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

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
Sprenger reveal that 'devils . . . busy themselves by interfering
with the process of normal copulation and conception, by obtaining
human semen, and themselves transferring it'. Demonic
artificial insemination in the Middle Ages goes back at least to St
Thomas Aquinas, who tells us in On the Trinity that 'demons can
transfer the semen which they have collected and inject it into the
bodies of others'. His contemporary, St Bonaventura, spells it out
in a little more detail: succubi 'yield to males and receive their
semen; by cunning skills, the demons preserve its potency, and
afterwards, with the permission of God, they become incubi and
pour it out into female repositories'. The products of these
demon-mediated unions are also, when they grow up, visited by
demons. A multi-generational trans-species sexual bond is forged.
And these creatures, we recall, are well known to fly; indeed they
inhabit the upper air.
There is no spaceship in these stories. But most of the central
elements of the alien abduction account are present, including
sexually obsessive non-humans who live in the sky, walk through
walls, communicate telepathically, and perform breeding experiments
on the human species. Unless we believe that demons really
exist, how can we understand so strange a belief-system,
embraced by the whole Western world (including those considered
the wisest among us), reinforced by personal experience in
every generation, and taught by Church and State? Is there any
real alternative besides a shared delusion based on common brain
wiring and chemistry?
In Genesis we read of angels who couple with 'the daughters of
men'. The culture myths of ancient Greece and Rome told of gods
appearing to women as bulls or swans or showers of gold and
impregnating them. In one early Christian tradition, philosophy
derived not from human ingenuity but out of demonic pillow talk,
the fallen angels betraying the secrets of Heaven to their human
consorts. Accounts with similar elements appear in cultures
around the world. Parallels to incubi include Arabian djinn,
Greek satyrs, Hindu bhuts, Samoan hotua poro, Celtic dusii and
many others. In an epoch of demon hysteria, it was easy enough to
demonize those we feared or hated. So Merlin was said to have
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