- 147 - beginning of Saul’s death agony, and it tortured his inmost soul until the hour of its fulfillment. Hence, on receiving the fatal message, he fell his full length upon the earth, horrified. What he had hoped to hear from the conjurer, namely, how he could best overcome his enemies, he was not told; instead, the terrible fate that he did not want to hear was revealed to him as a punishment. In Saul was fulfilled the prophecy pronounced by God through the prophet Ezekiel: Ezekiel 14: 7-8: ‘If any one of the House of Israel, or of the foreigners who live in Israel, separates himself from me, and takes his idols into his heart, and sets the stumbling block of his iniquity before him, and nevertheless comes to a prophet to inquire for himself of me, I, the Lord, will answer him personally; and I will take action against that man, and will make an example of him and a proverb, and I will drive him out from the midst of my people, so that you shall know that I am the Lord.’ The conjurer’s recognition of Saul when Samuel appeared was due to her power of clairaudience, which enabled her to hear Saul’s name when it was uttered by the spirit of Samuel. When Samuel further told Saul: ‘Tomorrow you and your sons will be with me,’ this is not to be construed as meaning that Saul and his sons were to share Samuel’s lot in the Beyond. All that Samuel intended to convey to Saul was that he and his sons were doomed to die on the following day, and that Samuel would be present to meet them as they passed over into the Beyond. • The spirits of the dying are met and greeted already at the deathbed by those who have gone before when they were close in life. They are also instructed and admonished by them, before they go to the place where they belong according to their lot. For the spirit world that goes without saying, just as it goes without saying for you that you will meet your friends on their arrival at some foreign port to which you have preceded them. In spite of that, your fate and theirs in that country can be very different. The conjurer of Endor communicated with ‘the dead’ by clairvoyance and clairaudience. She told those who consulted her only what she herself saw and heard. Other conjurers were true mediums: they fell into a trance and the foreign spirit itself spoke through them. Finally, when the text says that the spirit of Samuel ‘rose up out of the earth’, that is only how it appeared. To render itself visible, a spirit requires a cloud of od, and it procures this od from the odic radiation of the people who are present. The cloud of od does not develop suddenly, but little by little, generally increasing in size from bottom to top, and this gives the impression that it is rising. Samuel appeared in the form of an old man, wrapped in the cloak he used to wear on earth, so that he would be recognizable. • Spirits generally show themselves in an odic form that bears all of those distinguishing features by which they were recognized during their earth life. Just as you are able to choose your material garments at will, so spirits can give to their odic garments the character they consider best adapted to their purposes. Inasmuch as the laws governing communication with the evil spirit world are the same as those that apply to communication with good spirits, you find in the Biblical reports that the same means were employed in consulting the dead that were used when inquiring of God. In both cases you find
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