says:"When in Chicago in 1875, I read in one of the morning papers a very particular account of how a white dove flew into the chamber window of a young unmarried woman in a neighboring village, she having brought forth a child, and solemnly declaring that she had never lost her virginity."
It is, of course, easy to dismiss all these stories, ancient, mediaeval and modern, with contempt, as so many falsehoods, or, at best, self-delusions. I have already said that, despite the immense number of traditions and miraculous births, I doubt if such ever occur upon the borderland of the two worlds, owing to certain occult principles to which I shall briefly refer further on. Nevertheless this mass of folklore belief is too overwhelming in quantity and too widely diffused to be dismissed lightly. Back of it all there must be some objective realities and some fire for all this smoke. And we must not forget that there is one miraculous birth which is accepted throughout Christendom the birth of Jesus from a Divine Father and an earthly Virgin-Mother. Nevertheless by the cultured heathen opponents of Justin, the story of the divine paternity of Jesus seems to have been regarded with a scorn similar to that with which we regard the above tales today, and that Church Father showed his wisdom when he placed heathen and Christian stories upon the same logical basis.
Am I not right in saying that to impugn the possibility of marital relations between earthly women and heavenly bridegrooms is to strike at the very foundations of Christianity?
In folklore customs and fairy tales, fantastic though these may be, we find numerous indications of the world-wide belief in bridegrooms and brides from the unseen world of spiritual beings, or, as they were termed in the middle ages, incubi and succubae. (Latin, incubo, "to lie upon;" succubo, "to lie under."
We may set out with that description among the islanders of the Antilles, where they are the ghosts of the dead, vanishing when clutched; in New Zealand, where ancestral deities 'form attachments with females, and pay them repeated visits;' while in the Samoan Islands, such intercourse of mischievous inferior gods caused 'many supernatural conceptions;' and in Lapland, where details of this last extreme class have alsobeen
