Page:Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondence.djvu/70

adeptship, constitutes an infraction of this order. In such cases spirits invade man's consciousness through the consent or collapse of his freedom and rationality. They enter into his thought and memory, and thus possess and control all his mental and bodily faculties. The controling spirit once having gained posession of the will and memory of the medium, may talk or write under any name, relate events, locate stolen property, or reveal anything within the contents of the memory of the medium, or any person or spirit present; he may, from his superior knowledge of causes and their tendency to results, even foretell events to an extent. He can induce subjective states which, flowing down into the plane of sense, become illusions and apparitions, which are perceived as altogether real things; and so far as any persons bring themselves into consulting sympathy with the medium and his controlling spirits, these illusions may be induced upon them also, so that they would believe and declare the sensation to be objectively real, when it is not in the least so. The old necromancy and enchantment, when not the pretense of wicked men, was the trick of wicked spirits performed in this way through