Incubus in the Middle Ages - a demon, or fallen Angel, they are attracted to women who sleep. This word comes from the Latin “incubare” - “to lie on top”. An incubus appears to a woman in dreams and has sex with her, sometimes after this, children are born... Demons from which nuns gave birth...

In the Middle Ages, the problem of incubi was so pressing that in 1484, Pope Innocent VIII issued a special bull, which contained instructions on how to protect yourself from the lustful demon. Incubi especially harassed nuns. Hermits in convents Hundreds of children were born from them. The incubi did not ignore laywomen either. Although, it seems, the woman referred to the connection with this only out of extreme despair, when nothing else could explain the unwanted pregnancy... Incubi were described in the early Middle Ages as vile hunchbacked dwarfs. They believed that the children born from them were just as hunchbacked and ugly. And in general, often all newborns who had physical abnormalities were declared to be born not from a legal husband, but from incubi.

As they say in documents that have reached us, starting from the 17th century, incubi appeared to women handsome men. There have also been cases where these were familiar men, but they died. There are often cases when incubi appeared in the form of deceased husbands.

Such reports of conceptions from an otherworldly entity can be called fiction. But things are more complicated. Of the cases of sexual intimacy during sleep that resulted in pregnancy, there are truly mysterious ones.

The case is mystical and legal

German professor Johann Klein from the University of Rostock in 1698 described the case of Maria de Mondelon, 32 years old. This noble lady filed a lawsuit in the city of Grenoble demanding that her young son be confirmed in hereditary rights. The whole piquancy of the situation was that the son could in no way be born from her husband, Count Jerome Auguste de Mondelon. The count died in America four years before the child was born. Therefore, the baby could not lay claim to his property and lands. And yet, Maria swore that this child was precisely from the husband who came to her in a dream. Her request was rejected by the court. Then the Countess appealed the refusal to the Grenoble Parliament. Midwives and midwives took Mary’s side, confirming that conceptions in a dream are possible and have happened more than once. The lawyers presented ancient documents certifying the birth of children to nuns in convents, which occurred as a result of the appearance of men in their dreams. In the end, parliament heeded the requests of the respected lady who found herself in a difficult situation.

This whole story about “conception in a dream” seems to look like a curiosity. But after some time, those around him began to notice that the boy, as he grew up, looked more and more like the late Count Jerome. In addition to the external resemblance, the young man had his gestures and habits that could not be learned. The count's friends said that he even had the voice of a deceased person. Professor Klein wrote that, having learned about all this, Jerome's old nurse and butler came to Grenoble. They were amazed to see the young man and testified that he was the spitting image of Jerome de Mondelon. The secret of the origin of the countess's son remained unsolved.

Otherworldly entities are capable of anything

An equally mysterious incident occurred in the late 1980s in Moscow. Olga L. is 20 years old. Doctors diagnosed hypoplasia, or, popularly, “children’s uterus.” With such a diagnosis, you have to say goodbye to the dream of having a child. Her husband immediately left the girl. As Olga’s relatives said, after he left, she cried all night. The depression lasted for a whole month. Olga cried day and night. And then one night, when she fell asleep, exhausted, she dreamed of her husband. He repented of his action, asked for forgiveness, but most importantly, he entered into intimacy with her, which, according to the woman, was incredibly stormy. Saying goodbye to her, he whispered: “We will have a son,” and disappeared.

After 2 months, the woman went to the gynecologist, who determined that she was 8 weeks pregnant. No one could say how this happened. But Olga’s diagnosis was made not by one doctor, but by several, and in different clinics, which she visited in the hope that maybe the doctors were wrong...

Later it turned out that women with this diagnosis still give birth, but these are extremely rare cases. In Russia, before Olga, only one such case was recorded. It happened in 1910, also in Moscow. True, there is a significant difference between both episodes: that woman had ordinary intimacy. And Olga, it turns out, gave birth to a ghost...

The reaction of her ex-husband to this event and the further fate of Olga herself are unknown to us.

Conception from an incubus has been scientifically proven

There is no point in dwelling on cases of “sleep conception” in healthy women, reports of which will appear in the world media. There is still a great possibility of deception here. Therefore, let us consider another incredible episode from a medical point of view, somewhat similar to the case of Olga L.

This happened in 1972 in California (America) with Teresa Rosalia F. At the age of 24, she was diagnosed with a diagnosis no less serious than Olga: obstruction of the fallopian tubes. The diagnosis meant the inability to give birth. Before this, Teresa had been married for five years to a man who was 16 years older than her. Teresa had a miscarriage, after which she suffered from an inflammatory disease, which resulted in tubal obstruction. After that, of course, she did not become pregnant. When the doctors announced the diagnosis, her husband left her.

For two years the woman was depressed. Then, one November night, an incident occurred that many still do not believe. Teresa dreamed of a certain Michael, with whom she had an affair a long time ago, back in school. They did not reach real intimacy, but the young people met until the guy died in a road accident. He crashed his motorcycle. Michael appeared to Teresa in a dream four times, and each time their meetings ended in intimacy. On his last, fourth visit, he mysteriously promised that they would soon unite forever...

Those nights, weak poltergeist manifestations were observed in Teresa’s house: footsteps were heard in the empty corridor, doors creaked, and the sounds of furniture being moved were heard. After the fourth night everything stopped. Soon Teresa felt that she was pregnant. The doctors were very surprised and suggested she have an abortion, arguing that the fetus would still not be able to develop under such conditions. Teresa categorically refused. The birth was very difficult and ended in the death of the woman. The child was stillborn.

More than 25 years later, Dr. S. Lenihan tried to find an explanation for this mysterious case. He took advantage of the fact that in the hospital where Teresa lay and her autopsy was performed, particles of her uterus and fetus were preserved. All that remained was to find Michael's genetic material. At first Lenichen planned to take this material from his close relatives, but it turns out that the young man’s family kept his bloody shirt. Genetic testing showed that the father of Teresa’s child with a 98% probability was this same Michael...

“We live in a more than strange world, if such events can happen in it,” Doctor Lenihan shrugged.

Ancient texts indicate that no one sees a sleeping woman during her intimacy with an incubus. Everyone around is fast asleep. This suggests that an otherworldly entity can pass from an incorporeal form to a tangible one and back, because conceptions occur for real. It seems that in this respect the nature of incubi is akin to the nature of aliens, who, according to ufologists, have the same abilities...

An incubus in the Middle Ages was a demon, or fallen angel, who was attracted to sleeping women. The word itself comes from the Latin “incubare” - “to lie on top”. Incubi appear to women in their dreams and have sex with them, after which they sometimes give birth to children...

Demons that gave birth to nuns

In the Middle Ages, the problem of incubi was so pressing that in 1484, Pope Innocent VIII even issued a special bull, which contained instructions on how to protect yourself from the lustful demon. Incubi especially harassed nuns. Hundreds of hermits in convents gave birth to them.

Incubi and laywomen were not ignored. Although, it seems, women referred to a connection with this otherworldly entity only out of extreme despair, when nothing else could justify an unwanted pregnancy...

In the early Middle Ages, incubi were described as vile, hunchbacked dwarfs. It was believed that the children born from them were just as ugly and hunchbacked. Often, all babies with physical disabilities were declared to be born not from their legitimate husbands, but from incubi.

According to surviving documents, starting from the 17th century, incubi appeared to women as handsome men. Cases have also been recorded where these were male acquaintances who had died by that time. Incubi often appeared in the form of deceased husbands.

Reports of conceptions from incubi can be called fiction. But it's not that simple. Among the cases of love intimacy in a dream that ended in pregnancy, there are truly mysterious ones.

The case is mystical and legal

In 1698, Professor Johann Klein from the University of Rostock in Germany described the case of 32-year-old Marie de Mondelon. This noble lady filed a lawsuit in the city of Grenoble demanding that her young son be confirmed in hereditary rights.

The piquancy of the situation was that there was no way a son could be born from her husband, Count Jerome Auguste de Mondelon. The count died in America four years before the child was born. This means that the boy could not claim his lands and property. Nevertheless, Mary swore that she conceived precisely from the husband who appeared to her in a dream. The court rejected her request.

Then the countess appealed the refusal to the Grenoble parliament. Midwives and midwives took Mary’s side, confirming that conceptions in a dream are possible and have happened more than once. The lawyers presented ancient documents certifying the birth of children to nuns in convents, which occurred as a result of the appearance of men in their dreams. In the end, parliament heeded the requests of the respected lady who found herself in a difficult situation.

This whole story about “conception in a dream” seems to look like a curiosity. But after some time, those around him began to notice that the boy, as he grew up, looked more and more like the late Count Jerome. In addition to the external resemblance, the young man had his gestures and habits that could not be learned. The count's friends said that he even had the voice of a deceased person.

Professor Klein wrote that, having learned about all this, Jerome's old nurse and butler came to Grenoble. They were amazed to see the young man and testified that he was the spitting image of Jerome de Mondelon. The secret of the origin of the countess's son remained unsolved.

Otherworldly entities are capable of anything

An incident that occurred in the late 1980s in Moscow looks no less mysterious. Doctors diagnosed 20-year-old Olga L. with hypoplasia, or, as people say, “a child’s uterus.” With such a diagnosis, you have to say goodbye to dreams of childbearing. Olga’s husband immediately left her. As Olga’s relatives said, after he left, she cried all night. The depression lasted for a whole month. Olga cried day and night.

Finally, one night, when she fell asleep, exhausted, she dreamed of her husband. He repented of his action, asked for forgiveness, but most importantly, he entered into intimacy with her, which, according to the woman, was incredibly stormy. Saying goodbye to her, he whispered: “We will have a son” - and disappeared.

Two months later, the woman went to the gynecologist, who determined that she was eight weeks pregnant. How this happened - no one could say. But Olga’s diagnosis was made not by one doctor, but by several, and in different clinics, which she visited in the hope that maybe the doctors were wrong...

Later it turned out that women with this diagnosis still give birth, but these are extremely rare cases. In Russia, before Olga, only one such case was recorded. It happened in 1910, also in Moscow. True, there is a significant difference between both episodes: that woman had ordinary intimacy. And Olga, it turns out, gave birth to a ghost...

The reaction of her ex-husband to this event and the further fate of Olga herself are unknown to us.

Conception from an incubus has been scientifically proven

There is no point in dwelling on cases of “sleep conception” in healthy women, reports of which will appear in the world media. There is still a great possibility of deception here. Therefore, let us consider another incredible episode from a medical point of view, somewhat similar to the case of Olga L.

This happened in 1972 in California, USA, with Teresa Rosalia F. At the age of 24, she was diagnosed with something no less serious than Olga: obstruction of the fallopian tubes. The diagnosis meant the inability to give birth. Before this, Teresa had been married for five years to a man who was 16 years older than her. Teresa had a miscarriage, after which she suffered from an inflammatory disease, which resulted in tubal obstruction. After that, of course, she did not become pregnant.

When the doctors announced the diagnosis, her husband left her. Depression haunted the woman for two years. Then, one November night, an incident occurred that not many people still believe. Teresa dreamed of a certain Michael, “with whom she once upon a time, back in school, had an affair. They did not reach real intimacy, but the young people met until the guy died in a road accident. He crashed on his motorcycle.

Michael appeared to Teresa in a dream four times, and each time their meetings ended in intimacy. On his fourth and last visit, he mysteriously promised that they would soon unite forever...

Those nights, weak poltergeist manifestations were observed in Teresa’s house: footsteps were heard in the empty corridor, doors creaked, and the sounds of furniture being moved were heard. After the fourth night everything stopped. Soon Teresa felt that she was pregnant. The doctors were very surprised and suggested she have an abortion, arguing that the fetus would still not be able to develop under such conditions. Teresa categorically refused. The birth was very difficult and ended in the death of the woman. The child was stillborn.

