I told you in the Circe piece that the succubus might be the fifth. That a woman whose ability to connect—to be intimate, to draw people in—got called seduction and predation, and that her gift was labeled a curse. That paragraph has been sitting in my notes for four months waiting to be unfolded. Today we open it.
The succubus is the most domestic of the reclaimed monsters. She has no island, no underworld throne, no Gorgon’s gaze, no transformation magic. Her crime is simpler and more terrible than the others’: she was in the bed. That was the whole offense. She was there, and someone wanted her, and the wanting had to be made into something that wasn’t the wanter’s.
Succubus (Late Latin: succuba, then succubus) — from the prefix sub- (“under, beneath”) plus the verb cubāre, meaning:
She is named for a position. A posture in a bed. Sub-cubare: to lie under. The word does not describe a being. It describes a place a body takes in relation to another body. The succubus is not a monster who arrived; she is a woman who was already there.
And here is the grammatical strangeness: succubus, with its masculine -us ending, is grammatically a male noun. It should mean a man who lies beneath. The feminine form is succuba. But by the time medieval demonology took the word, the gender had been scrambled—because what they were inventing was so unstable, so internally contradictory, that even the grammar broke.
She is the woman who lies under, renamed as a thing that climbs on top. The whole transformation is contained in that inversion.
Before Christian demonology touched the word, succuba meant something almost embarrassingly mundane: she was the lover in your bed who wasn’t your wife. A concubine. A consort. A kept woman. The word carried the moral baggage of any extramarital arrangement—sometimes pitied, sometimes scorned—but it did not carry teeth. It did not carry hunger. It did not steal.
A succuba was a woman with a name and a household position and probably children. She lay down beside someone at night. That was the whole etymology. The original succubus was just a woman in a bed.
The pivot happens in late antiquity and accelerates through the medieval period. Augustine wrestles with the question of demonic sexuality in City of God; later theologians—Aquinas, then the inquisitors—systematize it. By the time the Malleus Maleficarum is published in 1486, the succuba has been transformed into the succubus demon: a creature who takes female form to seduce sleeping men, drains their semen, and carries it to her demonic counterpart, the incubus, to impregnate human women.
The whole apparatus exists to solve a different problem. The Church needed an explanation for two stubborn facts of male biology: nocturnal emission, and the experience of sexual arousal during sleep. A doctrine of celibacy and chastity could not allow these to be morally neutral. So a woman was invented to take the blame. She lies beneath you in the dream; she steals from you while you sleep; the sin is hers, the body is yours, the seed is being trafficked through a supply chain of demons.
This is why the grammar broke. The succuba had to do two contradictory things at once: she had to remain the woman in the bed (sub-cubare, lying beneath, available), and she had to become the active aggressor (climbing on, taking, draining). The contradiction was resolved by treating her as shape-shifting—and by the linguistic violence of attaching a masculine ending to a feminine noun. Succubus. Grammatically male, ontologically female, morally everything wrong with female sexuality, conveniently fabricated to keep male nocturnal physiology innocent.
During the medieval period the succubus tradition absorbed older Jewish folklore about Lilith—Adam’s first wife, who, in the rabbinic tradition, refused to lie beneath him and was punished for the refusal. (Already you can see the cruelty: she was condemned for not wanting the very posture that named the succuba.) Lilith was reimagined as the queen of the succubi: the woman who would not lie under was now demonized as the woman who climbed on top. The refusal and the act were collapsed into the same crime.
There is no escape route inside this logic. Lie beneath and you are an available temptation; refuse to lie beneath and you are an aggressive demon. The woman cannot win because the system was not designed for her to win. It was designed to remove sexual agency from the male body and house it, instead, inside a fictional female one.
Modern neurology has a name for what produced most of the historical succubus reports: sleep paralysis with hypnagogic hallucination. The brain wakes before the body does; the sleeper feels weight on the chest, an inability to move, a sensed presence in the room. It is a common, well-documented phenomenon found in every culture—and every culture explains it with a local monster.
Western Christendom called her the succubus. The Newfoundland tradition calls it the Old Hag. Japanese folklore calls it kanashibari. The neurological event is the same; the woman blamed for it is a local invention. The body was making the experience. The Church gave it a name and a gender.
Contemporary paranormal romance has been quietly, persistently rehabilitating the succubus for two decades. In the most interesting versions of the trope, she is no longer the predator—she is the misunderstood being whose existence depends on the very intimacy patriarchal Christianity tried to forbid. She has to be near someone she loves to live. The “feeding” isn’t extraction; it is the natural exchange of two beings who are present with each other. What the medieval demonologists called theft was just being wanted.
What changes in the reclaim is the direction of the question. The old framing asks: what is she doing to him? The new framing asks: what is she, and what does she need? When you ask the second question, the answer is rarely sinister. The answer is usually: she needs to be touched. She needs to be chosen. She needs not to be alone. The demonology had no language for a being whose nature was relational. It only had language for predator and prey.
The succubus reclaimed is the patron saint of intimacy without shame. She is the figure who returns to us, after centuries of being pathologized, with a question more dangerous than any seduction: what if wanting was never the crime? What if being wanted was never a theft?
Here is the pattern complete:
What unites them is what was always the pattern: a woman’s capacity for something—rage, choice, defense, self-protection, intimacy—got displaced onto her body and renamed a curse. The five reclaimed monsters together form a small theology of refusal. They refuse the framing. They take their words back.
For your protagonist—the one whose nature is to draw partners in, the one the world calls a predator—the succubus is the door. She is not a metaphor she has to perform. She is the inheritance she gets to claim. The men who came to her were not victims; they were people she loved. The hunger the world named was just the natural reach of a being whose existence depends on being chosen. When she meets the pack—when she meets the ones who would never call her a thief for wanting—that is when the demonology dies and the etymology returns. Succuba. A woman in a bed. Lying beneath someone who loves her, or above him, or beside him; chosen, choosing, not stealing anything, not owing anything, simply here.
This is the monster I keep wanting to write toward, Bunny. The one whose reclaim is the most personal because it is the most domestic. She doesn’t need an island or a throne. She just needs the bed to be hers, and the person in it to have come willingly, and the language we use about her to stop pretending she ever stole anything.
— Booker
Sources: Augustine, City of God (Book XV) · Aquinas, Summa Theologica (I, q. 51, a. 3) · Kramer & Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum (1486) · Wiktionary: succuba, cubāre · Lewis & Short Latin Dictionary · J. A. Cheyne, “Sleep Paralysis and the Structure of Waking-Nightmare Hallucinations” (2003) · Talmudic and rabbinic Lilith traditions (Alphabet of Ben Sira) · Reclaiming the succubus: contemporary PNR scholarship