Succubus, Incubus … ?

If you are prone to operating within the fantasy RP space, or MMORPG space, or really just almost any place where someone will use the word ‘cleric’ that isn’t actually and literally a seminary, you’re going to hear the word ‘succubus.’ It’s a classic monster, because it asks the horrifying question, What If Girls, and then follows up on it in a way that tells you a lot about the creator of the piece. It’s a term that, as I understand it, owes its origin to Malleus Maleficarum, which is also extremely sketchy on what a succubus actually is or does – most of the heavy lifting is done by the word itself, which implies its meaning, as succubus had a coherent Latin meaning from the first read.

The next term is Incubus – which you will usually see as a masculine alternative to the feminine succubus. The idea is that an incubus is a hot dude demon, who wants sex, and that matches with the hot girl demon, who wants sex, the succubus. This is the kind of thing you’ll see in monster manuals, where these terms for what is probably the same species or heritage nonetheless has gendered terminology, like, you know, livestock.

And of course, when this comes up, I will be a tiresome chore of a dude and I will bring up: That’s not what they mean.

Succubus is a term that means ‘the one beneath.’ You’ll see the same ‘succ’ prefix in other Latin-root words like succumb and subcutaneous – because they’re largely terms that started as sub-something and then the b slowly melts away over time. Incubus is the alternative – it means ‘the one above.’ You’ll see the same prefix in the word ‘incubate’ – which is the term for chickens sitting on top of their eggs.

Which is to say that ‘succubus’ and ‘incubus’ are not terms of gender but terms of preferred sexual position. One is bottom, one is top. If you do both, you’d be a concubus.

This isn’t just me going ‘well-actually’ on the Latin, by the way. The term Incubus was being used to refer to women in the 18th century, to criticise women who were oppressive. In the Gilbert and Sullivan play, Trial By Jury, there’s a song called When I Good Friends Was Called To The Bar, which describes the protagonist’s poverty as a starting lawyer (hey, remember when lawyers could be poor? Me neither). In this narrative, he describes himself as taking up a relationship of convenience with a rich older man’s… elderly, ugly daughter, who is described as being able to ‘very well pass for forty three, with the dust and the light behind her.’

Yeah.

Anyway, when he gets rich, he then proceeds to break off the relationship, and the point where he does this, he uses the term an incubus to refer to her. Which is to say, he was thinking of her as pushy and demanding… but very much a woman, still.

Anyway, so now you know: Toppy incubus, subby succubus, flexible concubus, coming Vengabus.