*Warning: The following post contains suggestive material and may not be suitable for all audiences

My adored blogging sister, Jazz of Haphazard Life, recently wrote a wonderfully blasphemous blog in which she pondered whether the biblical Lazarus was perhaps the first print account of the existence of a zombie.

I liked it.

But, I don’t much care for zombies. I don’t ‘do’ zombies, if you will.

In fact, I don’t much do creatures of the nether world of any sort, like vampires and werewolves and other monstrous incarnations because I don’t believe in them.

I don’t believe in ghosts, either.

My otherwise very well-read, intelligent and logical grandmother (pictured here with my grandfather) believed implicitly in ghosts and maintained she’d had visitations from the back and beyond. But, she grew up in Edwardian times, an era in which folks believed in a lot of rubbish like the Titanic was unsinkable and that the hideousness of World War One was somehow a good and patriotic thing.

But, much as I loved her, I just never bought in.

That is not to say I don’t have my fantasies or that I mind speculative tales of the improbable. In fact, I do make one exception in terms of creatures that don’t really exist other than in the imagination, and that is as follows:

In folklore traced back to medieval legend, a succubus (plural succubi) is a female demon appearing in dreams who takes the form of a human woman in order to seduce men, usually through sexual intercourse.

Now, I could get around that idea. I mean, why something disgusting and rotting, or scary, when you could have a visitation from a babe? ‘Succubus’. Even the name is suggestive.

I could, of course, do without the bat-wings and the tail, and am picturing someone more in the vein of Scarlett Johansson or maybe Rose from Dr. Who.

Otherwise, I find the idea quite wonderful as a fantasy. Of course, it has been suggested that the idea was pushed by the early Catholic church as a warning against the ‘sin’ of self-abuse by the young.

And just so females don’t get left out of the nether-world carnality realm, there is also the incubus, who is a male who does the same dirty stuff.

 

 

Advertisements