More than 25 years later, Dr. S. Lenihan tried to find an explanation for this mysterious case. He took advantage of the fact that in the hospital where Teresa lay and her autopsy was performed, particles of her uterus and fetus were preserved.

All that remained was to find Michael's genetic material. At first Lenichen planned to take this material from his close relatives, but it turns out that the young man’s family kept his bloody shirt. Genetic testing showed that the father of Teresa’s child with a 98% probability was this same Michael...

We live in a more than strange world if such events can occur in it,” Dr. Lenihan shrugs.

However, some experts believe that the examination was carried out incorrectly...

Ancient texts indicate that no one sees a sleeping woman during her intimacy with an incubus. Everyone around is fast asleep. This suggests that an otherworldly entity can pass from an incorporeal form to a tangible one and back, because conceptions occur for real. It seems that in this respect the nature of incubi is akin to the nature of aliens, who, according to ufologists, have the same ability.

Igor Volozev

The most serious and at the same time the most famous phenomenon of possession was the union of the devil with men and women of the human race in a carnal relationship and the birth, through this, of a special breed of satanic creatures, already doomed to hell by the very act of their birth, and, during their earthly life lives that usually manage to cause severe harm to humanity.

The ability of love and procreation, apparently, was recognized for demons in general, since even the cabalists believed that, in addition to the male and female forms that devils can take on themselves, like werewolves, they themselves are divided into female and male and are combined among themselves and reproduce like people. German folk tales are well known for female devils, but all old women: the devil's grandmother, the devil's mother, are not particularly evil creatures who willingly stand up for people in front of their ferocious grandson or son. In the beliefs and proverbs of the Little Russians, “The devil’s mother” is even very popular, “The devil’s mother’s daughter,” etc. If “the sun goes crazy”, that is, in the sunshine, this means that “the devil beat Zhinka” or “daughter marry viddaye.” The Czechs, Polish Ruthenians, the French (le diable bat sa femme) and the Germans (Afanasiev) have similar superstitions and corresponding sayings. Female demons are equally popular in Slavic, Germanic, Latin and Celtic beliefs (mermaids, jeeps, fairies, nyxes, etc.), but, in the majority, these are not real hellish devils, but elemental spirits, they are in their own right. Like brownies, goblins, etc., it is more of an ally and vassal of Satan than a truly devilish force. However, as Kostomarov rightly noted in his afterword to “The Tale of Solomonia the Demoniac,” Russians, “demons constitute their own separate material world and, like animals, are divided into two sexes; A dark-skinned woman comes to Solomonia as a midwife, no longer of a human, but of a demonic breed. The Russian people everywhere depict demons - under the image of two sexes; there is a word for devils; There are stories of people who have seen demonic females. One man in Novgorod told me (Kostomarov) that he saw with his own eyes at night on Lake Ilmen a black woman who was sitting on a stone, washing herself and laughing, then disappeared. It was, in his opinion, not a mermaid, but a devil, a female demon.”

The rabbis attributed four wives to the first devil Samael, from whom countless devilish tribes multiplied. But, in general, the devil’s wife is a creature that is not defined in popular belief, although it is sometimes mentioned. The devil walks around the world single, unable to find a bride for his mate. Sexual energy, which was attributed to him by some theologians, and among them Michael Psellus was especially energetic, he exudes in free unions with human women - with witches at sabbaths, or in that form of inducement (obssessio), which was called incubate.

According to experts in black mysticism, incubi are demons who unite with carnal love with women, and succubi are devils who pursue men for the same purpose.

The gloomy and passionate belief about incubi and succubi dates back to the most ancient times of mankind, almost to the beginning of the world. The serpent who seduced Eve is none other than the incubus Samael. According to the Talmudic legend (Rabbi Elijah), Adam, for 130 years, was visited by devils, who gave birth to larvas and succubi. Probably, in order to settle down the young man, they had to marry him to Eve. The forefather has adventures with demons, the foremother is the victim of a demon in love: there is nothing to say, notes Arturo Graf, not a bad start for the human race! The fierce Cain was considered the son of Satan not only by some rabbis, but also by the Greek Suida (11th century) in his famous “Dictionary”, interpreting in this sense the 44th verse of the VIII chapter of the Gospel of John: “Your father is the devil; and you want to do the lusts of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning and did not stand in the truth, for there is no truth in him.” The book of Genesis speaks of the fall of the sons of God in alliances with the daughters of men. From these marriages giants were born.

The theological literature on this adventure is vast. Her final conclusion is that the fallen sons of God are angels who betrayed heaven to become incubi. Byron turned scholastic proof into wonderful thoughts and colors of the mystery "Heaven and Earth." In general, the imagination of the Byronic poets did a lot of work for the glory of the incubate. In order not to go far for examples, it will be enough to name our Lermontov, who tinkered with this plot all his life. short life: wrote a succubus (“Angel of Death”), wrote an incubus (“Demon”) and started on another (“Fairy Tale for Children”), but died. After him, it seems, none of the Russian classics encroached on the theme, exhausted by the magical passion of Lermontov’s verse. "The Dream", "Klara Milich" and "Ghosts" by Turgenev - rather weak stories with the stamp of that outwardly beautiful and complex invention, which in realist authors always betrays a lack of a fantastic mood and a lack of faith in their own artificial plan - are closer to another, albeit related, area of ​​the fantasy kingdom: to vampirism.

In the 80s of the 19th century, interest in demonic hallucinations arose among the Russian intelligentsia - under the impression of the observations of Charcot, Richet and others in the field of hypnotism and great hysteria. The interest was still purely materialistic. An example was given to him from France by Guy de Maupassant himself, the literary god of our youth. Quite a few stories were written at that time that slyly glided along the precarious boundary between physiological knowledge and superstitious mystery. Some of the eighties, however, paid for these dangerous toys. Madness is contagious, and many who approached spiritualism, theosophy, magic, etc., dressed in the armor of scientific skepticism not thick enough, then themselves became spiritualists, theosophists, served black masses, fell ill with spiritual vision, and out of fear went into asceticism, under the protection of one or another powerful church. Let me remind you of the worldwide famous example of Huysmans. From a young age, he, a student of Zola and a comrade of Maupassant, struck the highest note of artistic naturalism with his almost brilliant novel “Martha.” I started writing a historical novel about witchcraft (similar to what N.K. Mikhailovsky, after “Demons,” advised Dostoevsky to write), went into the study of the Middle Ages and drowned in the influx of monstrous materials. Historical novel he didn’t write, he became a demon maniac. His “La Bas” and “Au Rebours” caused a lot of noise in their time and played a significant role in the development of Satanic literature and the propaganda of the mystical worldview. Huysmans ended his life as a Catholic, with a purely peasant dualistic faith-fear, hiding under the patronage of the good white principle from fear to the evil and black principle. They say, however, that in recent years this too has faded from him, and little by little, like a convalescent, he began to return to the ideas of his youth. If this is true, well, it was hard for him to live out, consciously looking back, a ruined life for nothing.

Poetic neo-romanticism, which has long been known in our country under the vaguely broad name of decadence, has widely opened its depths to all mystical moods and therefore has become the most zealous advocate of any supersensitivity, including demonological. If we may play with words, then the main interest in hypersensitivity stemmed from pretentious sensitivity, and it is clear that voluptuous tales of incubi and succubi crawled out in the literary delirium of 1895–1909. to the first, honorable places. They were paid tribute by absolutely all more or less major poets and prose writers of neo-romanticism: Merezhkovsky, Gippius, Balmont, Bryusov, etc. Particularly interesting in this regard is the late Lokhvitskaya-Zhiber, a talented poetess, with brilliant verse, variously forged from the variegated “bitterness” flesh." This writer, in her countless rehashes of all kinds of sensual superstitions, sometimes managed not only to find a medieval demonological worldview, but also to merge with it into complete sincerity of horror or delight. Her two huge dramas - “Immortal Love” and “In nomine Domini” - are very bad, but the demonic side is excellent even in them. In Lokhvitskaya’s small ballads, glorifying the secrets of Sabbaths and devilish kisses, one breathes the energy of such truthful passion that one involuntarily agrees with the famous statement of Avksenty Poprishchin that a woman is in love with the devil. The only one of all our demonomaniacs and demonomaniacs who repeat their devilry with a transparent and not always skillful pretense, like a rote lesson from black magic, the only one Lokhvitskaya found in herself a kinship with the sultry madness of a medieval hysterical woman.

Lokhvitskaya's sincerity is so convincing that, despite the fiery voluptuousness spilled in her poems, not even one of the most violent and shameless dreams of the poetess awakens thoughts in the reader:

Isn't it pornography?

The thought, unfortunately, is almost constant when reading Russian Huysmans. In one ballad “Murgit,” Lokhvitskaya spoke about the satanic rebellion of women, which created an epidemic of witchcraft and a counter-epidemic of bonfires on the border of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, much more and more clearly than a huge part of scientific research. “Murgit” by Lokhvitskaya is as realistically bright and deep as “Demons” by Pushkin, like “The Sea Princess” by Lermontov, and in places it reaches the beauty of their compressed verse and weightily sparse words.

The pagan freedom of the flesh is undoubtedly and tendentiously exaggerated by the apologetics of the first Christian centuries. Lawyers have a different opinion on this matter than theologians. But, in any case, the ancient world, which built its societies and states not only on the encouragement, but even on the compulsion of marriage and childbirth, was not an enemy of sex and treated its demands simply, as in any other physiological need, habit, oddity, passions. The attitude towards a sexual libertine in the ethical literature of the ancient world is approximately the same as in modern literature - towards a habitual drunkard or opiophage; a person is marked with a stain of vice, but not with the stigma of sin. Sexual eccentricity in ancient society was by no means praised, but it was taken into account, looking at its immediate harm, by the individual, family, state, customary law, and not by a religious principle, hostile and forbidden. The gender fairy tale of Hellas and Rome is always simple, bright and smiling. The darkness of hatred flows into it only from the East, from the “religions of the suffering god.” And - when the East took possession of the world through the victory of Christian statehood, then before the menacing eyes of its ascetic ideal, the sexual fairy tale faded, and its cheerful Olympic day turned black - into hellish midnight. The graceful myth of Eros and Psyche, which immortalized the name of Apuleius, becomes a witchcraft story subject to spiritual judgment, with torture and the stake. Alexander the Great and Augustus invented their descent from incubi in order to give themselves a divine shine in the eyes of the conquered peoples, but not only the English Plantagenets, but already the Byzantine Justinian fought against such legends about their origin, as with the worst insult to the family.

The tale of Robert the Devil, son of an incubus, is known even to those who have never studied the history of the Middle Ages or folklore, and to those who have never studied either the history of the Middle Ages or folklore - from the famous opera by Meyerbeer. Its music has already outlived its time, but in the romantic movement of the thirties of the last century it played a big role and remains its typical monument. Meyerbeer was an unusually intelligent connoisseur of the public and a master at catering to the taste of the era. Having plunged his hand into the very core of romantic mythology, he pulled out from there, for the sake of the age, precisely the most characteristic and beloved of the black superstitions of the Middle Ages: the sin of a princess seduced by an incubus. And, with the light hand of Meyerbeer, the supernatural lover and ghostly mistress begins to dominate music as much as poetry. Now completely forgotten, Marschner became famous for “Hans Geiling” and “The Vampire”. The herald in Zampa even warned Meyerbeer by telling in sounds the popular Italian legend about the succubus - a marble statue of an abandoned bride. I'm not even talking about ballet: its romance is the constant apotheosis of incubation. Finally, Wagner did more for the myth than anyone else: the love communication of elemental demons with mortal humanity - a plot that permeates all of his operatic work, with the exception of Die Meistersinger and Rienzi. I don’t know if it’s possible to express the passion and philosophical depth of the succubus myth in words greater strength and poetic penetration, which Wagner managed - the music of Venus in Tannhäuser.

