Note 1288 — Chapter XXVII

In his Exposition of the Ten Commandments, published in 1518 and frequently reprinted during his lifetime, “Werke,” Weim. ed., 1, p. 407; “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 12, p. 18: “Among the devils there are ‘incubi’ and ‘succubi,’ of which I shall speak more fully immediately,” which he then proceeds to do. The children are, according to him, abortions. According to a statement in the Table-Talk, however, they were “devils with bodies like the mother’s,” or stolen children, or changelings, like one he wished to have drowned because the devil constituted the soul in its body (“Werke,” Erl. ed., 6O, pp. 37-42). In his exposition of Genesis (cap. vi.) Luther admits the existence and activity of the said “incubi.” He declares he had heard from many persons credible instances and had himself met with such (!), and even appeals to St. Augustine (“Hoc negare impudentiæ videtur,” “De civ. Dei,” 15, c. 23); he remarks, however, that it was altogether false to believe that “anything could be born of a union of devil and man”; on the contrary, those taken for the devil’s offspring, some of whom he had seen, had either been distorted by the devil though not actually begotten by him, or were real devils who had either assumed flesh in appearance or borrowed it elsewhere with the devil’s help. “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 2, p. 127. Cp. N. Paulus, “Hexenwahn und Hexenprozess vornehmlich im 16. Jahrh.,” Freiburg, 1910, p. 35 f.