Medicine in the Middle Ages: Extracts from "Le Moyen Age Medical" by Dr. Edmond Dupouy; translated by T. C. MinorDupouy, Edmond
History
Medicine in the Middle Ages: Extracts from "Le Moyen Age Medical" by Dr. Edmond Dupouy; translated by T. C. Minor
Dupouy, Edmond
Medicine, Medieval
Pic de Mirandolle, relates how another priest had commerce for over
forty years with a beautiful succubus, whom he called Hermione. Bodin
recounts the story of Edeline, the Prior of a religious community in
Sorbonne. An adversary of Demonomaniacal doctrines, Edeline was accused
by the theologians of defending demons. Before the Tribunal the Prior
declared that he had been visited by Satan, in the form of a black ram,
and had prostituted his body to an incubus, and only obeyed his master
in preaching that sorcery was a chimerical invention. “Although the
proof furnished by the registers of the Tribunal of Poitiers,” remarks
Calmeil, “leaves no doubt as to the alienation of the intellectual
faculties at the moment of his trial, Edeline was none the less
condemned to perpetual seclusion from the world.”
As another striking example of hallucination, bearing upon this
question of incubism, Guibert de Nogent tells of a monk, “who was sick,
and retained the services of a Jew doctor. In exchange for health, the
aforesaid physician, demanded a sacrifice. ‘What sacrifice?’ asked
the monk. ‘The sacrifice of that which is the most precious to men,’
answered the Jew. ‘What may that be?’ inquired the monk. And the
demon, for it was the Devil disguised as a doctor, had the audacity to
explain. ‘Oh curses! Oh shame! to require such a thing of a priest’—but
the victim, nevertheless, did what was asked. It was the denial of
Christ and the true faith.”
Like psycho-sensorial hallucinations of the other senses, that of
the genesic sense may assume the erotic type of disease, and is due
undoubtedly, in some men, to a repletion of the spermatic vesicules. It
is this that Saint Andre, physician in ordinary to Louis XIV., gives
as an explanation of incubism. “The incubus,”[71] says this writer,
“a chimera that had for its foundation only a dream, an over excited
imagination, too often a longing after women; artifice had no less a
part in the creation of the incubus,—a woman, a girl, only a devotee in
name, already long before debauched, but desiring to appear virtuous
to hide her crime, passes off the offenses of some lover as the act of
a demon; this is the ordinary explanation. In this artifice the woman
is often aided by the _suggestions_ of the man—a man who has heard
_succubi_ speaking to him in his sleep, usually sees most beautiful
women in his dreams, which, under such circumstances, are often
erotic.”
It is certain that an ardent imagination and exaggerated sexual
appetite have played a leading _role_ in the history of _incubi_, but,
meantime, there may be exceptions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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