In Russia we have the theme of supernatural love - except for Rubinstein, who happily created the “publicly accessible”, and therefore much higher than his own merits, beloved “Demon” - (after Rubinstein, Baron Fingoff-Schelle, P.I. Blaramberg and E. wrote music on the same plot. F. Napravnik), - N.A. developed especially diligently. Rimsky - Korsakov, the Fairy in Antara, the Snow Maiden, Princess Volkhova, the Swan, the Shemakha Queen, Kashchei - the most amazing monuments not only of external and musical beauty, but also of an absolutely exceptional, truly folk instinct for the mystery of elemental myth. One of the most brilliant pages in all Russian music - the scene of Ratmir's charm in Glinka's Ruslan and Lyudmila - is still waiting for some Chaliapin in a skirt, who will explain to the public the burning passion of this demonic hallucination. Usually the secrets of this stage are hopelessly lost in the meaningless routine of ignorant singers and vulgar corps de ballet. Creation of a musical type, similar to that which Chaliapin gives in each of his scabs, and Felia Litvin and Ershov in the Wagnerian repertoire, has not yet fallen to Glinka’s lot. The dark power of the demon, breathing from the terrible phrases of Ratmir, remains an unspoken secret. Maybe it’s for the better, because otherwise a passionate infection would have poured from the stage into the hall, in comparison with which the magic of the “Kreutzer Sonata”, as L.N. described it, by the way, is completely arbitrary. Tolstoy should seem almost like a child’s prayer. I think that if Glinka had put Ratmir’s music into the mouth of a tenor, then this scene would have been the most terrible weapon of seduction that music has ever created. But fate stood up for the female sex, prompting the great composer to make the discouraging mistake of entrusting the deepest expression of male passion - to a woman in a man's suit, that is, to embody it in the eyes and imagination of the public as a creature of some middle sex: neither a boy, nor a girl, nor for a woman. love, nor for men. The deep contraltos that Ratmir's part requires are quite rare, and most often you hear a mezzo-soprano in Ratmir: a new obstacle to the fullness of the impression.

“Waiting for the divine sleep” about which Lokhvitskaya screams and moans - sensual loneliness, the rebellion of sex against forced chastity - is the atmosphere in which, as perhaps the most talented critic of modern France, but at the same time one of the most crafty magicians of the century, Remy de Gourmont, “an incubus materializes.” Antiquity is quite rich in tales of this belief: they were reflected even in the legislation of Moses (Deuteronomy 4; Leviticus). The ancient world of Hellas and Rome legitimized incubate and succubat with countless fables of their mythology, with which Christian apologetics waged a merciless struggle, and Neoplatonists tried in vain to translate them into elemental symbols of pantheism. The church fathers believed in incubi. Bl. Augustine calls them in the ancient way, from pagan myth, fauns and satyrs. The ascetic desert, where Anthony, Jerome and others suffered a superhuman struggle with the voice of the flesh, leaving us stunning chronicles of their temptations, became a breeding ground and laboratory for painfully sad legends, which through the “Lives of the Saints” and oral tradition passed through the Middle Ages and were renewed in the Hellenism of the Renaissance and, to the detriment of rationalism, materialism and positivism of the new civilization, they successfully crawled into the 20th century. Romantic epidemics, flying from time to time over Europe, revive and strengthen the old myth, always returning to the first - in essence, but blossoming with new beauties of symbols, images and forms. The old tale of Philostratus about the bride - Empusa, exposed by Apollo of Tyana, lives to have the honor of becoming in Goethe's The Corinthian Bride. The Gnostic magician, who passed off his mistress as the reincarnation of Helen of Sparta, is resurrected in Marlowe’s Faust, and another 200 years later, Goethe uses the same naive fairy tale about the succubus Helen for one of the grandest historical symbols, turning the union of Faust and Helen into a ghostly festival of the Renaissance. Venus, having ceased to be a goddess, retained her charms as the most charming and most destructive of devils. She charmed and lured into eternal captivity the valiant knight - the poet Tannhäuser, for which the 19th century could send her a later, but well-deserved thank you, since we owe to this legend the wonderful ballad of Heinrich Heine and the brilliant opera of Richard Wagner. Tannhäuser was not the only victim of the goddess. In the darkness and boredom of the narrow Middle Ages, she - ancient and unfadingly young - was loved and sought by many, and she loved many, as if she were an old woman - at least she was also jealous. The English chronicler of the 12th century, William of Malmesbury, tells in strong and colorful Latin an amazing case of how a certain noble Roman youth of a senatorial family was captured by the demon Venus on the very day of his wedding. During the feast, the wedding guests decided to play a game of bowls. Afraid of breaking wedding ring, the young man takes it off and, in order not to lose it, puts it on the finger of a nearby statue. Having finished the game, he comes up to take his ring back, but is amazed to see that the finger of the statue, which had been straight until then, is bent and pressed tightly to the palm. Having fought for quite a long time, but in vain, to return the ring, the young man returned to his feasting friends, but did not say a word about his adventure, fearing that he would be laughed at, or someone would go secretly and steal the ring. When the feast is over and dusk has fallen, he, accompanied by several household and servants, again goes to the statue and is amazed to see the finger straight again, and the ring has disappeared. His wife managed to dispel his embarrassment and annoyance at the loss. The wedding night has arrived. But as soon as the young man lay down next to his wife and wanted to get closer to her, he felt that something indefinite was agitating between him and her - as if thick air - tangible, but invisible. Thus cut off from the marital embrace, the young husband then hears a strange voice:

Be not with her, but with me, since today you became engaged to me too. I am Venus. You put a ring on my finger. I have the ring and I won't give it away again.

The young man, frightened by the miracle, did not dare to object a word, and spent the rest of the night without sleep, silently discussing this mysterious incident in his heart. A lot of time passed, but no matter what hour he tried to get closer to his wife, he always heard and felt the same thing - in general he remained courageous and capable, no matter what you could wish for. In the end, prompted by his wife’s complaints, he revealed everything to his family, and the family council invited a certain priest from the suburbs, named Palumba, to heal him. This Palumbus was an expert in black magic and commanded demons as he pleased. Having expressed a huge reward in advance, he put all his art into use and, having written a letter with magical signs, handed it to the young man with the instruction: “Go, at such and such an hour of the night, to such and such a crossroads, where the roads diverge into four directions of the world.” , and watch carefully what happens. Many human images, male and female, of all ages, classes and conditions will pass there; some on horseback, others on foot, some with their heads hanging, others with their noses proudly raised, in their faces and gestures you will see all the types and images of joy and sorrow, as many as there are on earth. Not a word to any of them even if someone talks to you. This crowd will be followed by one - taller and heavier than everyone - seated on a chariot. Silently give him the letter, and your wish will be fulfilled immediately, unless you chicken out and act decisively, as befits a husband.

The young man went where he was shown, and the clear night showed him all the miracles promised by Palumbus. Among the passing ghosts, he soon noticed a woman riding on a horse, dressed like a courtesan, with her hair flowing over her shoulders and a golden diadem on her head. In her hands she held a golden whip, with which she urged her little horse; judging by the thinness of the fabrics that clothed her, her body seemed naked, and she shamelessly exposed it with defiant gestures. This was the goddess Venus. Finally, here is the last one - on a magnificent chariot, entirely trimmed with emeralds and pearls. Fixing his terrible eyes on the young man's face, he asked:

Why are you here?

But he, without answering, extended his hand to him with a letter.

The demon, seeing the familiar seal, did not dare not accept the letter and, indignantly, raised his hands to the sky and exclaimed:

Almighty God! How long will you endure the meanness of Palumbus!

Then, without wasting any time, he sent two of his henchmen to immediately take the required ring from Venus. The devil resisted for a long time, however, she gave in. Thus, having received what he wanted, the young man was returned to the embrace of legitimate love. But Palumbus, when he learned that the demon had raised a complaint against him to God, guessed that his end was near. Therefore, in order to avoid the clutches of the angry devil, he hastened to arrange an artificial martyrdom for himself: he ordered his arms and legs to be cut off and died with pitiful repentance, confessing to the pope and all the people of unheard-of crimes and sins. It is curious that a similar, deplorable end with deathbed torture in atonement for sorcery - the legend attributes to Pope Sylvester II (the famous scientist mathematician Herbert, d. 1003).

Heine in “The Elemental Spirits” tells this legend in a slightly different version, substituting Diana in the place of Venus and giving her a more regal role in the night demonic train. During the time of William of Malmebury, this story was current in Rome and the Riga Campagna, and mothers passed it on to their children so that it would live in the memory of generations from generation to generation. Indeed, she was lucky enough to live to be one of the few surviving folk tales Italy, until our time. In the last century, from the episode of the statue stealing the ring, Herold took the plot for an opera. (“Tsampa”), and - I don’t remember who - I think Puni - for the ballet “The Marble Bride”. In fine literature, the same plot is treated by Prosper Merimee in the exciting story “La Venus d'ille” (Venus of Ille). Villemin, borrowing a legend from the chronicle of a certain Hermannus Contractus, used it in his “History of Gregory VII” to characterize superstitions , reigned in Rome in the 11th century. But it was widespread throughout the Middle Ages. It was used as proof of the demonic nature of the ancient gods and confirmation of their ability to enter into marriages with people. The plot on the theme of the bride statue is found in old collections of Western folklore by Meon and Le Grand d'Aussy. But, in addition to polemical goals, Christianity, especially in the affirmation of celibacy of the clergy, took advantage of such a rewarding topic for didactic purposes. In the book Le Grand d'Aussy (Contes devots, Fables et Romans anciens pour servir de suite aux fabliaux, Paris, 1781) is a 13th-century monastic poem in rhymed verse, entitled “About the man who put a wedding ring on the finger of the Blessed Virgin Mary” (De celui qui met l "anneau nuptial au doigt de Notre -Dame"). In this poem, the young Roman is already replaced by a young, cheerful deacon, and the statue of Venus or Diana is replaced by a statue of the Madonna. The episode with the ring, which the statue takes along with the oath “not to love another woman but you,” remains unchanged. The deacon gets married, but on his wedding night the Virgin Mary appears to him in a dream:

Liar and traitor! - she exclaims, - where is your betrothal to me?

And she separated the deacon from his young wife. The ending has been didactically changed. The Christian vow of a cleric to the Mother of God, of course, is a stronger force than some half-pagan’s joke with Venus or Diana - and, of course, no Palumbus was found against the intervention of the offended Madonna in the deacon’s family life. The deacon leaves his wife, distributes his property, flees into the desert and becomes a monk. (P. Saintyves. Les saints successeurs des dieux.). The prevalence of the myth in such a Christianly regenerated version is sufficiently proven by the fact that Zotenberg found this miracle, among other miracles of the holy virgin, in a manuscript collection of the Paris National Library.

Not only legends, but also the very phenomena of “incubate” and “succubat” have experienced such a rebirth over the centuries. In the 19th century, says Jules Delassus, cases were not so frequent, or rather, they received publicity less often. Science, which despises everything occult, sees in the cases it observes nothing more than diseases of sex, for the origin of which it does not look for special external causes. But if it were possible to talk frankly with the clergy, we would hear a lot of rare confessions. But priests are held back by the secrecy of confession, as well as the fear of religious scandal that such revelations could produce. Based on the occasional public confessions of this kind that have surfaced, it is absolutely clear that in our time a defeated medieval demon, for love affairs as an incubus or succubus, systematically “dresses himself in an angel of light,” and in the fantasy novels of hysterics and hysterical women, the place of devils and she-she-devils taken by those of both sexes, not excluding - and most often - those standing at the highest levels of the heavenly hierarchy. (The case of the ecstatic Marie Ange in 1816 - 1817; the case of Gaudenberg in 1855. In both, the dream of love hovers around visions of Christ and the Virgin Mary).

