Chapters 3 to 5 - Communication with Spirits during the Post-Apostolic Period and in Modern Times

- 10 - “The angel of the attending prophetic spirit fills a person, and that person, filled with a holy spirit, speaks to the congregation as the Lord wills.” The deep-trance state of the Montanist mediums, and this occurs with all deep-trance mediums, is described with the words: “They bow their faces to the ground.” This appears to refer to the onset of the deep trance, for, as the medium’s own spirit leaves the body, that body sinks over forward and is returned to an erect posture only when the foreign spirit enters it. The “stepping out” or departure of the medium’s spirit is accurately expressed by the word “ecstasy”, the meaning of which is “a stepping out”. After the foreign spirit enters, the communication proceeds in complete calm, if that spirit is a good one. If, however, an evil spirit has taken possession of the medium, conditions very often arise that give even observers inexperienced in such matters the impression of demonic possession. As the Christian Tatian says, “Raving is the work of demons.” Clairvoyance, clairaudience and clairsentience, which includes the senses of taste and smell, also occurred frequently among the Christians of the first few centuries. Much space in the book of Hermas is devoted to clairvoyance and clairaudience, for most of the communications received by him came through these channels. A female figure that he saw and heard explained the truths of the Beyond to him. She is his guide, as Beatrice was to the clairvoyant Dante – for Dante also saw most of what he wrote down in his “Divine Comedy” through clairvoyance. The martyr Polycarp also foresaw his destined death by clairvoyance. He spent his time at the country home to which he had fled with a handful of companions doing nothing “day and night” but praying for everyone and for the congregations of the whole world, as he was in the habit of doing. Three days before his capture, while he was at prayer, he had a vision in which he saw his pillow in flames. At this, he turned to those around him and said: “God has determined that I am to be burned alive.” The most frequent visions granted to clairvoyant believers in God are figures and landscapes in the Beyond, and, generally, visions of the spirit realm as a world similar to ours on earth, only spiritual instead of material. Needless to add, pagan clairvoyants had similar visions, for clairvoyance is a gift of the human spirit resulting from the configuration of the od surrounding it, enabling it to see in the same manner as a disembodied spirit. The things seen by a clairvoyant are as faithful an image as are the images of the material world seen by our physical eyes. The spirit world can show these images to a clairvoyant whenever it pleases. Od is the substance of which they are composed. It depends entirely on the inner attitude of the clairvoyant whether his visions of the Beyond are presented by the good or evil spirit world. Clairvoyance relating to things on earth and dependent on odic radiations of terrestrial beings is not affected by the clairvoyant’s inner attitude, and for this reason the pagan clairvoyants were able to foretell events on earth quite as well as the Christian clairvoyants, although the Christians claimed that demons were producing the pagans’ visions. The records of the early centuries of the Christian era are filled with such instances of clairvoyance and clairaudience. When Polycarp died a martyr’s death in Smyrna, Irenaeus, who happened to be in Rome at the time, heard a trumpetlike voice proclaim: “Polycarp has become a martyr.”

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