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

The Demon-Haunted World
been fathered by an incubus. So were Plato, Alexander the Great,
Augustus and Martin Luther. Occasionally an entire people - for
example the Huns or the inhabitants of Cyprus - were accused by
their enemies of having been sired by demons.
In Talmudic tradition the archetypical succubus was Lilith,
whom God made from the dust along with Adam. She was
expelled from Eden for insubordination - not to God, but to
Adam. Ever since, she spends her nights seducing Adam's
descendants. In ancient Iranian and many other cultures, nocturnal
seminal emissions were believed to be elicited by succubi. St
Teresa of Avila reported a vivid sexual encounter with an angel -
an angel of light, not of darkness, she was sure - as did other
women later sanctified by the Catholic Church. Cagliostro, the
eighteenth-century magician and con man, let it be understood
that he, like Jesus of Nazareth, was a product of the union
'between the children of heaven and earth'.
In 1645 a Cornish teenager, Anne Jefferies, was found groggy,
crumpled on the floor. Much later, she recalled being attacked by
half a dozen little men, carried paralysed to a castle in the air,
seduced and returned home. She called the little men fairies. (For
many pious Christians, as for the inquisitors of Joan of Arc, this
was a distinction without a difference. Fairies were demons, plain
and simple.) They returned to terrify and torment her. The next
year she was arrested for witchcraft. Fairies traditionally have
magical powers and can cause paralysis by the merest touch. The
ordinary passage of time is slowed in fairyland. Fairies are
reproductively impaired, so they have sex with humans and carry
off babies from their cradles, sometimes leaving a fairy substitute,
a 'changeling'. Now it seems a fair question: if Anne Jefferies had
grown up in a culture touting aliens rather than fairies, and UFOs
rather than castles in the air, would her story have been distinguishable
in any significant respect from the ones 'abductees' tell?
In his 1982 book The Terror That Comes in the Night: An
Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions, David
Hufford describes an executive, university-educated, in his midthirties,
who recalled a summer spent as a teenager in his aunt's
house. One night, he saw mysterious lights moving in the harbour.
Afterwards, he fell asleep. From his bed he then witnessed a white,
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