Page:Heavenly Bridegrooms.djvu/85

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at last was only because the woman either broke the moral law in some way, or because prejudiced against every such being as an emissary of Satan. In time by the workings of the laws of Borderland, she who through natural curiosity and romantic sentiment at first hearkened to the angel lover, and afterward through the failure to live aright or think clearly felt bound to reject him as a devil became subject to hallucinations and also in some cases, to annoying physical manifestations. Some picturesque stories have been told of such women to whom the spirit lover has appeared in the guise of a handsome youth vainly wooing his earthly love night after night. The stories usually wind up with an account of fearful persecutions at the hands of the rejected lover, who thus by his malignity reveals himself as the Devil. But the cases of a spirit lover who has once been received (whether as husband or only communicating spirit), it would seem as though his hypnotic suggestions often outweighed those of the priest. Sometimes the priest is appealed to but not always successfully. The Roman Catholic Church has a regular rite to exorcise demons and is probably successful with the psychic through hypnotic suggestion. But in the case of a spirit lover who has once been received (whether as husband or by communicating spirit) it would seem as though his hypnotic suggestion often outweighed that of the priest to still exorcise the fiend in cases of demoniacal possession. But I am inclined to think that the very lingering of these subjective experiences indicates that her psychic hallucinations were often not only due to hypnotic suggestions by her spirit lover, but were also the result recorded in her subliminal consequences of a veridical phenomena which she at first encourages, whether through harmless curiosity, or through the romantic and tender sentiment of a pure heart, or through the grosser impulses arising from a luxuriant and untrained imagination, matters not. When her season of ordeals set in and she was obliged to distinguish between the illusory and the real, in order to maintain communication with her interesting visitor, she either grew alarmed at the phenomena of the ordeals or