When Lovers Become Ghosts: Xenosexuality, Spirit-Spouses & Sam Smith’s Unseen Contract
In many traditions, an unseen figure visits the bedroom, not the spouse, but something else: a succubus, an incubus, a spirit-spouse. They’re called qarīnah in Arabian folklore, Ogun Oru in Yoruba lore, and appear in Siberian, East African, Southeast Asian and Pacific Island shamanic traditions as spirit-mates, night-hags, or spectral lovers . These figures are not metaphors. They are energetic presences with subtle-world consequences.
When Sam Smith announced they identified as xenosexual - attracted to non-human beings—it invited curiosity and concern. A diagnosis from the spiritual-energetic world might ask: Are they in bed with a ghost?
The Mythic Roots
In medieval Christian thought, the succubus drains a man by night, often causing illness and madness. The male incubus does the same to women. Freud and Jung later framed these as projections of suppressed desire or parts of the unconscious. Jung’s spirit of the depths in Red Book is not just symbolic—it shakes the soul and offers initiation—or collapse .
Tantric texts like Woodroffe’s Shakti and Shakta include warnings about premature spiritual contact, which opens a field that can host residual energies or non-human attachments .
Spirit-Spouses in Living Cultures
In many cultures, spirit-spouses are not taboo as they are ‘recognized’ and managed.
In Vanuatu and among Kaluli people, a ghost-wife encountered in a vision may bear children in ceremony. That union shapes lodge hierarchy .
Among the Yoruba, the Ogun Oru nocturnally enters a sleeping person - spouses then establish boundaries via ritual .
In Chinese ghost marriage, living individuals wed the spirits of deceased ones to balance cosmic debts .
These are not freakish anomalies but alternative relational ecosystems governed by ritual, ethics, and community.
The Legal Question: Can You Sue a Ghost?
Legally, no—but culturally, yes.
In 1936, Sudan Government v. Ngerabaya Jellab, the accused killed someone he believed a witch using supernatural means. The court still found him guilty.
In 1959, a driver in Sudan attacked a figure he thought a ghost only to kill a real person. He was acquitted under mistake of fact.
These cases confirm one truth: a belief in spirits doesn’t exempt responsibility. But culturally, such belief can drive behavior that realigns fate - ritually or tragically.
Xenosexuality: Desire or Distraction?
Xenosexuality - attraction to beings beyond human gender can be spiritually adventurous or spiritually dangerous. Tantra holds: eros is meant to ground you, not unmoor you. Attracted to embodiment, not abstraction.
If one is drawn to the alien, especially as a persistent identity, Tantra and Jung would ask: Is this intimacy, or is it entanglement?
Eros that doesn’t bring you home to your body is a sign. Not of enlightenment but of leakage.
Are Entities Real or Psychological?
Yes.
The difference between hallucination and visitation is not belief - it's effect. Anthropological studies confirm suicide and illness following nocturnal visitations .
Clinical psychiatrists in India have recorded succubus-like cases in schizophrenia, complete with nocturnal disembodiment .
In Tantra, effect is truth.
If your vitality is drained, your emotions hijacked, your intimacy stalled—you can’t sit it out with affirmations or Instagram aesthetics. You’ve met an entity. Or a part of yourself that wants your energy more than your presence.
Is Sam Smith “in trouble”?
I won’t diagnose anyone. But the public claim of xenosexuality without longstanding spiritual support flags energetic vulnerability. That’s all Tantra ever asks you to notice.
If the declaration is held with clarity and ritual support, great. But if it's lived as an unanchored identity, it becomes a ghost contract.
What Tantra Would Actually Recommend
Not sermon, but ritual:
Pause the identity narrative. Wait. Don’t embody the archetype yet.
Anchor your system. Ritual, breathwork, somatic practice. Solidify your home.
Seal the subtle body. A tantric kavaca practice invites containment.
Test friendships. Can you sustain intimate conversation, not glamour?
Invite the relational. Meet humans. Fragile, demanding, unfinished humans.
Exit ghosts respectfully by not feeding them.
Why This Matters
We live in an age of image contracts: identities declared for attention, not evolution. That’s not queer liberation. It's commodified curiosity. The question is not who Sam Smith is becoming—but whether the identity invites liberation or abandonment.
If your partner is a ghost, tantric ethics say: you can’t hold them accountable, but you can refuse to sustain them.
🧠 Footnotes
Jung, Carl. The Red Book, 2009—on the spirit of the depths.
Woodroffe, J. Shakti and Shakta, 1918—on astral interference.
Grover et al. “Succubus phenomenon in schizophrenia”, Ind Psychiatry J 2018;27(1):147–150.
Hufford, David J. The Terror That Comes in the Night, 1982.
Cultural examples: Yoruba, Pacific Islands, Chinese ghost marriage