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124 Indo-Europeans
to all vices. And there is no doubt that they
know under which stars the semen is most
vigorous, and that men so conceived will be
always perverted by witchcraft (Kramer and
Sprenger [1486] 1970, 25).
In other words, people who copulate with
demons are more inclined to sin, and human
beings thus conceived are somehow corrupted by
this process so that they readily give themselves to
Satan after they grow up.
There were, however, other medieval traditions
that asserted the incubi could impregnate mortal
women, and that succubi could become pregnant
by mortal men. It was, for instance, rumored that
Merlin the magician was the offspring of such a
union. This notion of semidemonic children was
useful for explaining such phenomena as
deformed babies. Incubi were sometimes referred
to as demon lovers. Also, some writers asserted that
succubi were the same as the wood nymphs of
European folklore.
Mortals who willingly responded to the seductive
wiles of these beings risked damnation. A
papal bull issued by Pope Innocent VIII in 1484,
for instance, asserted that: “Many persons of both
sexes, forgetful of their own salvation, have abused
incubi and succubi” (Kramer and Sprenger 1970
[1486], xliii–xlv). Some of the church fathers, such
as St. Anthony, asserted that demons would take
the form of seductive naked women who would
try to lure him away from his devotions. These
experiences were later taken as evidence for the
real existence of succubi.
See also Demons; Nightmares
For Further Reading:
Augustine. The City of God. London: J. M. Dent and
Sons, 1942.
Baskin, Wade. Dictionary of Satanism. New York:
Philosophical Library, 1962.
Eliade, Mircea, ed. Encyclopedia of Religion. New
York: Macmillan, 1987.
Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. The Encyclopedia of
Dreams. New York: Crossroad, 1993.
———. The Encyclopedia of Witches and Witchcraft.
New York: Facts on File, 1989.
Kesey, Morton. Dreams: The Dark Speech of the
Spirit. New York: Doubleday, 1968.
Kramer, Heinrich, and James Sprenger. Malleus
Maleficarum. 1486. Transl. Montague Summers.
New York: Benjamin Blom, 1970.
Niels C. Nielsen, Jr. et al. Religions of the World. New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983.
Van de Castle, Robert L. Our Dreaming Mind. New
York: Ballantine, 1994.
Indo-Europeans
Although there have been innumerable subsidiary
influences, the angels and demons of Western religions
(i.e., Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam) are derived ultimately from the gods of
the Indo-Europeans. Indo-European was originally
a linguistics term referring to the Indo-European
family of languages. This category of classification
was created when it was discovered that almost all
of the languages from Europe to India were
related, indicating a common root language. This
family resemblance is evident in similarities of
vocabulary. Thus, for example, the Sanskrit/Hindi
word deva, which refers to a certain class of gods
and goddess, comes from the same root as the
English words deity and divine. In order to explain
this phenomenon, scholars have postulated that
these similarities are the result of a group of
peoples, who spoke the original (now lost) Indo-
European language.
These peoples, who called themselves Aryans
(Nobles), originated from the steppes of southern
Russia, in the region stretching from the Black Sea
to the Ural Mountains. (Contrary to the less-thanscholarly
reinterpretation of this history by Nazi
theoreticians, the Aryans were a distinctly Central
Asian people—not the Nordic racial type of Nazi
mythology.) Several millennia before the common
era (B.C.E.), groups of Aryans took off in every
direction, subjugating indigenous peoples in every
area of the world from India to Ireland (Iran,
Ireland, and Aryan all derive from the same root).
The Indo-European family of languages is one of
the legacies of this expansion.
Efforts to reconstruct Indo-European religion
and mythology, represented especially in the work
of George Dumézil, have focused on finding
common elements in the myths and religious practices
of Indo-European peoples that are not found
in other cultural complexes. It has, for example,
been established that the Indo-Europeans divided
their society into three groups of people, and that