- 155 - Only from the content of the messages and from the behaviour of the spirit beings that have entered the human mediums can we judge whether these messages come from good or evil, from high or low spirit beings. As for the messages themselves, in those days Jews, pagans, and Christians (Catholic and nonCatholic) all regarded them as communication from invisible spirit beings. Weinel, p. 64: “Whenever a Christian sees a vision of an angel or a demon, of Christ or of the Devil, whenever [a Christian or] a pagan or a Gnostic has a vision, it is not true, as many modern theologians claim, that what in the case of the Christian is a real experience, is merely hallucination in that of the Jew, since in each of these cases invisible, superhuman spirit beings actually revealed themselves for that space of time. And these visions may occur in the same manner each time.” Weinel, p. 64: “The activities of the holy spirits and those of the demons, however, do not only bear a general resemblance to each other, but one and the same phenomenon may be construed as the work of either a good or an evil spirit, according to the dogmatic (religious) standpoint of the author. What might be considered the work of good and holy spirits by a member of the Christian sect of the Gnostics, might appear to a Catholic as an hallucination produced by demons, and vice versa.” Weinel, p. 65: “Whenever pneumatic manifestations appear in the same spiritual and physical domain, their similarity across the centuries is most striking. The monastic mystic of the Middle Ages, the Quaker in Protestant England, the inspired Huguenot, the faith healer of the 19th century – all experience and behave precisely as did the pneumatics of the church in its formative stage.” Weinel, p. 67: “According to Christian doctrine, there are no neutral effects in the field of pneumatic (mediumistic) phenomena. Either the spirit at work is good or evil.” The methods by which spirits communicated in post-apostolic times were the same as those described in the earlier chapters on mediums in this book. The spirits did their speaking through mediums. There were “partial-trance mediums”, whose own spirit hears whatever the foreign spirit says through the medium, as well as “deep-trance mediums”, through whom a foreign spirit spoke while the medium himself was quite unconscious. A medium who spoke in a partial trance thus describes his sensations: Weinel, p. 77-78: “On these occasions I always felt myself being uplifted to God, in Whose name I therefore solemnly declare that I have never been bribed or enticed by anyone, or influenced by any worldly considerations whatever, to speak any words other than those which God’s spirit or angel itself utters through my organs of speech. To such a spirit I therefore yield the guidance of my tongue during my state of ecstasy, meanwhile using all my effort to direct my spirit toward God and to remember the words pronounced by my lips. I know that a higher and different power is speaking through me then. I do not think about it and have no idea beforehand of what I will say. It thus seems to me as if my own words are being spoken by someone else, but they leave a deep impression on my spirit.” Often, also, a spirit prays through a medium who is in a partial trance. An example of such a “prayer in spirit” is strikingly presented in the martyrdom of Polycarp. The sensation of being deeply moved is also aptly described here: Polycarp comes down from the upper story of the house where he had been hidden for safety to the soldiers waiting below, orders his servants to provide food for the soldiers, of whom he requests an hour’s undisturbed respite for prayer. “When this was granted he stood before them and, filled with the grace of God (in spirit), prayed so fervently that for two hours he could not cease, and all of his hearers were seized with fear, while many of them regretted having come to take prisoner an old man so highly favoured by God.”
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