Ask a Question
or
Create a Poll
  1. Home /
  2. Questions /
  3. Social Sciences
  4. / Mythology
  5. / Mythological Creatures
  6. / More Mythological Creatures

by atreadia on December 2nd, 2006

atreadia

Question

Help answer this question below.

Does anyone know the legend of the night mare and its origen

Share:
Other

Answers. 1 helpful answer below.

  • by CannedHam on December 2nd, 2006

    CannedHam

    The following is from http://www.wordorigins.org/wordorn.htm
    ---------------------------------

    Nightmare:
    No, a nightmare is not a dream about a scary horse. The origin is fairly simple, but not obvious. The night portion is straightforward, it comes from the word night. It's the mare part that makes people think it has to do with horses.

    Mare is simply an Old English term for a demon. So a nightmare is a demon that visits you at night--a scary dream. A mare was a demon, known as an incubus (male) or succubus (female) that descended on a sleeper, paralyzing and suffocating them, and had sexual relations with the sleeper. Over the centuries the meaning has become generalized to any frightening dream. Another term for the original phenomenon, still used today, is night hag.

    The word is an old one. The OED2 attests to nightmare as early as c. 1290. Night is recorded as early as c. 825, but it is such a basic word that it is likely far older than surviving manuscripts. Mare is dated as early as c. 700. Mare also has cognates in many languages, including Dutch, German, French, Polish, and Czech, and ultimately derives from the Indo-European root *mer-, meaning to rub away or to harm. *mer- is also the root of murder and mortal.

    The phenomenon of night hag is well documented. Some people experience a sensation of paralysis, including difficulty breathing, and couple it with a sensation of being visited by other beings. In today's modern mythos, it is extraterrestrials, not demons, that visit and perform strange sexual acts. The paralysis and visitations are not real, just figments of the mind in active dreaming. But these dreams are powerful, as attested to by the persistence of the myth, only the supposed origin of the imagined visitors has modernized.

    • Like
    • Report

    No comments. Post one | Permalink

Want to attach an image to your answer? Click here.

Did this answer your question? If not, then ask a new question or create a poll.

More Questions. Additional questions in this category.

You're reading Does anyone know the legend of the night mare and its origen

Follow us on Facebook!

Related Ads

Related Questions

Professionally Researched

ANSWERBAG BUZZ

Someone puking on the train
Mythology origin of night
Mare paralizing
Mythological meaning of nightmare
Night hag

Answerbag

a Demand Media company