Scientific Alternate Explanations
Victims may have been experiencing waking dreams or sleep paralysis. Nocturnal arousal or nocturnal emission could be explained away by creatures causing otherwise guilt-producing behavior. Then again, victims of incubi could well have been the victims of real sexual assault. Rapists may have attributed the rapes of sleeping women to demons in order to escape punishment. A friend or relative is at the top of the list in such cases and would be kept secret by the intervention of 'spirits.' The victims and, in some cases, the magistrates, may have found it easier to explain the attack as supernatural rather than confront the idea that the attack came from someone in a position of trust.
Read more about this topic: Incubus
Famous quotes containing the words scientific, alternate and/or explanations:
“If a man is a good lawyer, a good physician, a good engineer ... he may be a fool in every other capacity. But no deficiency or mistake of judgment is forgiven to a woman ... and should she fail anywhere, if she has any scientific attainment, or artistic faculty, instead of standing her interest as an excuse, it is censured as an aggravation and offence.”
—E.P.P., U.S. women’s magazine contributor. The Una, p. 28 ( February 1855)
“In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.”
—Henry James (1843–1816)
“We operate exclusively with things that do not exist, with lines, surfaces, bodies, atoms, divisible time spans, divisible spaces—how could explanations be possible at all when we initially turn everything into images, into our images!”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)