Magic Library

One cannot say it often enough: in order to explain any historical fact in a purely human way for the mind and heart, it is absolutely necessary to go back to its first origin within the mind itself, and to grasp it according to its spiritual and moral connection and its branching out with all other related intellectual phenomena in history and in the real life of individuals and peoples.

If we consider the historical fact with which we are concerned here, and specifically the later Christian belief in Buhlteufel succubi/incubi or spirit-lovers in the witch trials since Pope Innocent VIII, apart from its connection with the older, similar ideas and assumptions in the developmental history of the human race, it stands in the immeasurable domain of human notions and ideas as an isolated fact that permits no connection with reason and real life, neither forward nor backward, and thus excites nothing but an admiration in which indignation and aversion are simultaneously mixed.

But if we go back to the first natural formative period of man, described in the previous part on page 3 et seq.; if we explain to ourselves in this cultural period of the brooding, dawning, first human life the natural origin of this notion from within the human mind itself, and then see how the monstrous primeval assumption of sexual intercourse with spirits has developed through a long series of centuries among peoples in almost innumerable forms and modifications, from Moses' Bne Elohim Sons of God to the Buhlteufel spirit-lovers of the later Christian witch trials, during the second cultural period of objectivity and