The Anatomy of Melancholy

In that magnificent temple of Jupiter Belus in Babylon there was a beautiful chapel, says Herodotus, who saw it himself. In it stood “a splendidly furnished bed and a golden table beside it”—a fine bed, a table of gold, and so forth. No one entered it except one woman, chosen by their god, as the Chaldaean priests told him; and their god himself lay with her, as was also done in ancient times at Thebes in Egypt.

So you see, this is nothing new: the devils themselves, or their trickster priests, have played such pranks in every age. Many theologians firmly dispute it; but I will conclude with Lipsius that, since “the examples, testimony and confessions of those unfortunate women are so evident on the other side, and so numerous, even in our own town of Louvain,” it is likely to be true.

“I will add one thing: I believe that in no past age—I know not what fate governs this unhappy time—have so many lecherous devils, satyrs and spirits appeared or shown themselves as in our own, as the daily accounts and recorded judicial sentences reveal.”

Read more on this question in Plutarch’s Life of Numa; Augustine’s City of God, book 15; Weyer’s On the Deceptions of Demons, book 3; Gerald of Wales’s Journey through Wales, book 1; the Hammer of Witches, part 1, question 5; Jacobus Reussus, book 5, chapter 6, page 54; Godelmann, book 2, chapter 4; Erastus; Valesius’s Sacred Philosophy, chapter 40; John Nider’s Fornicar, book 5, chapter 9; Strozzi Cicogna, book 3, chapter 3; Delrio; Lipsius; Bodin’s Demonology, book 2, chapter 7; Pererius on Genesis, book 8, chapter 6, verse 2; King James; and others.