In this guide

A scholar in a scriptorium copies a passage from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, careful to separate the bird-bodied Sirens from the fish-tailed mermaids that later art would merge. Across the same century, a witch-hunter annotates the Malleus Maleficarum, marking the section on night-demons that drain sleeping men. Both writers catalogue seduction, but the creatures they describe operate on entirely different premises. The siren seduces through auditory enchantment to cause shipwreck and death; the succubus seduces through nocturnal intercourse to exhaust and spiritually corrupt its victim. One works in broad daylight, targeting travelers by sea. The other works in the dark, in the most private chamber.

Sirens are Greek mythological beings, originally depicted as half-woman, half-bird, whose irresistible song lures sailors onto rocks. Succubi are medieval demons, mostly female, who visit men during sleep to engage in sexual acts, often draining their life force. Though both figures personify dangerous female allure, their origins, methods, and cultural functions diverge sharply. We trace those differences through the texts that define them.

Where the Siren Came From: The Bird That Sang Men to Death

Where the Siren Came From The Bird That Sang Men to Death

The earliest surviving account of sirens appears in Homer’s Odyssey (composed around 725–675 BCE). Book XII describes them as creatures who “enchant all men with their sweet song.” Odysseus, following Circe’s warning, plugs his crew’s ears with wax and has himself lashed to the mast so he can hear without steering the ship toward ruin. Homer gives no physical description beyond their voices. Later Greek art, however, consistently shows sirens as large birds with the head or torso of a woman. They sit in a meadow piled with the bones of their victims.

Hesiod’s Catalogues of Women (6th century BCE, fragmentary) names them as daughters of the river god Achelous and the Muse Terpsichore. Their number varies: Homer speaks of two, later sources give three (Peisinoe, Aglaope, Thelxiepeia). By the 3rd century BCE, the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes has Orpheus drown out the sirens’ song with his own lyre, saving Jason’s crew. The siren’s threat is purely sonic; once the song is neutralized, the creature becomes powerless.

Where the Succubus Came From: A Demon Born of Night and Guilt

That history explains why the succubus emerged from a different world entirely. The succubus has no single origin text. Its roots lie in the ancient Near East. The Babylonian Lilitu (a female wind demon) and the Hebrew Lilith (Adam’s first wife in medieval folklore, who leaves Eden and becomes a demon preying on men and infants) both appear in Jewish demonology by the 1st millennium CE. The Talmud (tractate Shabbat 151b) warns that a man sleeping alone risks being visited by Lilith.

Christian theology formalized the figure. The term succubus (from Latin succubare – “to lie beneath”) appears in Canon Episcopi of the 10th century, which dismisses such night-riding as delusion, but later Scholastics took the threat seriously. Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologica (1265–1274, Part I, Question 51), argues that demons can assume bodies and cause lustful acts. The succubus receives its fullest treatment in the Malleus Maleficarum (1486) by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger. Section I, Question 3 argues that incubi and succubi are real demons who collect human semen to impregnate women (succubi obtain it, then incubi deposit it). This is not seduction for its own sake; it is a demonic reproduction strategy.

How They Seduce: Sound Versus Touch

The methods of seduction could not be more different. The siren’s tool is the voice, which works at a distance. Her victim hears the song before he sees her. The seduction is cognitive: the listener loses his will, forgets his destination, and steers the boat toward the rocks. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book V, 8 CE), the Sirens’ song is described as “so sweet that the sails drop from the hands of the sailors.” Their seduction is not sexual in the pysical sense; it’s a siren song that leads to death by wreck, not by exhaustion.

The succubus, by contrast, works by touch in the most intimate space. The victim is asleep or in a half-dream state, often paralyzed (the sensation later called sleep paralysis). Medieval accounts describe a weight on the chest, a pressure that makes breathing difficult, and then sexual contact. The seduction is always genital, always draining. The Malleus Maleficarum specifies that the succubus apes the posture of a woman in intercourse but the act saps the man’s vitality, sometimes to the point of death. Unlike the siren, the succubus does not sing. She does not need to. Her victim is already prone.

The Goal of Each Seduction

That method difference points to a deeper contrast in purpose. The siren wants to kill. Her song is a hunting tool. In the Odyssey, Circe tells Odysseus that the siren’s victims die because they linger too long, lured by the voice until their ship smashes on the shoal. Nothing is taken from them but their lives. The siren herself does not feed on the body; she simply leaves the bones to rot.

The succubus wants to drain. She feeds on sexual energy or on the spirit itself. Christian demonologists held that she could also steal semen to provide a demonic body for an incubus, but the immediate goal is the gradual erosion of the man’s health and soul. This is why the Church treated succubus visitations as a spiritual crisis requiring confession, prayer, and sometimes exorcism. A man visited regularly by a succubus was losing his vital force, his will to resist, and his chance at salvation.

What the Sirens and Succubi Have in Common

Despite their differences, both figures serve as warnings about uncontrolled desire. The siren embodies the danger of pleasre that deters a man from his course. The succbub embodies the danger of secret lust that corms the soul in the night. Both are female beings who initiate, male victims who succb. In both traditions, the victim is at least partially guilty: Odysseus chooses to hear the song, and the man visited by a succbub has often (accrding to the Maleus) given wayst of eventual lecherous thought.

However, we note a critical asymmetry. Sirens are rarely blamed for their victim’s death; they are simply predators. Succubi, in medieval Christain thought, are often seen as punishemt for sin. The man who expefences a succbub is already fallen, and the demon is both the cause and the sign of his corruption.

Real Misconceptions: The Mermaid Siren and the Pure-Lust Succubus

The most common misconception confss the siren with the mermaid. The fish-tailed mermaid is a later medieval fusion, popularized by bestiaries and romances such as the 7th-century Liber monstrum and the 14th-century Travels of Sir John Mandevile. The original siren was feathred. That mis mer ging obscures the creature’s original bird-like nature and the coection between the siren’s song and the poetic voice.

A second misconception reduces the succbub to a mere sex demon. In fact, she is often asociated with infant death (the orignal Lilith as child-killer). The Talmud describes Lilith as leaving infants dead. The Malleus relates how succubi cause nocturnal polutions to keep men weak and impure. The sex is not the end; it is a means of spritual harev.

FAQ

Can a succbub turn into an incubus? In Christian demonology, yes. The Malleus Maleficarum states that a succbub obtains semen from a man, then transforms into an incubus to deposit it in a woman, fathering demonic offspring.

Do sirens always kill their victims? In most myths, yes. The song is fatal. Only figures like Odysseus and Orpheus escape by neutralizing the song rather than resisting the creature herself.

Are succubi only female? The term specifically refers to the female demon who visits men. Her male counterpart is the incubus. Both are considered the same demons changing gender.

Can you protect yourself from a succbus? Traditional protections include sleeping with a Bible under the pillow, placing iron or salt near the bed, and saying specific prayers before sleep. The Malleus recmmends the sign of the cross and the name of Jesus.

The Lore Continues

The siren and the succubus remain two distinct templates for dangerous seduction in Western occult thought. One works through sound, in the open, and kills by wreck. The other works through touch, in the dark, and kills by drain. Neither is simply a “sexy monster.” Each encodes a specific fear about desire: the siren warns that pleasure can destroy your course; the succuus warns that secret pleasure can destroy your soul. For more on the family of beings that haunt the boundary between desire and danger, see our overview of mythical creatures. Explore the etymology of the incubus in the glossary. And read our focused guide on demonology in medieval grimoires.