heavenly bridegroom, just so long will her guardian persist in putting her through a course of training a training which she must undergo until she passes her examination and is promoted into a higher class, there to take up still more advanced lessons in psychic discrimination and psychic self-control.
Now, the "Devil's Marks" and the "sucking" were both, so I hold, illusory sensations which the witch failed either to classify or to conquer, but to which she mistakenly succummbed. When the supposed Devil's imp showed non-sensitiveness to pin-pricks, it was probably a case of auto-suggestion or, in the case of some, a hypnotic dulling to pain caused (oftentimes in mercy) by the angel guardian.
Of the same illusory character is that phenomenon which has so puzzled all the writers on witchcraft the icy chilliness of the sperm. This experience is entirely subjective; because it is forbidden by Borderland laws; to evoke a nervous energy for no definite result and as a harvest in offspring on the Borderland cannot be produced, it is breaking Borderland laws to sow the seed. The very fact that the Devil, who is supposed to be a deity of fire, cold in the Borderland marital union, ought to have shown his earthly partner that it was an illusion. And the psychic who expects or thinks to enact a forbidden experience on the Borderland, has only her own ignorance to thank for the illusion.
Incubi and Succubae, evil spirits who were supposed to force themselves as lovers upon both men and women, played an important part in witchcraft days. Deformed children were supposed to have sprung of such a union. Luther believed implicitly in this. Virtuous women seemed to be especially subject to the attacks of incubi, and this was looked on as attesting the cunning of Satan, who thus aimed at those noted for purity of life. It rarely, if ever, seems to have occurred to people in those days that a virtuous woman, reasonably clear-headed, is a being who is under especial angelic protection, and that when such a woman was persistently singled out by a spirit for lover-like attentions, it must have been owing to the favor of Heaven, and not to the malignity of devils. That these attentions became a great annoyance
