Page:Heavenly Bridegrooms.djvu/87

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

worlds must be lived up to by the two who meet upon the borders of the two worlds. Rationalists have tried to explain the spirit bride and spirit bridegroom as a nightmare arising from a plethoric condition of the body. An explanation which has force only when the spirit is an incubus and not a succubus and when the earthly psychic (man or woman) is asleep or dozing. But the clearest and most convincing manifestations of the objectivity of the heavenly bridegroom always come when the psychic is most clearheaded. It seems, indeed, that it is not even in a trance but only when the psychic is wide awake that the marital union takes place objectively. And this I think will be found to be the case with the witches. When their union with the supposed Devil was based on the faithful tender love of one woman for one man, and its reciprocity, in accordance with high moral standards, then was the union objective and natural. The gross rites of the Witches' Sabbaths with their abnormalities and absurdities, were evidently the illusion of an insane imagination in great part although it is also doubtless true that as Professor Wilder says, there is little reason to doubt that these "witches' sabbaths" were formerly celebrated, and that they were, in some modified form, a continuation of the outlawed worship of the Roman Empire.