Book contents
Chapter 4
from Question 1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2015
Summary
AS for the way in which sorceresses subordinate themselves to incubus demons, six topics should be examined. Some are from the point of view of the demon and the body assumed by him: the element from which it is formed. Second, from the point of view of the act: whether it is always carried out with the infusion of a seed received from someone else. Third, from the point of view of the time and place: whether the demon acts at one time rather than another. Fourth, whether he acts visibly from the point of view of the woman, and whether only those women who are begotten from filthy acts of this kind are visited regularly by demons. Fifth, whether those women who are offered by midwives to the demons at the time of birth are so visited. Sixth, whether the sexual pleasure is lesser or greater in such women.
First, regarding the material and quality of the assumed body, it should be said that he assumes a body made of air and that it is made of earth in some way inasmuch as it has the characteristic of earth through a process of thickening. This is explained as follows.
Air | is in its own right capable of being formed into an effigy only in terms of being formed into the effigy of some other body in which it is enclosed, and hence it is by no means delineated by its own boundaries but only by those of the other body. Also, one part of the air is contiguous with the next. Therefore, a demon cannot straightforwardly, so to speak, assume a body made of air. (It should be noted that air is especially capable of being transformed and changed into anything at all, a sign of which is the fact that when certain men have endeavored to cut or pierce a body assumed by a demon with a sword, they were unable to achieve this because when air is divided, the parts immediately become continuous again.)
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- The Hammer of WitchesA Complete Translation of the Malleus Maleficarum, pp. 302 - 314Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009