Demons After Dark

The creatures herein may be of…some additional interest…to creators of adult fiction. This begs a few questions:

...Do demons have gender?

Yes? No? It’s assumed that the majority of demons can reshape themselves as they wish. Most demons are given the “gender-neutral ‘he'” pronoun”…but given the grimoire genre’s target audience of “noble lords,” academic authors, and a strong tendency toward coercive love spells, it’s really not that gender neutral. Here and in the “Rainbow Codex” we’ve assumed that a demon should probably be a “he” unless there’s strong evidence to the contrary. Unfortunately the majority of female demons are of the Mesopotamian baby-stealing Lillitu lineage. 

…Do demons have sex?

This depends on when you’re asking. Before 300ish, strong yes. The “Watcher” fallen angels took wives and had weird monster babies. Greek gods and lesser spirits definitely had half-mortal kids. In the late medieval to Renaissance period, the Succubus/Incubus demon categories were seen as a very real threat: demons could have sex with mortals (whether it was physical or astral/dream intercourse, unknown), and while they couldn’t have their own offspring, they could change gender and move semen between mortals, creating tainted cambions (pretty much the same creature as the “changeling” myth in fairy lore, and possibly from the same source. Occasionally demons have demonic children, but whether that’s metaphor, some sort of spiritual parthogenesis, or actually involves things poking into other things, unknown. 

If the demon in question has some strange alien form, the answer may still be “yes.” Demons are (generally) spirits and their bodies are (generally) shapeable. If you need your demon to have mad biological sex to serve your fiction or fantasy, it’s probably okay. The demon can almost certainly be what it wants to be to meet its needs for the moment, which may or may not serve its mortal “lover.” If that’s temptation, degradation, punishment, or love and affection, they’re as equipped as your cosmology allows.

….What about consent?

There is a very heavy emphasis on love spells in the grimoires…it may not be universally true but demonologists as a group come off as occult “in-cels.” Sometimes “can be called on to gain the love of…” is more like “can be called on to force a woman to the demonologist’s will.” We’ve listed some of these love-spell demons below, but there’s so many of them that it’s honestly both boring and disturbing. 

..What’s with all the baby-killing?

Almost all demons come from a time with a vastly higher infant mortality rate than we have today. Children were precious, reproduction was essential to building a society, and killing off the next generation was about the worst thing a demon could do…particularly since older religions lacked a promise of a future immortality in the afterlife. The future was your children. Thus, an awful lot of demons are either baby-killers, or invoked to protect against baby-killers. Or in Lillith’s case, both.