Unaccountable phenomena occurring in localities sufficient to render them virtually uninhabitable are a recurrent theme in the world's history. In the Old Testament, God comes to the aid of his erring children, often when they have just reached the point of destruction either by natural disasters or the victory of their enemies. God produces his way of relief by the use of malign psychic phenomena aimed at the enemy, who, though vastly superior in material numbers to the Israelites, are frightened into abandoning their position and possessions and fleeing away to the safety of their own abode, which may be thousands of miles from the present place of conflict.
One of the most dramatic instances is recorded in 2 Kings 6-7 in respect of the relief of a population on the verge of starvation during the course of a very severe famine. This famine has already been alluded to in chapter 5.
The king of Israel, one of the Bible's numerous typically evil characters, had subsequently come to destroy Elisha, since he believed that God had clearly planned all the misery, and Elisha was God's prophet. Elisha, however, made the astonishing prophecy that within a day such common articles of food as flour and barley would sell at a very cheap rate. On a purely rational level this seemed quite impossible even if the drought, which was the cause of the famine, was broken instantaneously by a gigantic spell of rain, for a considerable time would need to elapse before the vegetation would start to grow once more. Nevertheless, Elisha's prophecy came to pass, for the next day four men who were afflicted by a relatively common skin disease (traditionally called leprosy, though this diagnosis does not tally with the modern definition of the disease) were dallying at the entrance of the city gate. They were debating their grim future, and decided that staying in the confines of Samaria, which was besieged by the Assyrian army commanded by King Ben-Hadad (2 Kings 6.24), presented no worse fate than their present situation. And so at dusk the four of them set out for the camp, but when they reached its confines there was not a soul to be found. What apparently had happened was that the soldiers were confronted by the clamour of chariots and horses which resembled a great army, which the Aramaeans believed came from the Hittites and Egyptians, whom the king of Israel had hired to attack them.
And so in the dusk they fled, abandoning their tents, animals and various possessions, including silver, gold and clothing. At first the dazed men kept the news and the material wealth to themselves, but soon a warmer conscience rose up in them, and they spread the good news to the royal palace of the king of Israel. At first he could not accept the veracity of this apparent retreat of the Aramaean forces, believing that they were merely acting to entice the Israelites to enter the camp, after which they would reappear and destroy the Israelites completely. In passing, it is noteworthy that at an earlier period the Israelites performed a similar stratagem against the inhabitants of Ai (Joshua 8.1-25). The racial memory no doubt persisted, especially as the destruction was preceded by a terrible reverse, when an Israelite force was radically repulsed before the later spectacular victory; the cause of this earlier defeat was the avarice of an Israelite who coveted something from Ai that had fallen on God's curse (Joshua 7). In the present instance the officers to whom the king confided his doubts suggested that they form a team with the few surviving horses still available, in order to confirm the men's story. They found matters substantially as had been reported and the whole way from the camp to the Jordan strewn with clothes and gear which the panic-stricken Aramaeans had thrown away. Thus Elisha's prophecy was fulfilled when the starving Israelites were able to partake freely of the Aramaeans provisions long before any change in the weather had occurred.
A far more dramatic and terrible fate was in store for the Assyrian army some hundred and fifty years later. Under their brutal and very powerful King Sennacherib they had threatened the complete destruction of Israel under its beneficent King Hezekiah, and their boastfulness had become intolerable. Isaiah made a strong prophecy that the king of Assyria would not enter Jerusalem, let alone attack it. On the contrary he would return by the same way as he came, for God was determined to save the city for the sake of his servant David. That very night the angel of God struck down 185,000 men in the Assyrian camp. In the morning when it was time to arise, there they lay, so many corpses. Sennacherib did indeed strike camp and returned home, staying in Nineveh where his two sons murdered him and escaped into the territory of Ararat (2 Kings 19.35 -7).
