Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters (19 page)

Similar to a claim of immaculate conception, Merlin’s mother argues that a phantom lover kissed her, spoke to her, and eventually impregnated her. Vortigern is shocked by this, calls for an adviser
named Maugantius, and asks if he believes Merlin’s mother’s story. Maugantius responds: “In the books of our wise men and in many histories have I found that many men have been born into the world on this wise. For, as Apuleius in writing as touching the god of Socrates doth make report, certain spirits there be betwixt the moon and the earth, the which we do call incubus daemons.” And Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote more than 500 years before
The Nightmare
was painted.

Seven hundred years before Geoffrey, the evolution of sexual demons from more neutral
daïmônes
is seen in St. Augustine’s
De Civitate Dei
(
City of God
): “It is a widespread belief that sylvans and fauns [nature spirits], commonly called incubi, have frequently molested women, sought and obtained coitus from them.” St. Augustine’s writings are about the earliest that we find mentioning the threats presented by the succubus and incubus, but the odd thing about this medieval rise of sexual demons is that they seem to represent a fear of sexual seduction that could hardly have been new.

In the
Odyssey,
Odysseus runs into numerous temptations and threats of seduction. The Lotus-Eaters try to lure him into a life of eternal flower eating, and the beautiful witch Circe does her best to convince Odysseus his place is to be forever by her side, but these threats are nothing compared to that presented by the Sirens. As Odysseus prepares to leave Circe, she sternly warns him, “First you will come to the Sirens, who enchant every single man who comes to them. If anyone draws near to them in ignorance and hears their voices, there is no homecoming… instead he is enchanted by the clear, sweet song of the Sirens who sit in a meadow, surrounded by a great heap of rotting men, skeletons with shreds of shrivelling skin on them.”

Remarkably, when Odysseus reaches the Sirens, the text gives absolutely no physical description of these monsters while describing their song in considerable detail: “Come here, illustrious Odysseus, great glory of Greece, beach your ship, so you can listen to
our voices. For nobody has ever sailed by on his black ship without listening to the honeyed words on our lips.”

Depictions of Sirens in art and literature made many years after Homer show these monsters as bird-women, presumably because birds sing and because many birds are, in fact, carnivorous and sit in nests surrounded by skeletons and rotting flesh. Yet Homer’s decision to not describe the Sirens’ bodies is worth noting, since so many other monsters in his stories are described in great detail.

Intriguingly, even the gender of the Sirens is concealed. They have honeyed words on their lips and they are specifically mentioned by Circe as attracting men, so they are often assumed to have been female, but Homer does not actually state that they are. One reason for the gender and physical ambiguity in the
Odyssey
could be that the Sirens were so well known that everyone hearing the story was expected to know what they looked like. Given the extensive descriptions of so many other monsters, however, it seems more likely that Homer simply wanted to have a monster in his story that represented the fears associated with the temptations of the flesh. By presenting the Sirens without physical form, he effectively left which temptations they represented up to the listener.

There are obvious similarities between these Greek monsters and the demons that appear so much later in history. All of them seduce, but there is a key difference between the Sirens and the demons found later in
Kings of Britain
and
The Nightmare
—sleep.

People who were forced to face the Sirens did so awake. If they fell prey to them, it was because of their own conscious folly. In
The Nightmare,
it is sleep that is the distinctly new element mixed with sexual seduction to create the monster. In
Kings of Britain,
the situation for Merlin’s mother is less obvious. The text hints that she does ultimately sleep with the demon, since it leads her to conceive a child. Moreover, it is described as coming to her “chambers,” suggesting
these were nocturnal visits since time spent in chambers would most often be at night when she was getting ready for bed or sleeping. Even so, it is not entirely clear if her interactions with the demon took place when she was awake or dreaming. Yet there is a progression present that suggests that the evolution of the incubus demon from
daïmônes
and monsters like the Sirens was not anxiety over sex but rather a rising fear of sexual thoughts taking place during sleep. This is strange because studies of ancient human communities hint that, historically, people have had no problem with sexual thoughts during sleep.

The Hadza in northern Tanzania have had limited exposure to the ways of the outside world, and their traditions are much the same today as they were thousands of years ago. They don’t mix with other tribes, rarely paid attention to Europeans who tried to make contact, and their language, which involves a number of click sounds, is a challenge for Westerners to learn. They are thus rather well isolated from many of the ideas floating around in the rest of society.

As for how they handle the matter of sexual dreams, the Hadza have treated a girl’s first menstruation as a joyous occasion for generations. The girl is adorned with beads and a celebration is thrown in her honor. Intriguingly, when Hadza boys ejaculate in their sleep for the first time (an event that is often associated with dreams of sexual activity) they too are adorned with beads and given a celebration. The sexual dream is not something to be ashamed of but something joyous.

Even so, the Hadza are not a perfect window into the past. Some of their traditions may have evolved with time, and their treatment of girls and boys as they make their journey into adulthood may have altered somewhat from what it was a few thousand years ago. However, it is hard to imagine the celebratory behaviors that anthropologists see in the Hadza today stemming from behaviors that were once associated with any sense of shame. Minor changes would be understandable, but a dramatic change in overall tone seems unlikely.

