapidly to and fro as if seeking for some hiding-place in its stable.[iii]
Woman Wailing for her Demon Lover
In his poem ‘Kubla Khan’, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote of ‘Woman wailing for her demon lover’, but having a demonic paramour was highly dangerous according to Sinistrari. For one thing, voluntary consorting with a demon lover would be considered witchcraft and therefore a sin.
As part of the Inquisition, Sinistrari knew a great deal about this and other sins. In fact, in order to help priests hearing confessions he had written a substantial analysis and classification of all the sins there were, with each being divided into sub-categories, and further Aristotelian sub-divisions within those.[iv]
However, Sinistrari had considerable sympathy for people like Hieronyma who were pestered by lusty demons and resisted them. He recommended a number of herbs, stones and other substances that could be placed around the bedroom to discourage an amorous demon – cardamon, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg in vessels of hot water. If you want your room to smell like a pub rather than a curry house, you could use tobacco and brandy. Or you could use diamonds or menstrual blood.
If you don’t have any of the above to hand, you might be in trouble. Sinistrari argues that when a man confesses to bestiality, the priest orders him to slaughter the animal to avoid being tempted again. Congress with an inferior creature is sinful. However, incubi and succubi are fallen angels, so in the case of sexual relations between them and humans, it’s us that are the inferior creatures. And because Sinistrari sees these lusty demons as capable of salvation, if and when the demon sees the error of his ways he is liable to kill his human lover to avoid further temptation, or so we are warned…
Epilogue: The Lancashire Connection
If you’ve got this far, you might be wondering why I’m reading seventeenth century tracts on demonology. Well, it’s because I’m doing research for a book on demonic possession in early modern Lancashire. The Lancashire witch trials are well known, but around the same time Lancashire was troubled by several bizarre cases of supposed possession by evil spirits, as attested to in a number of astonishing contemporary pamphlets. And this is the rabbit hole that led me to Father Sinistrari’s Demoniality…
Sweet dreams…
[i] Father Ludovico Sinestrari, Demoniality: Incubi and Succubi
[ii] Rosemary Ellen Guiley, The Encyclopaedia of Demons and Demonology, (New York: Facts on File, 2009) p.19
[iii] Guiley, p.120
[iv] Alexandra H.M. Nagel, Tracing the mysterious facts of “Demoniality” (“De Daemonialitate”) by Ludovico M. Sinistrari and published by Isidore Liseux, (2008). Available at: https://www.academia.edu/4046753/Tracing_the_mysterious_facts_of_Demoniality_De_Daemonialitate_by_Ludovico_M_Sinistrari_and_published_by_Isidore_Liseux
Paul Weatherhead 
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