In the first narrative, God intervenes to save his people by terrifying their enemies but not actually destroying them. In the second narrative, the rescue of Israel is accomplished by a wholesale destruction of the enemy forces, but the nature of the destroying force is obscure. God is, of course, the source of all things good and bad alike, as we considered in chapter 1, but we are entitled to eliminate deleterious elements in our environment. This includes hostile living forms also, which I believe have been created to accelerate the development of the higher forms of life. Development proceeds by the mechanism of challenge, and this entails not only much strife but also the ultimate destruction of the challenging agent, unless by the grace of God that agent evolves into something primarily useful and ultimately noble. As any agnostic would add, the more highly a species evolves, the more terribly its destructive powers might manifest themselves; in highly civilized humans creativity attaining nearly divine proportions has been accompanied with the most serious defects of character sufficient to lead to wholesale persecutions and bloodshed.
This apparent diversion from the theme of psychic incursions of property finds its justification in the fact that usually the powerful agent producing these hostile invasions is the human living in the property, whether at the present time or at a previous period. One example is the poltergeist that was considered in chapter 2, but this is a nuisance rather than a very harmful presence. Sometimes properties may be haunted by extremely terrifying atmospheres that may produce such depression that nobody who is psychically sensitive could bear to be within reach of them. The human that may be found living in the precincts of the locality has an unpleasant feeling to them: they cannot look one straight in the face but often exude a suspicious charm, though their manner of speech is tortuous and its content a maze of insinuations. In short, one is intuitively uncomfortable with the person, and is relieved to retire from their company as soon as possible. The criminal classes of society show many of these characteristics, and an experienced policeman will identify them quite easily. But many such people do not involve themselves in petty crime, but in much more dangerous activities that aim at undermining individuals, families or society itself. The paradoxical feature of all this malign description is that the person concerned is blissfully unaware of the danger in which they live and the potential harm they may cause, if indeed they are not already causing.
If one is actually sensitive psychically, one can often discern a shadowy darkness around these people and also an unpleasant smell in their vicinity. This is quite distinct from the smell of a dirty person, which we all know from our own experience. This smell has an acutely pungent characteristic which reminds us of an unpleasant circumstance in the past, making the heart palpitate and the mind quicken with anxiety. It is recognized that the sense of smell, though the most primitive of the five senses in the human, who relies primarily on sight, hearing and touch, is imbued with a strong psychic element. It makes us aware or else reminds us of past happenings that in their turn produce strong emotional effects. It is in this way that the psychic sense plays its part in modifying our attitudes and behaviour; at its best filling us with hope but at its worst depressing us with unpleasant forebodings. It is noteworthy in passing that the senses of smell and taste, though quite separate, work together when we eat a meal: the four tastes of sweet, sour, salt and bitter are modified by the faculty of smell which plays a vital part in the savour of a meal. When the faculty of smell is temporarily obliterated as during a severe nasal cold, we can taste our food as well as ever, but it lacks its essential flavour by which we recognize it for what it is. When a piece of food reminds us of a long past event and evokes a psychic sensitivity, it is the smell associated with it that evokes the emotional reaction. On the whole, at least in my experience, the psychic responses to food are more often unpleasant than pleasant, a sad proof that "the prince of the world" is still far from conquered in the souls of many of God's creatures, for we are all parts of the one body, to quote St Paul once more.
