Incubi come from Watchers?

Am relaxing this day before Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Thursday with a White Fluffy: 1 oz. marshmallow vodka, 1 oz. dark chocolate liqueur, 2 oz. cream, all poured over ice and garnished with marshmallows and cocoa powder. Yum. Tomorrow I’m going to taste absinthe for the first time – have my own glasses, sugar cubes and spoon! – expensive as hell, but supposedly heavenly. But first ...

Il Volo released their latest cd. (I would have said "second", but they released so many variations of #1 – Continental, Global, Spanish, French, Takes Flight/Live in Detroit – and I suppose the christmas mini-cd counted as something – I’m not sure what number this actually is). Anyway, they just released their latest cd.

You get so used to groups or solo artists releasing their first cd, a spellbinder, and then falling flat on the second ... even someone as talented as Vittorio Grigolo, whose classical crossover career fizzled as fast as an open bottle of coke in a desert ... but not so this one.

My jaw dropped again – this is actually better than the first one, and I didn’t think that was possible, because I adored the first one! Holy crap, these guys are awesome! I can’t even find a "least" favorite, and I could on the first one – ("Smile". They sang it beautifully, it was just a snoozer of a song).

Mr. Signpost tossed out one of the Native American Plagiarist’s insipid tweets again: "Unusual sights can fill the heart with great joy. Keep your eyes open for the odd and different." Well, okey-dokey dear! And you have a real Tinkerbelle Day too, ‘kaaaaay?

Of course, the very next thing I saw was this photo:

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of the members of Il Volo goofing off while getting ready for a concert in Los Angeles.

Keep in mind that this was one of their last concerts at the tail end of a long, three-month straight, country-wide tour of the states. They were three exhausted and punch-drunk teenagers, eager to go home ... so silliness was perfectly understandable to those of us who had working brains.

Ah, but America is so lacking in working brains and so overstuffed with pretentious church ladies, the reaction of the American Hissy Fit Society was utterly predictable. "Eeek!" "Put your pants back on!" "Ohhh NOOO!" "Can’t we just... sing?" ...

Perfect example of the puritanical nonsense most American women spew all over the place to the point where your fingers are literally itching to slap them silly. European women wouldn’t have even blinked; American women – some of them, anyway – were all in this flutter of despair that "da boys" had turned into lusty old men on them. I’m sorry, I started laughing so hard I almost fell out of my chair at some of their prissy, condescending church-lady nonsense.

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Lost my train of thought. Incubus. I arrived back at the incubus question via the direct and roundabout way: a while ago, I discovered that I really missed my daily sonnet burning its way out of me – and while the agony that provoked them has lessened somewhat, the comfort derived from creating them has not. I decided to start writing again.

I thought I would venture off in a different direction with the second poetry series. My inspiration was found in Milton’s Paradise Lost – although when I say "inspiration", I actually mean that the more I read of it initially, the more I wanted to slap him too for allowing himself to be sucked into a mass delusion. On the other hand, the more I read about him, the less I was sure as to what he did believe. Some day, I may get around to reading a biography. Meanwhile ...

This is the bit that bothered me:

Fast by the oracle of God, I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th' Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme

I do realize that the line directly after "Aonian mount" was a nod to either or both Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato or Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso but my irritation was his reference to the Greek gods and their creation being far inferior to his "Adam and Eve" story.

For the more under-educated readers, "Aonian mount" is a another way of saying "Ionian mount" which is another way of saying, "Greek mountains, such as Mount Olympus, which was the home of the Grecian deities." He’s basically saying, "They sucked; I win!" So, yes, he more or less comes across as the literary Sheldon Cooper of medieval poetry.

Second point being: a complete refutation of John Milton’s Paradise Lost is also possibly among those "things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme" (I suspect not but wouldn’t lay down a wager on it), but that’s the direction I wanted to go. I began this attempt a few weeks ago. And as I have decided that I also want to look down my upturned nose at poetry that doesn’t have a rhyming structure ... I ridicule him for his complete rhyming failure as well! BWAH-HA-HA!

So, speaking of Paradise Lost, and the urgent need christians have to demonize human sexuality ("Bad incubus! Bad! Bad!"), it made me wonder how many other spiritual beings were respected and even loved by the pagan world, and then turned into sexualized demons by christians.

For example, The Horned God was so demonized he appears regularly on your TV as Hellboy with his horns shaved off ... (and actually, I love Ron Perlman’s interpretation of him, so I’m not picking on Hellboy, believe me). But the Horned God was absolutely beloved in the pagan world, not made into something evil, as christians have done. Rather than draw from a variety of sources, I’ll quote from Wikipedia that the horned god was "associated with nature, wilderness, sexuality, hunting and the life cycle." I’m not sure this was one of the sources of sexuality and demons, but it certainly contributed. I’m not sure how far back that goes.

In the Book of Enoch. ("the wha ...?") we read an interesting story about The Watchers. The Book of Enoch is dated back to somewhere in the 3rd century B.C. Some of the mythology in Enoch is found in judeo-christian texts, but the larger version is only in Enoch. What makes Enoch interesting as far as research into incubi and sucubi is concerned? Angels falling in love with women and mating with them. But even that isn’t the whole story.

This may be one of the first mentions of situations which christians now call an "attack by an incubi". Basically, so Enoch reports, angels fell in love with human women, mated with them, and the resulting offspring were ... not particularly human, to put it politely.

But I’m not sure that was essentially correct. Enoch lists the band of angels who fell in love with mortal women; their leader’s name was Samyaza or Semjâzâ.

And here’s what I think may be the real source of the demonic attribute: "And the Lord said unto Michael [ this is Michael the Archangel]: 'Go, bind Semjâzâ and his associates who have united themselves with women so as to have defiled themselves with them in all their uncleanness."

Read that one again. They’re fallen angels not because they're evil or demonic, or have done anything awful or unlawful, but because they consorted with women ... who are UNCLEAN! Fallen angels? Demons. According to your local judeo-christian hate-spreader, THAT may be the real reason why incubi are demons: they are attracted to and have sexual relations with women!! My jaw dropped when I found this – if anyone else has any other ideas behind incubi being demons, I’m all ears.

In the meanwhile, I'm thinking we need to free the incubus and succubus from christian clutches and treat them with respect again.