Other relatively isolated tribes, like the Umeda of Papua New Guinea, show similar tendencies. It is not uncommon for hunters,
on the night before a major hunt, to sleep on top of specially scented sacks that lead them to have erotic dreams and orgasms. Experiencing nocturnal ejaculations was considered to be a good omen, since sex between hunters and women usually followed a successful hunt and dreams of sex hinted that sex would come for real in the near future.
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So if the Hadza and Umeda can be seen as models of how people have historically responded to sexual dreams, this suggests that the ancient human condition embraced rather than feared sexual dreams. Somewhere along the way, during the evolution of society, the wheels came off the wagon and sexual dreams became something to dread. Can we blame the Greeks or Romans for this?

In ancient Greece, sexual dreams appear to have also been a cause for joy. It was common for dreams to be interpreted, and Herodotus wrote about the Greek traitor Hippias, who helped the Persians during their invasion when they landed at Marathon. Hippias had a dream of sleeping with his mother: “He dreamt of lying in his mother’s arms, and conjectured the dream to mean that he would be restored to Athens, recover the power which he had lost, and afterwards live to a good old age in his native country. Such was the sense in which he interpreted the vision.” This led him to believe he would one day return to his motherland of Athens in a position of power.

Similarly, Artemidorus, a Roman dream interpreter who lived in the third century AD, wrote that having sexual dreams involving one’s mother were good for people working in politics, since such dreams represented the love one felt for one’s motherland and were a sign of deep-seated patriotism. Yet Artemidorus was doing his work at a time when sexual dream interpretation was changing, and according to the anthropologist Charles Stewart at University College London, who wrote extensively on nightmares in the
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
in 2002, incubi in very early forms started to leak into his writings.

In his
Interpretation of Dreams,
Artemidorus makes a connection between the playful god Pan, who was known for engaging in dream mischief, and an entity who is mysteriously named Ephialtes. According to Stewart, Ephialtes etymologically seems to mean “to jump on top of,” which is not much different from “to lie on top.” More specifically, he points out that Artemidorus writes, “Ephialtes is identified with Pan but he has a different meaning. If he oppresses or weighs a man down without speaking, it signifies tribulations and distress.” Although the word “incubus” is not specifically used, there are some uncanny similarities between Ephialtes and the monster appearing in Füssli’s
The Nightmare.

Artwork supports the idea that AD 200 was a time when sleep demons were beginning to become more widely feared. In a marble
relief at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, a sleeping shepherd is straddled by a voluptuous winged woman with webbed feet. Unfortunately, the relief is fragmentary and the head of the woman has been lost to the ravages of time. For this reason we cannot determine how human she actually is or get a sense of whether she wishes the sleeping shepherd sweet dreams or sexual nightmares. Even so, many argue that the woman is, in effect, a Roman representation of one of Homer’s Sirens. This has led to the relief being named
Old Man and a Siren.

The timing of this transformation of Sirens into sleep demons, like the incubus and succubus, almost perfectly aligns with when Christianity was spreading rapidly throughout the classical world. As Christians came to blame many misfortunes on evil spirits, the neutral
daïmônes
of ancient Greek lore were transforming into Satan’s fiendish minions. When people ate too much, they fell prey to the demon of gluttony. If they didn’t do enough work, they were plagued by the demon of sloth.

Demons associated with behaviors that people could control with effort were frightening, but demons of nocturnal sexual thoughts must have been dreadful because (in spite of what many believed) there was nothing anyone could do to control his or her dreams. By identifying dreams as potentially sinful, Christianity effectively led people to fear what their own minds subconsciously conjured. Upon waking, they would be forced to struggle with powerful feelings of guilt, corruption, and the terror of eternal damnation. Both the dreamers themselves and the clergy whom they sometimes confessed to could not or would not accept that such dreams were naturally generated by the minds of good people all on their own. Something, or some things, had to be responsible. Thus the incubus and succubus evolved from their less overtly sexual relatives the Sirens and the less malevolent
daïmônes.

Even if Christianity was responsible for the transformation of sirens and
daïmônes
into sleep demons, there are still elements of their evolution as monsters that raise questions. The most perplexing of these is the strikingly different forms they take. In the marble relief
Old Man and a Siren,
the monster is standing over the man. In
Kings of Britain,
the demon merely visits Merlin’s mother at night. In contrast, Artemidorus describes Ephialtes as a creature that is “jumping on top” and “weighing a man down,” and in
The Nightmare,
the demon is literally perched on the center of the woman’s chest.

If only a fear of sexual dreams was responsible for the formation of sleep demons, one would expect their forms to be reasonably consistent, but this is not what we find. Some sleep demons tend to be associated with chest pressure while others only suggest sexual arousal. This could be because people were trying to come to grips with more than just dreams of sex.

As the body enters the stage of sleep when dreaming takes place, known as rapid eye movement or REM sleep, the brain effectively initiates a safety mechanism that tells almost all muscles in the body to stop acting. For example, if a dream emerges that leads you to believe you are walking, you do not literally start walking while in bed. The same is true with more violent activities. If you dream about punching someone in the nose, your body, because of the safety mechanism, does not act upon this impulse.
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Yet the safety signal that the brain sends out does not always work as well as it should.

In some situations, for reasons that are not entirely understood, muscles still take action even though they have been commanded by the brain to remain motionless. Under such a condition, known as REM sleep behavior disorder, people act out their dreams physically. This is why sleepwalking and, in a few noteworthy cases, even sleep-driving,
take place. This obviously dangerous disorder needs close monitoring.