The illegitimate descendant of ancient communication with spirits, spiritualism, inevitably had to approach the phenomena of incubate and succubat. They began to call the dead, talk to them, touch them - the dead so constantly and obediently respond to all calls. The impossible dream of once again possessing departed beloved beings has found the possibility of fulfillment. A widower seeks a meeting with his lost wife, a widow is consoled by the embrace of a ghost - her husband. And then we went further. They began to summon the shadows of famous women, courtesans and queens, whose bodies had long since turned to dust. According to Delassus, in France, until recently, it was not at all uncommon to meet a spiritualist who seriously dreamed of the delights of Semiramis, Cleopatra, Laisa, Theodora, just as Faust fell in love with Helen of Sparta. And vice versa, sentimental ladies dreamed of the materialization of their favorite poets or historical heroes. According to demonologists, or rather demonomaniacs of the 19th century, such as de Musso or S. de Guaita, the devil, who had hissed after the fright given to him by the Renaissance Inquisition, but always kept himself ready, took advantage of the spiritual moment to go off stage again. According to de Mousseau’s story (“Hauts phenomenes de la Magie”), on July 17, 1844, a society of young ladies decided to summon the devil; he appeared, behaved very decently, charmed the young ladies with his wit, but then drew them into the most vile debauchery and, at dawn, “vanished like a shadow.” Then, for eleven whole years, the devil from time to time visited the young lady whom he especially liked at that time. How, in fact, is this 19th-century demonmaniac, a French young lady who suffered for 11 years, better than the 17th-century Ustyug priest, Solomonia Besnovataya, who suffered in the same sexual hallucinations for exactly eleven years and another five months? The same de Mousseau says that during some spiritualistic seances, ladies sitting closer to the medium felt invisible but shameless touches “to the lower part of the bust.”

The fantastic stories of M. des Mousseaux are quite funny. But just recently, the “incubate” assumed significant proportions, accompanied by very immoral phenomena, thanks to the strange sect of the heresiarch Ventras, “Le Carmel” (“Carmel”). This sect was thoroughly studied by Stanistav Guaita in his book “Temple of Satan” (Temple de Satan), from which the following documents are cited. Eugene Ventre and his successor Abbé Bois taught that the redemption of Creatures must be accomplished through an "act of love" performed:

1. With the highest spirits and the chosen ones of the earth - in order to perfect oneself into heaven, imbue oneself with virtues and elevate one’s individuality to the ability of ascension.

2. With uninitiated worldly people and with the lower spirits of the elemental and animal order - in order to perfect these unfortunate fallen beings into heaven.

Thus, in the Ventra sect, the incubate was declared both a means and a testimony of holiness, and the adherents of that strange religion prided themselves on their union with the spirits of both the celestial and elemental orders. The letters quoted by Guaita leave no doubt as to the nature of these occult associations. Here is one of them, written by one gullible priest, the confessor of some hysterical lady who fell into this trap:

“The unfortunate woman must accept caresses and hugs not only from the spirits of light, but also from those stinking monsters that she calls human-beasts (humanimaux). Plaguing her room and bed, they copulate with her in order to rise to humanization. She assured me that they had made her pregnant several times and that for nine months afterwards she experienced all the symptoms of a real pregnancy, even with all the outward signs. At her natural time, she gives birth without any pain, but instead of a baby, winds burst out of the organ from which a woman, during normal childbirth, gives birth.” Bua himself. “he is gratified every night by the kisses of the angels of light Sahael, Anandhael and others, and the depraved ghost of the circumcised Ezekiel draws him into playing the role of a woman in the sin of Sodom.” And again: “In ventrem ergo cubans, manu stupratur. Tuns foeminei crebro Spiritus vocati apparent quorum, formas modo simul, modo altemis vicibus sibi submissas sentit...” Bois died in January 1893. His sect has disintegrated. But, according to clerical polemics, there were a lot of such satanic societies. At their meetings, bourgeois echoes of the Sabbath, Satan appeared in “visible and tangible” images, and Satanists and Satanists entered into sexual intercourse with him. Therefore, all persons who indulge in Satanism completely voluntarily and with full consciousness of their act are, in the eyes of the church, already guilty of incubation or succubus (Jules Delassus).

Doctors very often observe incubation phenomena in hysterical women who complain that they are being raped at night by fantastic creatures or men they know. Moreover, such women, often being very cold in normal sexual intercourse, experience intense pleasure from their passionate hallucinations. People possessed by an excessive heightened sexual feeling (hyperesthesie sexuelle), in a certain period of progressive illness, reach the ability of so-called “mental intercourse” (coit ideal), which is very similar to an incubate. According to the testimony of Krafft Ebing, Hammand, Mohl and others, such people, when they are in the presence of a woman who arouses their desire, do not need bodily communication in order to perform the sexual act with the power of imagination, so to speak, psychologically - and bring themselves to orgasm with all its physiological consequences.

Thus, according to Dellassue, in the phenomena of incubate and succubat, two main categories must be distinguished:

The incubation is unwilling: in the sick and “damaged”.

The incubation is free: among magicians, spiritualists and various subjects who consciously indulge.

These two categories, however, imply a third, which, if it does not embrace both of them, then, of course, already comes into contact with them both: the category of sexual neurosis, which equally causes both free and anti-war incubates, as two different in impression, passive and active - but essentially a completely homogeneous type of mystical, hallucinatory masturbation.

It can be considered as a general rule that incubi bothered women more often than succubi bothered men. Thomas of Kantipratiysky assures that he many times had to listen to the confession of women raped by incubi. According to Jean Bodin, in Rome in one year there were 82 cases of incubi taking possession of women. Caelius Aurelian cites information from Calimachus, a supporter of the Hypopratic doctrine, that in Rome at one time the visit of an incubus became epidemic, and many died from it. A most curious and hardly fictitious example of this hallucination is told in the “Life” of St. Bernard: in Nantes, an incubus pursued one respectable lady with its shamelessness even on her marital bed, not at all embarrassed by the presence of her husband sleeping next to her.

The results of such relationships were detrimental to the victims not only morally, but also physically. Thomas Walsingham, a monk from St. Albano in England, relates as a fact in 1440 that one girl died three days after being desecrated by the devil, from a terrible disease that swelled her body like a barrel, and the decomposition was accompanied by an unbearable stench . Another woman, described by Caesar, paid the same price for one devilish kiss. Succubi, of course, were just as poisonous. The same Caesar tells about a novice who died in the most pitiful way three days after a love meeting with a succubus who came to him in the form of a nun. To succumb to a succubus meant to destroy oneself, and to repel him was also unsafe. One young man, who chastely avoided the caresses of an obsessive succubus, was lifted into the air by an enraged devil and hit the ground with such force that the unfortunate man withered away and died a year later.

However, apparently, against such unfortunate consequences there were some kind of condoms, so significant that in many other cases the relationship between an incubus and a woman or between a man and succubi lasted for years without any harmful consequences for the mortal half. Contrary to the theologians' assertion that the depraved nature of demons is alien to the feeling of love, many devils turned out to be very passionate lovers. Gervasius of Tilbury, a great connoisseur of all these secrets, claims that some demons are so greedy for women that there is no cunning and deception that they would not use in order to take possession of the objects of their passion. But it must be admitted that in the vast majority of such cases, the devil met with perfect reciprocity from women. Many secretly considered it to be the greatest happiness of life to experience the embrace of the king of flame.

This is excellent in Lokhvitskaya’s “Murgit”:

“Hey, make way, honest people!”
- The wave broke out.
The monks sing incense and among them is she.
It's coming. The rough canvas falls from the lily shoulder;
A pound candle burns in her hands, smoking.
The informer is right there; after her, like a bull, roars

“Forgive me, forgive me, Murgit, and it will be easy for me,
I didn’t ruin my soul, I reported everything to the court,
But something is heavy in my heart and I feel sorry for you to the point of tears,”
The beautiful Murgit looked at her with her lilac gaze:
"Leave me alone, you fool!" - she tells him through gritted teeth, -
There is no time to cry and grieve when the fire is ready.
At least before him I won’t hear your stupid words.”
But Jaco screams louder and louder and says:
“Oh, what is life to me! Oh, what is light to me when Murgit is not in it!
I’ll say that my denunciation is false and I’ll pull you out of the fire,
I will go to my death for you - just kiss me!”
The beautiful Murgit flashed with pearls,
Turned poppy red, the pale color of untouched cheeks,
In a proud grin, the lips parted with an evil twist
And her earthly beauty became terrible,
“I will betray my soul to the devil and eternal fire,
But I will not defile myself as a slave in this miserable world.
And never, and never, as long as the light remains,
You will never kiss the beautiful Murgit!”

Alvir Pelagius, bishop of Solvay, complains in his book “On the Lamentation of the Church” (about 1332) that even among the nuns he personally knew, there were those who voluntarily surrendered to the devil. According to. Delassus, in Paris at the end of the 19th century, entire women's clubs were formed in which waiting for and, so to speak, attracting the devil - a lover - was the main goal and only occupation.

Getting rid of such a lover was much more difficult than getting him. Arturo Graf found in one of the countless legends about the miracles of St. The virgins are the story of an unfortunate woman with whom Satan settled into a completely marital cohabitation, and neither the cross, nor prayers, nor relics, nor holy water helped her against this hellish impudence. Finally, one day, being in the usual danger, she stretched out her hands to the sky, calling on the holy name of Mary - and so what? The infernal lover instantly lost the ability to harm his victim, for non fu piu buono a nulla. Caesar of Heisterbach says that in the city of Bonn the devil seduced the daughter of a priest and lived with her. The girl confessed to her father, and the priest, in order to stop this scandal, sent his daughter somewhere across the Rhine. The devil appears. Not finding the girl he loved, he attacked his father shouting: “Evil priest! How dare you take my wife from me?” - gave the unfortunate man such a kick in the chest that the poor fellow died two days later.

Was this monstrous communication accompanied by fertilization? Almost all authors claim this. True, the demon, having neither body nor bones, could not have seed. But he collected the results of male wet dreams, or, in the form of a succubus, stole sperm from especially strong men. Then, becoming an incubus, he transferred the stolen sperm into the uterus of the woman he wanted to make pregnant. This is what Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure (1221–1274) argued, in contrast to Michael Psellus (d. 1079), who argued that the devil has all the means to be, in this case, an independent agent. Children born from such intercourse were distinguished by their extraordinary heaviness compared to others, their ugly thinness and the ability to suckle at least three nurses without getting fatter.

Who was the father of the child - a demon or. the man from whom he stole the seed?

