Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

The Demon-Haunted World
and philosophical ferment, the existence, much of the character,
and even the name of demons remained unchanged from Hesiod
to the Crusades.
Demons, the 'powers of the air', come down from the skies and
have unlawful sexual congress with women. Augustine believed
that witches were the offspring of these forbidden unions. In the
Middle Ages, as in classical antiquity, nearly everyone believed
such stories. The demons were also called devils, or fallen angels.
The demonic seducers of women were labelled incubi; of men,
succubi. There are cases in which nuns reported, in some befuddlement,
a striking resemblance between the incubus and the
priest-confessor, or the bishop, and awoke the next morning, as
one fifteenth-century chronicler put it, to 'find themselves polluted
just as if they had commingled with a man'. There are
similar accounts, but in harems not convents, in ancient China. So
many women reported incubi, argued the Presbyterian religious
writer Richard Baxter (in his Certainty of the World of Spirits,
1691), 'that 'tis impudence to deny it'.*
As they seduced, the incubi and succubi were perceived as a
weight bearing down on the chest of the dreamer. Mare, despite
its Latin meaning, is the Old English word for incubus, and
nightmare meant originally the demon that sits on the chests of
sleepers, tormenting them with dreams. In Athanasius' Life of St
Anthony (written around 360) demons are described as coming
and going at will in locked rooms; 1400 years later, in his work De
Daemonialitae, the Franciscan scholar Ludovico Sinistrari assures
us that demons pass through walls.
The external reality of demons was almost entirely unquestioned
from antiquity through late medieval times. Maimonides
denied their reality, but the overwhelming majority of rabbis
believed in dybbuks. One of the few cases I can find where it is
even hinted that demons might be internal, generated in our
* Likewise, in the same work, 'The raising of storms by witches is attested by so
many, that I think it needless to recite them.' The theologian Meric Casaubon
argued - in his 1668 book. Of Credulity and Incredulity, that witches must exist
because, after all, everyone believes in them. Anything that a large number of
people believe must be true.
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