The nightmare demon occupies a richly contested space in the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as a medical phenomenon, a mythological figure, and an autonomous psychic force that resists reduction to either category. The primary theoretical tension runs between the Freudian-Jonesian hypothesis — that the nightmare demon is a product of repressed erotic wish, distorted by psychic censorship into demonic form — and the mythological-archetypal position advanced by Roscher and elaborated by Hillman, wherein the demon is not a symptom of faulty psychodynamics but an autonomous numinous power that instigates both desire and dread. Roscher’s scholarship, the foundational text in this corpus, traces the nightmare demon across Greek (Ephialtes, Epiales), Roman (incubus, pilosi, Faunus), and pan-European folklore traditions, consistently identifying Pan as the paradigmatic figure: goat-formed, shaggy, erotic, nocturnal, and essentially linked to suffocation, sleep paralysis, and collective panic. Hillman radicalizes this by insisting that the nightmare demon must be encountered on imaginal rather than naturalistic terms — the demon is not explained by respiratory mechanics or repression but is itself an archetypal reality. Jung contributes the figure of Lilith as nightmare-lamia, while Woodman and Ogden address the demonic nocturnal encounter from clinical vantage points. The stakes are epistemological: to reduce the nightmare demon to pathology is to miss what it means that the ancient world named it a god.
Roscher’s thesis, briefly is that the nightmare demon in antiquity is the great god Pan in any of his several forms, and that the experience of the nightmare demon then was similar to that reported in the psychiatry and psychology of Roscher’s own day.
This passage states the foundational argument of the entire volume: Pan is the classical nightmare demon, and the phenomenology of that encounter persists into modern psychopathology.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972thesis
the moruzzi pilosi, whom the Greeks call panitae, the Latins incubi, whose form is derived from the human but ends in the extremities of beasts… Obviously, the term pilosi specifies the nightmare demon as a rough-haired, shaggy being.
Roscher demonstrates that the nightmare demon’s goat-like, hairy morphology across Greek, Latin, and Slavic traditions is directly explicable by both material conditions (goatskin bedding) and the archetypal form of Pan.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972thesis
a demon who sometimes appears as a werewolf, sometimes as a nightmare demon with the feet of a donkey or goat, with goat’s ears and a hairy skin, and in many ways recalls the old Greek Pan and the satyrs who of course also appear as nightmare demons.
The passage traces the nightmare demon’s morphological continuity from classical Pan and satyrs through Byzantine and modern Greek demonic figures, establishing the cross-cultural persistence of the archetype.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972thesis
I shall conclude this consideration of Pan-Ephialtes with its expressed objective of specifying as completely as possible the reasons why the ancient Arcadian shepherd god became a nightmare demon.
Roscher explicitly frames his inquiry as an explanation of the historical-mythological process by which Pan became identified as the nightmare demon, connecting erotic impulse, epidemic panic, and nocturnal assault.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972thesis
the demon of the nightmare, working only in sleep or the state preceding sleep… must have had a great deal in common with Hypnos (and Oneiros) from the first… the demon of typhoid fever… also seems to have been identified or confused with the nightmare demon Ephialtes.
This passage maps the nightmare demon’s overlapping identifications in antiquity — with Hypnos, Oneiros, fever-demons, and Ephialtes — demonstrating the fluidity and centrality of the figure in classical demonology.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972thesis
Roscher opens the way for a mythological perspective: the demon instigates both the desire and the anxiety. They do not convert into each other, owing to Freudian censors and the mechanical hydrostatics of libido-damming.
Hillman sharpens the theoretical opposition between Freud’s intrapsychic account of the nightmare and Roscher’s mythological one, arguing that the nightmare demon is not a product of repression but an autonomous instigator.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972thesis
rape, panic, and nightmare belong where anxiety and sexuality are taken so concretely that the psyche has… Phenomenologically, rape, panic, and nightmare embarrass consciousness with concreteness, and thus always strike us as psychopathological.
Hillman argues that the nightmare demon’s terror resides in its radical literalness — its concreteness overwhelms the ego’s symbolic defenses, making it appear pathological when it is in fact numinous.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
it is one of the characteristics of night demons and specters that they are linked with night and darkness and that they have to escape if either a light is kindled or if day breaks… small nightmare demons with long grey beards who glide into the room to throttle the sleeper when the moon is full.
Roscher documents the cross-European folklore convention that nightmare demons are bound to darkness and routed by light or dawn, linking Lithuanian, Parsi, and Talmudic sources to establish a unified phenomenology.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
a complete battalion of French soldiers quartered in an old abbey near Tropea in Calabria was attacked by a nightmare during the middle hours of the night… the devil in the shape of a large black shaggy dog had entered through the door, rushed on their chests with the speed of lightning.
This account of collective nightmare epidemic demonstrates the nightmare demon’s capacity for mass visitation, directly linking it to Pan’s panic and to the shaggy, animal-formed intruder of classical tradition.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
as genuine nightmare demons, ‘they renounce their own nature by taking up various forms and shapes and conjure up terrifying visions before men’s eyes. They predict much of the future and inform men about it,’ particularly when they are sodden with wine and held fast.
Plutarch’s characterization of Faunus and Picus as nightmare demons who shapeshift and prophesy under compulsion extends the nightmare demon’s significance beyond mere terror into oracular and liminal revelation.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
In this classical nightmare we find once more nearly all the characteristics that were regarded as specific to the nightmare by the ancient physicians: the nightmare originated from indigestible food, there was profuse sweating, particularly on the face.
