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:
“Experimental work provides the strongest evidence for scientific realism. This is not because we test hypotheses about entities. It is because entities that in principle cannot be ‘observed’ are manipulated to produce a new phenomena
[sic] and to investigate other aspects of nature.”
—Ian Hacking (b. 1936)
“It might become a wheel spoked red and white
In alternate stripes converging at a point
Of flame on the line, with a second wheel below,
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Of billows, downward, toward the drift-fire shore.”
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—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)