grave? How could God's angels ever fall so? It were impossible.
But St. Augustine evidently starts from two hypotheses the unsubstantiability of ghosts and the impurity (footnote, as will be seen by a perusal of the quotation in full,) and, therefore, non-existence of sex, neither of which two hypotheses has ever been definitely proven. As a logician therefore, he is at fault, and I have already shown the danger of starting from mistaken premises when dealing with occult phenomena. The two hypotheses, however, were not peculiar to St. Augustine. They were, and are, the- common property of the majority of mankind. But it does not follow that they are correct: and the psychic who rashly assumes their truth to start with (through prejudice or because other people think so) may expect to be deluded, and to come upon all sorts of fantastic, and possibly, diabolical manifestations. Such is the occult law. Start with a false premise or with a premise which you have not investigated with scrupulous care, and you are certain to get phenomena of either a misleading or a depraved character.
But all the Christian Fathers did not accept the possibility of bridegrooms from the unseen world. There were then, as now, Materialist minds which disbelieved in ghosts. Alexander, Bishop of Lycopolis, endeavored to explain away angelic bridegrooms as myths, thus:
"When the Jewish history relates that angels came down to hold intercourse with the daughters of men * * * * this saying signifies that the nutritive powers of the soul descended from heaven to earth."
On the Tenants of the Manicheans, XXV.
Hence the "injuring" of women by incubi to which St. Augustine refers, an injuring either wholly subjective and illusory, or, if objectively real, was brought about in part by the woman's ignorance of the occult requirements for correct living and clear-headedness on the Borderland, in part by her failure to thus live and think on the earthly plane.
It would be interesting to know his authority for this. Rationalistic theories cannot rest as do folklore traditions,
