Page:Heavenly Bridegrooms.djvu/73

 witnesses testify to seeing these animals familiar as in the case of a witch ill in bed who was being closely watched. The witness, who was on guard testified with much detail of circumstance, to having seen a huge "fly," like a miller, which buzzed in among the hair of the sick woman and after a while flew away, when the witch called to the witness to lift up her hair, that she might show a sore place on the scalp which she said, was where the Devil, in the form of a fly, was wont to suck her.

4. That she could work harm to people .at a distance by what appears to have been hypnotic suggestion and that she usually was wickedly and viciously inclined to do this, at will.

5. That she could appear in what seems to have been her double, or astral form, to her victims.

Now, regarding this last, the extremely critical and level-headed Society for Psychical Research have collected some three thousand cases of apparitions of living doubles at the present day, all of them well attested by witnesses. Most of these apparitions (some of which were so like real flesh and blood as to be taken for the person himself) according to the Society's records, were spontaneous, only a few being deliberately self-induced a fact which indicates that the projection of the double is probably a normal power and that it ought to be, therefore, not so very difficult for an illiterate old woman to acquire. A few apparitions of doubles seem to be due mostly to one of the following causes:

1. Violent shock, as a runaway accident, danger of drowning.

2. A state of health indicative of approaching death, so that the astral form t (is this the soul, the body of the immortal spirit?) seems already poised for flight.

3. The moment of separation of soul and body, especially if caused by drowning, suffocation, contusion on the head, wounds received in battle, etc.

4. Falling into "a brown study": gazing fixedly at an object in an abstracted way (self-hypnotization); listening abstractedly to a continuous and monotonous sound.