Can Demons Have Babies?

(CC BY-SA 4.0)

By now, most of you will have heard of Dr. Stella Immanuel. She is a licensed doctor in Houston, TX and is one among a small group claiming that masks are ineffective against COVID19 and that hydroxychloroquine is. She and other doctors have become something of a rallying point for those who think something untoward is happening at the governmental level regarding this disease. However, this isn’t all Dr. Immanuel believes. She also believes that spirit husbands/wives, incubi and succubi, are the cause of gynecological diseases, impotence in men, and many other issues.

She sources her views in a reading of Genesis 6:

When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, 2 the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. 3 Then the Lord said, “My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.” 4 The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.

She understands the sons of God to be fallen angels who desire to have sex with mortal women. This is the reading taken up by the Enoch tradition. She even supports the view found there that the demons of the New Testament are the disembodied spirits of the Nephilim. Of course, she ignores that these children were heroes and warriors of renown, good guys, at least some of them. In a sermon, she goes on to say that many women who experience phantom pregnancies are pregnant with demon babies which need to be “aborted” through “deliverance.” I assume this is a kind of exorcism.

So, can demons do this? Can they, as she claims, steal sperm from men, impregnate women, and somehow reproduce themselves? To help with an answer, let’s turn the Angelic Doctor himself, St. Thomas Aquinas.

In the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas answers the question whether angels have bodies naturally united to them. He answers in the negative. Perfect intellectual beings are those without bodies and these we call angels. Later, however, because Scripture demands this of him, Aquinas must answer why it appears that angels have bodies. He here admits that they can assume bodies, can appear in physical form. We know this from Tobit, from the Nativity story, from Revelation, Ezekiel, and more. So, if angels don’t have bodies naturally, but can assume them, can they “exercise the functions of life” with the bodies they assume. In other words, amongst other things, can they have sex and reproduce?

Here, Aquinas says no. They can appear to do certain things, as Raphael says to Tobias, but they cannot do them in truth. Then Aquinas quotes Augustine in On the City of God in his reply to the 6th objection which argues that angels can have babies, just look at Genesis 6. This is what Aquinas quotes from Augustine:

As Augustine says (De Civ. Dei xv): "Many persons affirm that they have had the experience, or have heard from such as have experienced it, that the Satyrs and Fauns, whom the common folk call incubi, have often presented themselves before women, and have sought and procured intercourse with them. Hence it is folly to deny it. But God's holy angels could not fall in such fashion before the deluge. Hence by the sons of God are to be understood the sons of Seth, who were good; while by the daughters of men the Scripture designates those who sprang from the race of Cain. Nor is it to be wondered at that giants should be born of them; for they were not all giants, albeit there were many more before than after the deluge."

So, first Augustine admits the existence of creatures who are not angels or demons, but do desire mortal women. This is fascinating on its own, but we’ll have to pass it over for now. Second, he makes it clear that his understanding of the text at the literal level is that it is the sons of Seth and the daughters of Cain who are to be understood as the sons of God and daughters of men. And this makes sense. Even the Beowulf author sources the existence of ogres, goblins, and other monsters not in the illicit relations between fallen angels and human beings, but as the descendants of Cain.

But then Aquinas goes further. What if someone really did have a baby from a demon? How might this be possible. He answers as follows:

Still if some are occasionally begotten from demons, it is not from the seed of such demons, nor from their assumed bodies, but from the seed of men taken for the purpose; as when the demon assumes first the form of a woman, and afterwards of a man; just as they take the seed of other things for other generating purposes, as Augustine says (De Trin. ii.), so that the person born is not the child of a demon, but of a man.

Now Dr. Immanuel seems to agree that demons steal sperm from men and put it into women. But for her, this seed is so corrupted as to make the offspring actually the offspring of demons, causing cysts, endometriosis, etc. This Aquinas firmly rejects. A person born of this kind of relation is not the offspring of some demonic spirit, but of a human being. That is, when discussing the kind of thing these children are, they are human. And so, for Aquinas and Augustine at least, Dr. Immanuel’s position is not possible.

I want to be clear, however, that I firmly believe in the demonic and the angelic. There are beings in this world whom we cannot always see, but who are fighting in and over this world. We fight not against flesh and blood, Paul tells us. So my rejection of Dr. Immanuel’s stance is not because I disbelieve in demons. Rather, I reject it because it does not coincide with either Scripture or the tradition. It misunderstands what demons are and even what they do. Demons may well cause many maladies, I see this as possible. But it does not seem to me at all possible that they do so through impregnating women. There are many powers in this world and not all of them work for good, but there ways are often beyond our understanding. Thus, we must fight them and other evils in the appropriate manner. Demons we fight by prayer, fasting, acts of virtue. Diseases we fight similarly, but also with medicine, research, and experimentation. Balance is the issue. Of course, none of this necessitates that Dr. Immanuel is wrong about her understanding of COVID19, but it does drastically undermine her authority. Our job is to discern the spirits, see those which come from God or from the devil, and act accordingly, in conjunction with other remedies.

If you like what you’re reading and want to support go to Buy Me a Coffee.