According to the prevailing opinion of theologians, the father was man. But, adds Arturo Graf, the hellish nature of all offspring from incubi and succubi testifies that the role of Satan at the moment of conception was not purely transmissional, that he poisoned the future embryo in advance, and, so to speak, made him possessed already in the womb. Sinistrari d'Ameno, in the 17th century, who saw in incubi and succubi a special breed of creatures, average between a person and an angel, insisted that they, being humanoid, are equipped with genitals and secrete sperm. One should not think that all this nonsense were scattered only by the enlightening time and had no determined opponents even in those times when they were victoriously raging.Louis the Good, in his comedy "The Husband", makes the monk Jerome pronounce a very decisive tirade against those who imagine that an incorporeal being can produce offspring, and a baptized woman - to conceive from the devil - “And the unbaptized one?” - the casuists triumphantly objected, and popular belief joined them, and not the representatives of common sense. This continued for entire centuries, until in the 17th century, common sense divided superstitions and theologians and forced them to remain silent in the face of science and the power of knowledge. But just shut up, and not forget. “In our time,” says A. Brierre de Boismont, “relations with the devil have become much less common than in the old days; among the hundreds of women who have been subjected to my observation, I have not had one did not notice delusions of this kind. Now the sexual hallucinations of hysterical women are directed at angels, at famous people perfectly embellished by the imagination, and very often at the directors of the hospital. However, Dr. Macario recorded several cases." Of these, one, from 1842, in its typicality completely coincides with with all the tales about the incubate that fill the grandfather's processes.Margarita Zh., a pious old woman of 59 years old, in the menopause fell into a persecution mania, imagining that her relatives wanted to poison her and that only three priests, invisibly living in her house, were saving her from death. warn her how soon the food is poisoned. Desperate to destroy her with poison, her relatives entered into an alliance with hell against Margarita J., and since then the devils have been pursuing her day and night, and scenes are played out, the content of which is better left in the Latin text, without translation.

“Noctu, vix quieti indulgent, quum repentino adventu daemones illam e somno excutiunt; mox intentantes minas et obscena dictitantes, illam saluit, et manu impura contrectant quidquid secretum est in muliercula. Debilem vero carmen esse scimus ompes: jam cedit femina et cum eis voluptatem, corporibus immixtis, copulat; prae amore fatigatur, .exhuritur. Hi vero libidinosi daemones ante illius oculos apparet nunc quasi fulgura, juvenes qui nudi pudenda ei ostendunt vultumque ejus excrementis suis maculant.”

True, Margarita Zh. easily frees herself from shameless demons, dispelling them with the sign of the cross. But, due to their impudence, she has to cross herself without ceasing, and she is not able to sleep until the white dawn. Sometimes, instead of devils, the dead come, who scold Margarita Zh. in sad, deathly voices and want to beat her, but the sign of the cross is wasted in smoke. Macario claims that in the first half of the 19th century this type of hallucination was still very common in the villages of remote departments of France, and Arturo Graf thinks that in Italy you can still encounter it.

Legends attribute a similar origin to a great many famous people. Not counting the giants of the book of Genesis and countless demonic conceptions, so powerfully denoting talent and luck, no matter how they are expressed, in all pagan mythologies, as well as in the legends and traditions of the semi-historical period of all peoples, not counting religious and political fictions and pre-Christian fairy tales statehood (Servius Tullius, Alexander the Great, Augustus, etc.) - the Middle Ages either accepted from antiquity and the East and improved, or themselves invented many tales about incubi, which subsequently played such a huge role in the romantic poetry of the early 19th century and in music throughout throughout it,

These beliefs were widely developed among the peoples of the north, in Iceland, Norway, and Scotland. Trolls and elves often entered into alliances with the sons and daughters of men. Elves, elemental spirits, lived in foggy fjords, among rocks, in grottoes, in forests, along the banks of streams or sea breakers. Their women with skin blue color were distinguished by their wonderful beauty. “Many surnames in Iceland,” says Christian, “owe their origin to these mysterious unions.” These northern legends, and connections with alchemical allegory, gave new impetus and new interpretations to the legends of the incubate in the vague mythology of the mystical sects of the 18th century, incorrectly generalized under the name of Rosicrucianism. A curious novel from the 18th century; "Count Gabalis", falsely presented as a work of the 17th century (in order to bring it chronologically closer to the literature of the real Rosicrucians), is almost entirely devoted to the question of marriages between people and elemental spirits, proclaimed both very frequent and extremely desirable, since the breed, they say , it turns out magnificent from them. So, for example, Zoroaster, according to Count Gabalis, was the son of Noah’s wife and a certain powerful “salamander” (spirit of fire). Shem and Japheth also, with a liberalism worthy of the heroes of George Sand and the Russian “Pitfall”, gave up their wives to the demons they loved. Ham - one - turned out to be so jealous that he did not let his girlfriend go - and so, for this he, Ham, was cursed and his offspring remained on the bottom rung in the ladder of human races.

Sometimes the incubate belief took on such wide dimensions that it marked not only families and clans, but even entire nationalities and almost races with its mark. Thus, according to Iornand, during the era of migration of peoples, the belief arose and was maintained for a long time that the Huns originated from Gothic witches expelled to the Maeotian (at the mouth of the Don) swamps, and the evil spirits they met there.

Throughout the Middle Ages, there was a strong tendency to consider all newborn monsters as children of the devil, who were therefore destroyed without the slightest remorse. In 1265 in Toulouse, one lady, already over 50 years old, admitted that she had a child from the devil with a wolf's head and a snake's tail; This dear child had to be fed with the meat of small children. If these devilish bastards were not monsters, they were distinguished by rapid physical and mental growth, heroism, health, talents and ardent passions. The historian Matthew Paris (d. 1259) assures that one such child at six months of birth seemed to already be an eighteen-year-old youth.

A favorite theme of legends in these eras is a supernatural marriage, in which a mysterious husband or wife appears from nowhere and lives happily with the chosen ones of their love, under one condition:

Sans chercher a connaitre
Quel pays m"a vu naitre,
Ma race ni ma loi-
Tu garderas ta foi!

Happiness continues as long as the human half of the union fulfills the condition. One sad day, the curiosity of Eve or Adam intensifies to the unbearable need to break the accepted covenant with a fatal question - and the beautiful incubus or beautiful succubus disappears, abandoning their spouses and children to their unknown country. The most eloquent of these tales - about the Knight of the Swan - was brilliantly developed by Richard Wagner in his poetic “Lohengrin”.

But the Knight of the Swan is not always the knight of light, as he appears in this well-known opera: In “Adelstan,” the ballad of Southie, translated by our Zhukovsky, the Knight of the Swan, on the contrary, is a servant dark force, for the happiness of possessing the beautiful Laura, he sold the soul of his future first-born son to the devil, and the mysterious Swan, drawing him enchanted by the distance, sails with him not at all from the castle of St. The Grail, but almost straight from hell, an ambassador from Satan. Rhine tradition places this event in the era of Charlemagne. Female succubus versions of the legend, almost without exception, hint at a dark demonic force, if not evil, then not good - at best, so to speak, neutrally elemental. There are a lot of them. This is the most famous of all such chronic succubus - the female snake Melusina, the ancestor of the Lusignans. In Sicily, during the reign of King Roger, one young man, swimming in the sea by moonlight, noticed a woman in the waves who seemed to be drowning. He saved her, fell in love with her, married her, had a son with her. One day, overwhelmed by doubts as to what nature, what kind of tribe his mysterious wife was, he pestered her with questions as persistently as Elsa did to Lohengrin. “You’re ruining me by making me answer about this!” - she cried in despair and disappeared. Some time later, the child, abandoned by her, was swimming in the sea: suddenly the disappeared mother surfaced above the water, grabbed her child and, together with him, disappeared forever.

There were, however, spouses of strong character who stood the test. This is the Burgundian king Guntram in the ballad that was honored with Kaulbach’s drawings. Married to a forest fairy, he curbed his curiosity and was happy with love without questions, but he could not keep his people and, in particular, the clergy, who suspected the queen of a pagan and a witch, from curiosity. Since the king did not want to let his wife go or reveal her origin, the pope excommunicated him from the church, and Bishop Benno raised a popular uprising, during which both the enchanted Guntram and his mysterious queen disappeared without a trace.

As already mentioned, the belief made its way into history and was firmly rooted in the genealogy of many noble houses, including royal ones, for example, the English Plantagenets, who had some kind of great-grandmother from blood devils in their pedigree. A similar story is told about Baldwin, Count of Flanders, the hero of an old French novel. This count was a man so proud that he rejected the hand of the daughter of the French king. One day in the forest, while hunting, he met a girl of unusually majestic beauty. The girl called herself a princess, the daughter of the powerful emperor of Asia. Baldwin fell in love and got married. After a year, the young couple gave birth to twins - two girls of extraordinary beauty. But in vain the count waits for news from the eastern emperor, supposedly the parent of the young countess; there is no embassy. Meanwhile, a certain holy man sensed deception and reported his suspicions to the count. One fine day, when the count and countess were giving dinner to their vassals, the holy man suddenly entered the banquet hall and, without much ado, commanded the countess to disappear into hell from where she came. The Countess instantly turned into a ferocious she-devil and flew into the air with a terrible, truly terrible scream. The Count, in order to atone for his sin, undertook crusade and killed a great multitude of infidels. His daughters did not end up as badly as one would expect from such a strange mother based on heredity.

It would not be out of place here to list several historical or semi-historical sons whom the Middle Ages and the Renaissance attributed to the devil.

1. Cain. He was mentioned above, just like Zoroaster.

2. Atilla, the scourge of God. According to some legends, he was adopted by his mother from the devil, according to others - from a Medelian dog.

3. Theodoric the Great, king of the Readies. He revealed his origin with the ability to spew fire from his mouth and fell alive into hell with his father.

4. Merlin. His legend is very complex, detailed and remarkable, as not only a romantic but also a philosophical concept. Hell, defeated and devastated by Christ, seeks means to recover from its disaster. Satan decides that the only way to do this is to hasten the coming of the Antichrist: he, Satan, must give birth to a son who, being an inhuman, will extend the power of hell to people and destroy the work of redemption. An enterprise of extreme importance, dangerous, difficult. Hell had been preparing for it for a long time and carefully. Through the combined efforts of demons, a certain respectable and noble family falls into poverty and dishonor and dies in disgrace. Of the two surviving daughters, one indulges in the most shameless debauchery. The other, beautiful and chaste, resists all temptations for a long time. But one night, while going to bed, she forgot to sign the sign of the cross, as a result of which she temporarily lost the protection of heaven, and the devil was right there - he took possession of her and carried out his predetermined plan. Aware of her misfortune and horrified by it, the girl tries to atone for her sin through the labors of severe repentance . At the time prescribed by nature, she gave birth to her son. The monstrous hairiness of his body immediately revealed his demonic origin. The boy was christened - with his father's consent, although, of course, no one asked - and named Merlin. Then in the heavenly spheres the thought arose that it would be no small triumph to take away the son of Satan himself from hell, and the merciful God is taking the necessary measures for this. Satan taught his son knowledge of the past and present. God is killing this one dangerous gift, rewarding Merlin with knowledge of the future and thus making him impervious to the deceptions of the light and the machinations of the devil. Growing up, Merlin performed many wonderful deeds, as the Venerable Bede, the ancient chronicles and the stories of the Round Table tell, and uttered many wonderful prophecies, many of which have already been fulfilled, and the rest, one must think, will also be fulfilled someday in due time. Nothing in him reminded him of his formidable father, and Merlin himself did not want to know his father. The time and manner of Merlin’s death are not known exactly, but everything suggests that his spirit went to the abode not of punishment, but of bliss.