The Apuleian narrative analyzed here demonstrates how literary accounts of nocturnal demonic assault encode the full clinical and mythological symptomatology of the nightmare, bridging medical and religious traditions.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
The two most widely known words for the nightmare are epialtes and ephialtes… the ancient and the modern scholars vacillate between the derivations iallo (‘I send,’ ‘I shoot’) and hallomai.
Roscher’s philological analysis of the Greek names for the nightmare demon grounds the figure’s identity in the etymological sense of leaping upon or assailing the sleeper, confirming the archetype’s essential physicality.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
Occasionally – and more commonly in women – the feeling of anxiety is coupled with that of lust, and women often believe that the phantom has had sexual intercourse with them. Men have analogous sensations and generally emissions of semen.
Roscher’s medical documentation of the nightmare’s erotic dimension — pressure, paralysis, and genital sensation — provides the physiological substrate that mythology transforms into the incubus and succubus.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
Let us take this opportunity to recall the insomnia Veneris or somni Venerei (bad dreams of Venus) that are so closely allied pathologically with nightmares. These are erotic dreams associated with gonorrhea, and the doctors in ancient times believed them to be the precursors or symptoms of epilepsy and insanity.
This passage connects the nightmare demon tradition to the broader ancient medical cluster of erotic nocturnal disturbance, vampiric lamiae, and demonic seduction, situating the nightmare demon in a pathological-mythological continuum.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
an erotic nightmare spirit appearing in the form of a satyr… This village had been haunted for ten months by the ghost of a satyr who had evil designs on the women and was even said to have murdered two with whom he was particularly in love.
The Philostratean account of the demonic satyr establishes the erotic nightmare demon as a lethal and possessive force, parallel to Asmodeus, that operates across classical and Near Eastern traditions.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
Even horses and other animals are tormented by nightmares; the animals sweat profusely and snort loudly and become completely disarranged and have knotted manes, which cannot be combed out and can only be burned out with blessed candles.
The extension of nightmare demon activity to animals in German and classical sources reinforces the figure’s link to Pan as a god of herds, panic, and non-human nature.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
demons ascribed to the nightmare are frequently held responsible for certain fatal illnesses in cattle, manifesting themselves in multifarious ways in frightful excitement and unrest; we can assume that these demons in such cases rode or jumped on these animals.
Roscher shows that the contemporary Parnassian goat-demon tormenting shepherd flocks is a metamorphosis of Pan, directly linking pastoral nightmare demonology to the ancient archetype.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
the Medieval and Renaissance Devil is not only figuratively but also etymologically connected with the nightmare-Pan demon… a Latin quotation from Trithemius… on nightmare demons who possessed cloistered nuns.
Roscher’s appendix materials, summarized here by Hillman, establish the etymological and historical continuity between the classical nightmare demon, Pan, and the Christian Devil, with specific documentation of monastic demonic possession.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
the god of dreams, Phobetor, obviously derives his name… and to him are ascribed in particular the production of all kinds of terrifying animal apparitions. The frightful and monstrous things, the confusion of the senses, the startled flight from the bed presumably also belong in this context.
Roscher traces the nightmare demon’s generation of animal phantoms to the dream-god Phobetor, connecting the ancient medical literature on fever-nightmares to the mythological system of nocturnal demonology.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
A twelve-year-old boy afflicted with advanced spondylitis dorsalis imagined during his attacks that an animal had jumped on his back and wanted to crush him to death.
Clinical pediatric cases are adduced here to demonstrate the nightmare demon’s characteristic motif of animal assault, bridging medical symptomatology and the mythological figure’s bestial form.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
Lilith changed into a nightmare or lamia who haunted pregnant women and kidnapped new-born infants. The parallel myth is that of the lamias, the nocturnal spectres who terrify children.
Jung identifies the nightmare demon in its feminine form through Lilith and the lamia, situating the figure within the broader mythological pattern of the devouring mother and the nocturnal assailant of the vulnerable.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952supporting
‘choking, becoming strangled’ as the most essential characteristic of the nightmare, the symptom to which Soranus, Oreibasius, Aetius, Paulus Aegineta, and others have also drawn special attention.
The ancient medical consensus on suffocation as the defining symptom of the nightmare provides the physiological anchor for the demon’s characteristic gesture of pressing upon the sleeper’s chest and throat.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
I now wish first of all to try and explain as objectively as possible the observations and experiences of modern and ancient medicine in relation to the origin and nature of the nightmare.
Roscher’s methodological preamble establishes that the medical and mythological investigations are complementary, both necessary for understanding the nightmare demon’s full phenomenology.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
we must know the archetypal substructures that govern our reactions; we must recognize the gods and the myths in which we are embroiled. Without this awareness, our behavior becomes wholly mythic and consciousness a delusion.
Hillman situates the nightmare demon within his broader argument for mythological reflection as a psychological necessity, contending that unconscious mythic possession — not demonic encounter — is the true pathology.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972aside
As the human loses personal connection with personified nature and personified instinct, the image of Pan and the image of the Devil merge.
Hillman argues that the nightmare demon’s transformation into the Christian Devil is a symptom of cultural dissociation from instinct and nature, not a theological development.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972aside
I am in bed with the devil. He doesn’t look like the devil but I know he is… He stabs me in the mouth… I wake up screaming, ‘Oh God, Oh God.’
Woodman’s clinical dream material presents a contemporary nightmare demon encounter — the devil as nocturnal assailant with explicit sexual and destructive content — as evidence of the archetype’s living presence in the analysand’s psyche.
, Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride: A Psychological Study, 1982aside
If Pan is suppressed there, nature and instinct will go astray no matter how we strain on rational levels to set things right.
Hillman extends the argument about the nightmare demon into an ecological thesis: suppression of Pan as the archetype of wild nature produces distorted instinct, with the nightmare as one symptom of that suppression.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972aside