Incubus - Scientific Alternate Explanations

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:

    Anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the “anticipation of Nature.”
    Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)

    Germany is a queer country: one can’t regard it dispassionately. I alternate between hating it thoroughly, stick, stock and stone, and yearning over it fit to break my heart. I can’t help feeling it a young and adorable country—adolescent—with the faults of adolescence.
    —D.H. (David Herbert)

    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)