The story of Merlin is a typical example of divine predestination, which, by the will of God, can save even a creature, by all visible conditions, doomed to death and hell at birth. Much brighter and more dramatic is the legend of the other damn son, whose salvation was a triumph of the human spirit and free will. This -

5. Robert the Devil, Duke of Normandy. A certain Duchess of Normandy was burning with desire to have children, but in vain. Desperate for help from the unheeding heavens, she turned to the devil, who immediately fulfilled her wish. The Duchess gives birth to a son - a hero and a brawler. As a baby he bit off the nipples on his nurse's breasts; as a youth he cut open the belly of his tutor; At the age of twenty he became the chieftain of a bandit gang. He is knighted, hoping to re-educate him and tame the riot of evil instincts in him, but in knighthood he raged even worse. No one could surpass him in strength and courage. In one tournament, he distinguishes himself by defeating and killing thirty opponents in a row. Then he wanders around the world for some time, wherever his eyes look, and, returning to his homeland, he again takes up robbery and theft - robs, sets fire, kills, rapes. One day, having just slaughtered all the nuns of one monastery, he remembers that he has not seen his mother for a long time and goes to visit her. As soon as the duchess's servants saw him, they all ran away in panic, no one dared to meet him or ask where he came from or what he wanted. For the first time in his life, Robert was embarrassed. For the first time, he was struck and hurt by the sight of the horror that he inspired in his neighbors; for the first time he deeply felt his monstrous malice and felt something like remorse. I thought about myself; why is he angrier than other people? Who made him like this? Why was he born a monster? He rushes to his mother and, with a naked sword in his hand, forces the old woman to reveal to him the secret of his birth. Having found out, he is crushed by horror, shame, grief. But Robert's powerful nature did not break in despair. On the contrary: his daring soul flared up with a thirst for the fight for his own redemption and the hope of a difficult victory. He will be able to overcome hell and himself, he will destroy the shackles of the damned spirit, which gave birth to him to serve himself and dreams of turning him into an obedient instrument of his ferocious will, Robert does not hesitate. He goes to Rome, falls at the feet of the pope, confesses all his sins to one holy hermit, imposes the most severe penance on himself and swears not to accept any other food except what he can take from the teeth of a dog. Rome is besieged by the Saracens. Robert fights with them twice without being recognized by anyone, and twice brings victory to the Christians. The Emperor is excited, what kind of wonderful ally has heaven sent him? Finally, Robert is recognized. But he rejects all the gifts and grateful honors offered to him. In vain does the emperor want to give Robert his crown; in vain does he seduce Robert with the hand of his beautiful daughter. In the company of a hermit mentor, Robert retires into the desert. There he lived in deeds and prayers until he died, forgiven by God and blessed by people. However, according to other versions, God forgave the sinner earlier, and Robert managed to marry the beautiful princess who was in love with him. This magnificent legend, in its first half, partly resembles our Novgorod epic about Vaska Buslaev.

An undoubted version of Robert the Devil, but in a completely different light, is

6. Ezzelin da Romano, tyrant of Padua (1215–1256);

Fierce tyrants of all, Ezzelin
Made the world believe that the devil had a son.

Albertine Mussato tells the legend of this historical scoundrel in a tragedy called "Eccelinis". The monster's mother, Adelaide, herself initiates her son into terrible secret: he, Ezzelin, and his brother, Alberic, were conceived by her from the devil, who, for the sake of this adventure, took, like Jupiter in the romance with Europe, the appearance of a bull. In contrast to Robert of Normandy, Ezzelin is very happy and proud of his origins and gives his word that he will show himself to the world as a worthy son of such a wonderful father. Satan is a big loser in posterity, but this time he was lucky. Having taken possession of Padua, Ezzelin and his brother raged like furies, inaccessible to any human feeling, blind and deaf to the warnings that the merciful heaven for some reason never tired of sending them. But the too-deserved punishment did not take long to arrive. Defeated at the Battle of Ponte di Cassano, the villain died in despair. His brother followed him.

7. Martin Luther. The papists considered the great reformer the son of the devil, who seduced his mother, a maid in a hotel, in Wittenberg, taking on the guise of a traveling jewelry salesman.

The most remarkable and powerful son of Satan will be the harbinger of his destruction, Antichrist. The theological side of the doctrine of Antichrist does not concern us. As for the legendary one, it is incredibly colorful and diverse. In one Anglo-Saxon poem of the 9th century it is stated that the Antichrist had already come once, and Satan tried not only to oppose him to Christ, but to replace him with Jesus as the expected messiah. Perform on living faces that intricate substitution that Selma Lagerlöf told so interestingly and quite thoughtfully in her novel about a Sicilian town that mistook a figurine of the baby Antichrist for the image of the baby Christ and died from debauchery and wealth that poured into the city when the figurine attracted tourists , began to work miracles, etc., etc. Since Satan’s plan failed, he will repeat his idea only at the end of the world, when times are fulfilled. Antichrist is his main and decisive hope. Satan will put him up as the main support of his power and strength in the final battle with the deity. Many historical figures hostile to the church were mistaken for the Antichrist: Nero, Mohammed, Emperor Frederick II , Luther, etc.; In Russia, in the old faith, we have Nikon, Peter the Great. According to St. Ephraim of Edessa, the Antichrist will be born from a public woman; According to the promise of our famous religious teacher, Archpriest Avvakum, “the Antichrist will be born from Galilee, from the tribe of Dan, from a Jewish wife. Honor Ephraim, Hippolytus, in this regard, where you will be found in great detail” (Epistle to Jonah). Others, on the contrary, believe that it came from a girl or even a young girl: this opinion is disputed by Asson in his treatise “On the Antichrist” (De Antichristo). The last idea of ​​the birth of a hero from a minor by evil force, who must engage in mortal combat with good force, breathes into the European myth from the ancient Indian epic.

“Earthquakes and celestial signs announce to Vikramaditya the birth of Salivahana in Bratixhtana.” The sages explain that these phenomena signify the imminent death of some king. Then Vikramaditya addresses them with the following speech: “O you who know everything divine! One day the Lord (Shiva) , pleased with my repentance, said to me: King, I am favorable to you; ask me for some mercy other than immortality. I answered him: I would like to die by the hand of a man who will be born from a two-year-old girl. God promised me this. Where could such a child be born? To discover this dangerous child, the king sends Vetala"y, who finds in Pratishthana"e a boy and a girl playing in front of a potter's house. One Brahmin tells him that the girl is his daughter, and that Sesha, the prince of snakes , fathered a boy from her. At this news, Vikramaditya himself goes to Pratishtana"y to kill Salivahana, but, struck by the rod of death, dies (Veselovsky).

As for the father of the Antichrist, some believe that he will be a man, but Satan will enter the child at the moment of his birth. But the prevailing opinion is that the Prince of Darkness himself will be the father. Countless treatises on the Antichrist left by the Middle Ages testify to the horror with which the Catholic world awaited the appearance of this mysterious enemy. From time to time, ominous news spread across Europe that he had already been born or would soon be born. This happened mainly in critical periods: in the 4th century, around the year 1000, in the 14th century. In 380 this was confirmed by St. Martin of Tours, in 1080 Bishop of Raineri of Florence, then Norbert, Archbishop of Magdeburg. Under Pope Innocent VI (1352–1362), a French monk foretold the birth of the Antichrist for 1365, and Arnoldo of Villeneuve (1238–1314) predicted the same event for 1376. In 1412, Vincenzo Ferrer learned from reliable sources and informed the antipope about it Benedict XIII, that the Antichrist has been born and is already nine years old. Before the sacred tribunal of the Inquisition, many sorcerers admitted that they were very familiar with the Antichrist and had relations with him.

Our famous pillar and teacher of the old faith, Archpriest Avvakum, also personally saw the Antichrist. “Once upon a time I was sad and thought about how the last enemy Antichrist would come and in what way, and sitting, saying prayers and losing consciousness: I can’t stand on my feet anymore, - sitting, I pray to the accursed one. And behold, in the unclean field I see many people. And someone is standing next to me. I tell him: why are there so many people in the meeting? He answered: Antichrist is coming; wait, don't be horrified. I propped myself up with my two-horned archpriest’s staff and stood up cheerfully: but they were leading me to two naked men in white robes - his flesh was all stinking, very bad, breathing fire from his mouth and from his nostrils, and from his ears a stinking flame emanated, Behind him Our king will follow and rule with a multitude of people. When they brought him to me, I shouted at him and wanted to beat him with my staff. He answered me: why, archpriest, are you shouting at me. I cannot possess those who do not want to, but by the will of those who follow, I hold them in the region. Yes, having spoken, he fell in front of me and bowed to the ground. I spat on him and ended up; and he himself shuddered and bowed to the Lord. And I felt very sick and terrible; there's nothing to look at. I know from the scriptures about Christ without testimony: he will soon be.” Such a firm acquaintance with the Antichrist helped Avvakum to decisively refute those zealots who wanted to proclaim Patriarch Nikon the coming Antichrist. “And Nikon, he’s not the last Antichrist, so shish the Antichrists, - a babo... b, a rogue, disappeared into our land. And those who are stuck in the zodiac craze, look at books, and interpret the days separating the weeks, calling Nikon the last Antichrist, then it’s all a trick, and not reasoning with the Holy Spirit. Athanasius the Great writes: where Christ resembled our savior, from Galilee the Antichrist will emerge; and not from our Russia, I know Nikon: I was born not far from my homeland, between Murashkin and Lyskova, in a village; his father is Cheremesin, and his mother is a mermaid, Mina da Manka, and he Nikita became a sorcerer, and learned to fornicate women, and went to Zheltovodie with a book, and higher, yes, higher, and got to hell with the atamans, and now, like a kinops sorcerer, he will soon disappear and his memory will noisily perish. They shook that church no worse than the last devil of the Antichrist, and part of it is with him in the unquenchable fires.”

We have no right to laugh at these old nonsense, because even our time talks about the Antichrist no better. Not even 15 years ago, the rogue and adventurer Leo Taxil, something like the French Lutostan, only with greater luck, fooled devout Catholics with the news of the birth of the Antichrist, raised somewhere in America, and forged correspondence with his mother Diana Vaughan, supposedly staying there -something in the Bohemian Mountains. Vladimir Solovyov, one of the most talented and eloquent instigators of the mystical fog, also threatened Europe and Russia with the coming of the Antichrist, and the speech about this soon-to-be guest was his swan song.

The program of the Antichrist is well known. He will unite in his hands all the treasures of the world and with a generous distribution will equalize people in wealth, the result of which will be terrifying depravity and the worldwide reign of the Antichrist. He will destroy the great northern wall and the iron gates of Alexander the Great and release the “divi peoples” of Gog and Magog, locked by the conqueror, onto the baptized world. With their help, he will flood cities and kingdoms with blood, destroy the church and personally kill the prophets Enoch and Elijah, who would come in vain to defend it. But when he unites all the kingdoms and crowns of the world and becomes one, the ruler of the universe will overtake him with his well-deserved punishment: he will be killed either by Christ himself, or by the Archangel Michael, and with the Antichrist the power of the devil over man will fall and be destroyed. The gates of the abyss will be locked and sealed forever. The kingdom of Satan will end and the kingdom of God will be established, but there will be no end to it.

In ancient Russian literature, the belief of the incubate is very firmly established, although it is most often spoken of briefly and evasively - “for shame,” which is reasonable, since when Muscovite Rus' began to discuss sexual issues, it expressed itself in such language and with such thoroughness, that the ears were drooping and the walls were turning red. In the West, in such cases, the chaste Latin language came to the rescue, but in Rus' it was not commonly used. However, it is precisely ancient Russian literature that contains a very extensive and one of the most remarkable in its detail, from the point of view of psychophysiological observation, depiction of demonomania based on sexual disorder. This is the famous “Tale of the Possessed Wife Solomonia”, published in 1860 by Kostomarov in “Monuments of Ancient Russian Literature”, according to the 17th century list, it is unlikely to be much older than the event itself that is narrated in it. Despite the fantastic extravagances and decorations that fill this story, despite its ecclesiastical tendentiousness and the clumsy inventions naively flowing from here, the protocol consistency and accuracy of presentation in the description of Solomonia’s suffering clearly indicate that this is a curious and serious case of hystero-epilepsy, surrounded by sexual and religious hallucinations , recorded by an unknown author from life. He confuses and confuses the reader only where he introduces religious fiction, or he himself naively hides from his own research into the darkness of all-covering age-old superstitions. In general, he is so detailed that he even begins his story with the most accurate chronological and geographical data: “In the summer of February 7169 (1661), on (skipping) day, a city was committed within the limits of the city of Ustyug for fourty fields: up the Sukhona River there is a volost, the verb Erogotskaya , in it is the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary; The same church has a priest named Demetrius, his wife is called Ulita, and his daughter is named Solomonia, and we now have words about her.” When this priest Solomonia got married, her parents married her to a peasant named Matveya. On the wedding night, the young spouse “wanted to leave the bed to the threshold of the temple, bodily for the sake of need.” While he was away, someone knocked on the cage and called out to the young woman, “Solomon! open it!” Solomonia, thinking that it is her husband, gets out of bed, the doors open - and here miracles begin. “I smell in her face, and in her ears, and in her eyes, like some great cowlick, and a certain fiery and blue flame appeared.” Solomonia was very frightened, and when “Little by little her husband came to her in the temple, he was especially horrified,” and a severe hysterical attack began with her (“and there was no sleep all night; shaking and a great fierce chill came over her), which, growing over the course of three days, he turned Solomonia into an ordinary Russian village type of a clique - a demon maniac: “and on the third day she was in the womb of a fierce demon, tormenting her womb, and at that time she was in a frenzy of mind from the demon living in her.”

On the ninth day after the wedding, this hysterical girl, so strangely and seriously frightened at the critical moment of her transformation into a woman and, of course, had already convinced herself that she was spoiled “by a man of evil” and a demon climbed into her with a blue flame - this unfortunate, epileptic Solomonia began to have sexual hallucinations, “And on the ninth day after her marriage, after sunset, she was in the cell with her husband, on the bed of desire, and suddenly she saw the demon Solomonia, who came to her in a brutal way, shaggy, possessing nochti, and lie down on her bed. She was the great one, afraid of him and lost his mind. The same beast desecrated her with fornication, but she found herself on the morning of the third hour of the day, and did not tell anyone the former devil’s intrigue, and from the same days of damnation, demons began to come to her, except for the great holidays, at five and a half hours a day, with a human vision, like some beautiful young man, and so I attacked her, and desecrated her, and left her, but people who saw nothing of this. She, Solomonia, told her husband about herself, how these demons came to be desecrated.”

But the hallucinations began to recur and became daily, “except on major holidays.”

The husband at first felt sorry for Solomonia, but, seeing no end to her wild visions, he chickened out and took his wife to live back with her father, Priest Demetrius. Here Solomonia’s fits worsened even more, and her voluptuous dreams, away from her husband, became more frequent. And since the parental supervision of her, one must think, turned out to be weaker than her husband’s, the hysterical woman began to run away from home, and, when returned, lied to lies that the devils were taking her to their place in the water.

The illusions of sexual cohabitation led to (exactly like that ill-fated lady, whose example I cited above according to Delassus and Guaita) the illusion of pregnancy, la grosseuse hysterique, with the denouement of a fantastic birth.

“And they were two days and two nights, and they conceived in their womb, and carried them for a year and a half. When the time comes for her to give birth; and she was in her father's house, and she sent her father out of the house with all the living, telling him that if she wanted to give birth, she would not kill them dark-skinned ones. And at some time she began to give birth, and a wife came to her from those dark demons, and began to hang out with her; and she gave birth to six of them, and in a vision they were blue, and the woman who was in her took them and carried them out of the temple under the bridge.”

It would be long, boring and unnecessary to count all the disappearances of Solomonia, the violence of demons against her and her incessant childbirth, in which she gave birth to many imps.

The further history of Solomonia, as in the alternation of demonic and religious hallucinations, she lived for more than ten years; how she raged during the service, especially when one priest decided to forcefully give her communion (“the demon began to cry out through her lips in a great voice: burn me, burn me!”); how Saints Procopius and John, the Ustyug miracle workers and, finally, the Mother of God herself appeared to her with encouragement - this whole ordinary and frequent story of the demoniac clique is of little interest. But her healing is highest degree curious and revealing both as a clinical case and as a combination of false ideas. During Great Lent 7179 (1671), Solomonia fasted and - as a result of abstinence and physical fatigue associated with fasting - some internal painful process in her was resolved: a huge abscess appeared on her left side, which opened on the eve of the day she needed was to take communion. The process was carried out very difficult and painfully, and the “compassionate people” surrounding Solomonia, like her herself, took it for a new atrocity of the devil: “after sunset, the accursed demon was confused within her, and her womb began to tear; She began to scream from the heaviness; and gnawed through her left side; and when he gnawed it, Solomonia came to his senses, and saw his sap covered in blood, and showed it to those in existence: what the demon had done to her in the night; he like him, having seen her death from the demon, I feel very happy.” All this day and then until May 27 (meaning 1 1/2 months) Solomonia’s fits were stronger than ever - “the demon living in her gave no little rest: she tormented her womb and tore fiercely, and tormented her even more.” first. He knows his damned death.” The demon of Solomonia was more perceptive than her compassionate patients: he felt that her strong nature had overcome her - after all, the disease had occurred, the crisis had occurred and things were moving towards recovery. The sexual delirium stopped: after the internal demon gnawed through Solomonia’s side, no external demons were any longer “filthy” of her. The state of the shocked body is still very serious, but improved well-being already predicts recovery and prompts joyful dreams. On May 27, Solomonia sees in a dream the Ustyug miracle workers who are especially revered by her, “and says to her holy words: Solomonia! pray to Procopius and John; They will deliver you from such torment in a little time. Already you, Solomonia, Last year Hidishi! The prediction was justified even sooner than the saints promised: that same summer 7179, on the 8th day of July in the very memory of the holy righteous Procopius, which means six weeks after the vision, Solomonia, coming to the cathedral church of the Most Holy Theotokos, solemnly declared “to the entire consecrated cathedral” and to the “newly Orthodox” about their complete healing. According to her, it came to her again - in a dream. “And you saw me as a sacrifice, and my belly was filled with cruel evil; and seeing me all the mourners, seeing my destruction. And behold, an indescribable light suddenly arose, where I lay, and I saw a young man walking into the temple and carrying a lamp, and Saints Procopius and John walking along him, and they became bound on my head, speaking to the holy men; I don’t know what they say; and then Saint Procopius came to me, and crossed my womb with his hand, and Saint John, holding a small penny in his hand, came to me, and cut my womb, and took the demon from me, and gave it to Saint Procopius; the demon began to scream with a great voice and curl in his hand; and Saint Procopius showed the demon and said: Solomon! Have you seen the demon that was in your womb? It’s in vain that his vision is black and his tail is fat and scary; and put him, the accursed one, on the platform and killed him with pokers. Saint John again took them out of my womb one by one and gave them to Saint Procopius, and he killed them one by one... and took them, and threw them onto the church platform, and crushed them with his foot. And Saint Procopius said to Saint John: Is Solomonia’s womb clean from the demons living in her? And Saint John answered: she is pure, and there is no blemish in her! Therefore, Saint Procopius himself looks into my womb, so that it is pure.”

In Solomonia’s last hallucinations, what is remarkable is the concentration of her imagination on the surgical, so to speak, act: “cutting my womb, so that the cutting of me, a sinner, does not bleed,” “beginning to kill the demons with the same wound, as before.” All this speaks of well-being, which again feels in the “womb” some kind of sharp, cutting process, similar to how, two and a half months before, when the abscess demon gnawed through Solomonia’s side, and thus her healing began. Suspended by a relapse, acute in the form of the phenomena, but much weaker in essence, it happily ended in a new nervous crisis caused by Solomonia's overwork on the feast of St. Procopius, in the church crush and its religious ecstasy. This assumption is confirmed by details that are not in the Kostomarovsky list of the “Tale”, but it is in the Buslaevsky list: - “and on my belly, in which place they took out the holy demonic power of the enemy, and know that place, for the sake of true testimony, so as not people thought that this would be a ghost, and not the true miracle of the saints and righteous miracle workers.” The wound of the old abscess was closed (“the ulcer, like the gnawing of the devil’s evil, was healed”), but the scar from the new one remained.

There is no need to treat “The Tale of the Possessed Wife Solomonia” as a fiction, like fiction, for easy reading by pious readers of the 17th century, for the literary entertainment of contemporaries,” as Kostomarov put it in his time. In 1913, we can easily believe that this simple-minded recording actually and even verified recorded a true fact (Kostomarov also admitted the possibility of the historical existence of Solomonia). The works and observations of Charcot, Richet, Magnan, Krafft-Ebing, Mergeevsky and others give us every right to recognize this “glorious miracle, filled with guard and horror” in its entirety, without requiring any moment of it either in a supernatural interpretation or even in the possibility that the demonic drama of Solomony was entirely, or for the most part, a very human comedy, played out by a hysterical woman - a malingerer (these both qualities are inherent in Solomony to a high degree and alternate with remarkable typicality), with some ambiguous goals, with the help gangs of charlatans. Before us is simply a correctly and accurately, “clinically” so to speak, but not by a doctor, but by a clergyman, recorded history of sexual neurosis, which the author, in its causes, in detail, and in its outcome, interpreted and illuminated according to the theological worldview of his age . But in presenting the course and phenomena of neurosis, the author’s attentive conscientiousness turned out to be beyond praise, almost photographic. Therefore, we have no reason to doubt his preface that he wrote down the story from the words of her heroine herself: “even as I heard Solomony sinners from her very mouth, in the presence of her father, the spiritual priest Nikita, the same Ustyug, the cathedral churches of the Most Holy Theotokos , and her own father, Priest Dmitry, and wrote this in memory of the future generation.” Through the lines of the story, all the time, the living face of the living, from the bearish corner, the priest - the peasant, spoiled by Solomony - always looks. At times, the frightened face of her father Dmitry also appears, who later, probably under the impression of the events experienced in the family, turned out to be the monk Dionysius in the Trinity Gleden Monastery. For with the power of real, living, family horror experienced in one’s own skin, simple lines of at least this addition breathe: “for the torment of her darkness, the curse of the soul, live in her, and then she was beside herself, and ran from her temple in it, life-giving, naked in torn robe and outstretched hair, and thrown into the water in the winter and summer time: the people who arrived then took her to the edge of the water, and sometimes held her in the water and pulled her out of the water onto the shore and from the hole onto the ice, like a sacrifice; Then her womb was like that of a woman who wanted to give birth, and in her womb a demon was tormented in darkness, like fish in the deep; and this suffering of her, seeing the people coming, I was terribly surprised, and I took her back to the house where she lived, and this torment and languor from the demonic power happened to her many times.” This is an insert by priest Dmitry, who was present during the story as a witness, and one cannot help but admit that it was made with the energy and imagery of a man who vividly remembers how he fished along the banks of the river and snatched it from the ice holes, rushing to some mysterious calls, seized by a mysterious thirst for suicide, a crazy daughter. The role of the author of the story boiled down to the fact that when Solomonia or priest Dmitry naively said: “the unclean one began to squeal like a pig,” he, a well-read and written churchman, clothed this hillbilly in literature: “like a small pig.” But that's all. The protocol remains a protocol and its facts remain facts.

In addition to their natural children, devils loved to take foster children. They got children either through abduction, or through a curse or careless promise of parents, or through an incorrectness in the baptismal rite. We saw in the example of Solomonia the Demoniac that it was enough for the baptizing priest to be drunk in order to give the child to the power of “black demons.” The English chronicler Roger of Howden (about 1200) says that one girl became pregnant and left home to hide the approaching birth. In an open field, in the hour of a terrible thunderstorm, her torments seized her. Tired of calling for God's help in vain, she prayed to the devil. He immediately appeared in the form of a young man and said to her: “Follow me.” He took her to the sheepfold, made a bed out of straw, lit a good fire and left to get food. Two people were walking past, noticed the fire, entered the sheepfold, questioned the lying mother in labor and, horrified by the devil’s cunning, ran to the nearest village for the priest. Meanwhile, the devil returned with food supplies and water, fed the mother in labor and, when her time came, received the baby from her, like a most skillful obstetrician. And just then the priest arrived with a crowd of parishioners and began casting spells, which the devil, of course, could not stand and ran away, rushing off the newborn in his arms. The good mother, caring little about it, thanked the creator for deliverance from the evil one and returned to her home in peace. It is impossible not to admit that in this amazing incident the devil is almost the only actor, who behaved like a decent person.

Walter of Kuanxi (d. 1236) knows a different story. A virtuous and wealthy couple, having given birth to several children, gave St. The virgin's vow is to henceforth live in chastity. But the demon is cunning and the flesh is weak. Once, and even just on the night of Easter, the demon kindled the husband with such a fierce passion that, after much refusal, persuasion and threats, the wife had to give in to his desires. But before she gave in, she exclaimed:

If there is a child from this sin of ours, know that I am giving it to the devil!

The baby was finally born - and a charming one. And the further he grows, the more he admires everyone with his beauty, intelligence, sweet character, and kind behavior. And the mother bursts into tears, remembering her curse and expecting the darkest consequences from it. When the boy was twelve years old, a terrible demon appeared to his mother and warned her that in three years he would come for his prey. The poor woman, in despair, confessed to her son what fate awaited him. The boy cried bitterly and, leaving his parents' house, went to Rome to the pope to ask for protection. The pope was stumped by such an incidental matter and sent the young man to the Patriarch of Jerusalem, the wisest man on earth. This sage, however, also did not find a way to rescue an innocent boy from the claws of hell - Will such and such a hermit help you: he is so holy that angels descend from heaven to talk with him... Weeping bitterly, calling on God and the holy . the girl, the boy walks and walks, and meanwhile three years have almost passed and only one day remains until the due date. IN Holy Saturday he finds his hermit. At first he was also confused, but then he perked up and came up with something. After a night spent in prayer, the hermit, while serving mass, placed the boy between himself and the altar. This did not stop the devil from rushing in to grab his prey. But the hermit calls St. maiden She descends from heaven in all her glory, and the devil, of course, flees in shame, and the young man is saved and, returning to his homeland, devotes himself to the cult of St. for the rest of his life. virgins

In another story, the devil takes great care in raising a child he kidnapped and travels with him around the world. But at the age of fifteen the young man St. Jacob takes him away from the devil and returns him to his parents.

These beliefs are widely developed in Russian folk demonology. According to some, “babies cursed by their parents or who died unbaptized are captured by demons and turned into kikimore. Their community does the same Igosha - a stillborn child, a premature baby, a miscarriage, a freak without arms and legs, who settles in a hut and disturbs householders with his pranks. In the same way, a sleeping baby (crushed in a dream) goes to the unclean; “to free him, the mother must stand for three nights in the church - in a circle outlined by the hand of the priest, and then on the third night, as soon as the roosters crow, the devils will give her the dead child.”

Some of the folk stories about unfortunates who fall into the power of demons through a parental curse are remarkably beautiful and touching. To characterize them, I will take one from the famous book by A. N. Afanasyev “Poetic views of the Slavs on nature,” in which there are many of them:

“There lived an old man and an old woman, and they had a son, whom his mother cursed while still in the womb. The son grew up big and got married; shortly afterwards he went missing. They looked for him, prayed for him, but the missing man was not found. Not far away in the dense forest there was a guardhouse, an old beggar went there to spend the night and lay down on the stove. A little later he hears that a stranger came to that place, got off his horse, entered the lodge and prayed all night and kept saying: “God judge my mother - why did she curse me in the womb!” In the morning a beggar came to the village and went straight to the old man and the old woman in the yard. “What, grandfather! - the old woman asks him, - you are a worldly person, you always walk around the world, have you heard anything about our lost son? We are looking for him, praying for him, but nothing is announced.” The beggar told what he had imagined in the night: “Isn’t this your son?” In the evening the old man got ready, went into the forest and hid in the guardhouse behind the stove. So a fine fellow arrived at night, praying to God and chanting: “God judge my mother - why did she curse me in the womb!” The old man recognized his son, jumped out from behind the stove and said: “Oh! , son! I found you by force; I won’t leave you now!” - Come after me! - the son answers, he left the lodge, mounted his horse and rode off; and his father follows him. The fellow came to the ice hole and went straight there with his horse - and then he disappeared. The old man stood - stood near the ice hole, returned home and said to his wife: “I found my son, but it’s difficult to help him out; after all, he lives in the water.” The next night the old woman went into the forest and also did nothing good; and on the third night the young wife went to help her husband out, went into the lodge and hid behind the stove. A fine fellow arrives, prays and laments: “God judge my mother - why did she curse me in the womb!” The young woman jumped out: “My dear friend, the law of the inseparable! Now I won’t leave you alone!” - Come after me! - answered the husband and led her to the ice hole. “You go into the water, and I’ll follow you!” - says the wife. - If so, take off the cross. She took off the cross, fell into the hole - and found herself in large chambers. Satan sits there on a chair; saw a young woman and asked her husband: “Whom did you bring!” - This is my law! - “Well, if this is your law, then get out of here with it! the law cannot be separated.” The wife rescued her husband and brought him from the devils into the free world!

Many legends and fairy tales vary the well-known motif - a king, a merchant, a rich man sells or promises the devil for a service something that they do not know at home. When they make promises, they expect to get away with some trifles, because what kind of owner doesn’t know everything important in his house? But it turns out that this is the child with whom the promise’s wife is pregnant, which she has not yet managed to inform her husband about. The child thus promised subsequently has to work hard to earn his freedom from the evil power that innocently enslaved him. Slavic tales of this kind have, for the most part, a cheerful tone and a happy ending. Germanic ones are gloomy and tragic, as exemplified by Heine’s more than once mentioned ballad about Hermann the Merry Hero (Herrmann der Frohliche Held).

When the devil is unable to kidnap or lure a child away from its parents, he is not averse to buying it. This is especially common in German legends. In the famous “Thunderbolt” by Zhukovsky, borrowed from German models, the hero buys from Asmodeus a reprieve from hellish execution at the cost of the souls of his twelve daughters, a year for each. And, although the deal is obviously illegal, and Thunderbolt’s daughters could refuse to pay their bloody bills due to their minority, however, the contract turns out to be strong enough to turn them into “twelve sleeping maidens, admittedly delivered from hell, but not allowed in.” to heaven.

You can sell or transfer the devil not only your child, but also, for example, your wife, as one knight mentioned by Arturo Graf did. Moreover: under sufficiently favorable conditions, you can send a complete stranger to hell, as long as the gift is made not only in words, but from a pure heart. Arturo Graf reports a smiling parable on this subject, which I once used for a satirical story.

There was a tax collector, a ruthless, tight-fisted, greedy man. One day he was walking through a village and the devil accosted him as a companion. They're coming. Suddenly they see: a man is chasing a pig, and she is struggling, so much so that she brings him to despair, and he scolds her:

Damn you!

The collector says to the devil:

Don't you hear? He gives you the pig - go and take it.

No, the devil answers, this is not from a pure heart.

More are coming. The mother cannot stop the crying baby and swears:

Damn you!

Why don't you take it? - the collector is surprised again.

And again the devil objects:

He doesn't give from the heart. This is just so, a proverb.

Finally they approach the peasants, from whom the collector is about to extract arrears. When they saw their tormentor, they shouted in unison:

Damn you! You would forever be in the clutches of the devil!

What a deal! - said the devil, - these give from the bottom of their hearts. So let’s go, my dear!

He grabbed the collector by the collar - and he was gone!

An incubus is a demon who is interested in women. The word comes from the Latin “incubare”, which literally translates into Russian as lying on top. These demons come to young girls in their dreams, enter into intimate intimacy with them, after which the women sometimes give birth to children...

Did nuns give birth to demons?

In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII signed a document advising women on how to protect themselves from lustful evil forces. Most often, incubi harassed nuns. Hundreds of women in convents where men could not enter gave birth to children from demons. Laywomen did not stand aside either. Although, let's be honest, in most cases, women referred to sex with demons in cases where they could not justify an unwanted pregnancy...

In the Middle Ages, incubi were described as vile and hunchbacked creatures. It was believed that the children born from them were just as ugly. And the Inquisition, in turn, immediately called all babies with the slightest deviations who were not born from their legitimate husbands children of the Devil.

Later, starting from the 17th century, incubi, on the contrary, were described as handsome men. Cases have been recorded of demons appearing in the form of dead husbands.

See also:

Nowadays

Medieval legends about conceptions from ghosts can be called fiction. In those distant times, they invented a lot of things!

In 1988, in Leningrad, 22-year-old patient Anna was diagnosed with hypoplasia, popularly called “children’s uterus.” With this diagnosis, conception is impossible. Her husband immediately left the girl. The parents said that the girl was severely depressed for more than a month.

One night, she dreamed of her husband. He asked for forgiveness and entered into intimacy with her, which, according to Anna, was fabulously stormy. As he left, he said: “We will have a son,” and disappeared into thin air.

A month later, the girl came to the gynecologist, who determined that she was four weeks pregnant. The doctors were confused, and the girl was diagnosed in several clinics. Having opened the archives, doctors found that women with this diagnosis sometimes give birth. Before this, such a case was recorded in 1910. True, everything went naturally for that woman, the child was born from a living and legal husband...

Doctors offered to give the girl an abortion, claiming that with her diagnosis the child would not be born healthy. Anna categorically refused. The birth was difficult and ended in the death of the girl. And the child himself was born dead.

Later, Anna’s parents said that on the supposed nights of conception, poltergeist phenomena were observed in their apartment: footsteps and creaking doors were heard.

A pale or faint line when tested at home is one of the most common topics on women's forums. Young girls have heard about this more than once, but cannot really explain in what cases a ghost line is observed on a pregnancy test. Can a “phantom trace” be considered a confirmation or “this will pass”, as some people think.

What does a ghost trail look like on a test?

Physiologically, any female organism reproduces its own kind during reproduction. Only unexplained phenomena, everything that defies common sense is called mysticism, phantom or ghostly manifestations. How to combine one with the other in case of testing, how to explain?

Some young women claim that “there was such a pale stripe, then they checked it - it disappeared, then it appeared again.” How can we trust such results? So is there a pregnancy or not? Is it common to see ghost lines on tests indicating pregnancy, or are these exceptionally rare cases?

Attention: Ghost stripe also called the “evaporation line”, when a faintly colored trace was immediately present, but after a while it became invisible or completely disappeared. A phantom trace is different from a slightly colored line or a full-fledged “second” stripe, which can be considered a positive response during self-examination. Here are examples in the photo:

What is the difference between a false positive and a phantom trace?

• normal format (the same width and length of the tested line as in the control sample, the edges are not blurred).
• the ghost will notice, but it is difficult to say what color it is painted in (more likely, it is a slightly pinkish, bluish or lilac shade);
• somewhat reminiscent of a smoky trail or haze where an intensely colored test strip should be.

Most tests work on the principle of litmus paper with an applied reagent that determines the level of “pregnancy hormone” in the urine. As with any similar material, the test line could have been exposed to drops of paper, biological material, or simply contaminants.

Any test has an expiration date, and after its expiration, the material could lose its ability to color or change its original color. Any of these reasons may produce a ghost line on a pregnancy test when there is no conception.

When purchasing pregnancy tests at a pharmacy, look at the instructions and expiration date. Not worth it:

1. take goods from a display window on the sunny side;
2. buy tests on the market (storage in winter in inappropriate conditions);
3. examine urine (other biological material) in the first days after sexual intercourse; the level of the hormone is still insufficient to obtain a positive or false-positive result.

A phantom streak is not a result, but rather a false hope, especially when you really want a child.