Rather more frequently, however, I believe that the human agent who has caused the trouble is an unquiet spirit of the dead, such as we have considered in chapter 3. Their soul is not at rest, and it will continue to produce unpleasant repercussions until its presence is properly acknowledged. Only then will it be in a position to move onwards to the light of God's love and away from the present all-encompassing darkness. The type of person who is especially liable to remain earthbound after their physical death is the one whose life on earth was dominated by entirely selfish pursuits. Since their awareness was almost completely limited to their concerns, they may fail to recognize the extreme change that has overtaken them, and proceed along a well-worn course which they take to be their usual life on earth. They become very indignant when they discover that their home is now occupied by a stranger who, in their eyes, has no right to be there. All this incidentally reminds us of the temporary nature of human possessions; they are here today and gone from us tomorrow. Our stewardship is of short duration even at its best, for we are soon put to bed in the far country of death even at the zenith of our activities. Our achievement is measured primarily by the effect we have had on the lives of those around us, whether they have been hurt by our influence or healed of their infirmities both physical and spiritual. We are most helpful when we forget ourselves in serving other people; on the other hand, when we place ourselves at the head of activities, we cause only disturbances in the psychic atmosphere. If this is true even while we are alive on earth and our psychic sensitivity is at least a little under the control of a dense physical body, when we die we can cause much greater havoc on earth at least among those who are especially vulnerable. It is this type of entity that causes the most powerful effect on the local environment, and its connection with it when it inhabited a physical body explains its continued attachment to it later.
If a terrible crime has been committed in the area - especially if justice has not been properly carried out - the disturbance will be potentially very unpleasant. The entity is inflamed by a combination of fear and anger for the injustice it feels has been committed against it. If a person believes that they have been especially wrongfully treated, they may be inspired to curse the individual whom they blame or else the locality in which the wrongful action had taken place. We will consider the matter of curses in a subsequent chapter, but suffice to add at this stage that the power of a malediction is far from being illusory, and can cause serious trouble. Hatred emits a nasty odour like the one already described, and this smell is merely an outer, and at least slightly apprehensible, sign of something going seriously amiss in the emotional life of an individual or the community at large.
Therefore psychic incursions of a malign type affecting property can arise from both contaminated humans and their demonic sources. The value of all the trouble they cause is that they awaken the human agent at least - we cannot identify anyone on any other level - from the slumber of complacency, so that they are impelled to progress onwards to psychical mastery, which they discover cannot be achieved without a prior spiritual battle of high intensity among those who are in the thick of spiritual conflict for which there appears to be no logical reason let alone a solution. "And, as we know, all things work together for good for those who love God" (Romans 8.28). The way of approaching apparently insuperable evil is by confronting it in love. This love is Christ in us, the hope of a glory to come (Colossians 1.27). This does not automatically mean that we should turn the other cheek, thereby actually avoiding an embarrassing if not far more lethal encounter with a particularly unpleasant person, or for that matter any other living creature. There is a time for conflict and a time for reconciliation just as there is a time for victory and a time for defeat. This last is the most certain of all at least in terms of earthly existence, but the closer we attain to the stature of Jesus, the less relevant do the very concepts of defeat and victory become on an immediately mundane level of existence, for by the experience of our own particular tragic failure, symbolized as the cross in Christian terms, we come to know ourselves as eternal beings - and our various enemies that seemed such enormous eternal beings also.
All this sounds theoretical as well as ludicrously comforting in terms of reason, or common sense, and so it is too. But life is more than reason, essential as this undoubtedly is for daily living. Repeating a thought from 1 Corinthians 15.32, "If the dead are never raised to life, "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die."" If living is nothing more than the sustenance of the body, St Paul's ironic dictum fits perfectly, but if we have an expanded view of life - one that transcends the physical body - we are all vulnerable to psychic assault. If we are wise we lead chaste, orderly lives so that our inner resources are strengthened for the inevitable conflict ahead of us as part of our life's history. The means of this strengthening are first and last prayer, which alone brings us into the Divine Presence where we are prepared for an ordeal that has no end on this side of the grave.
Prayer, in my opinion, is not to be seen so much as a way of protection against the dark forces that seem so often to dominate the world, as a means of our strengthening for the inevitable conflict. The difference between protection and strengthening is quite subtle; the first separates us from evil, whereas the second offers no such guarding function, but gives us the resource to grow into full adulthood. In this state of enhanced spirituality we can serve God's purpose more profoundly by separating evil spirits from creation, at the same time weaning them from destructive tendencies and bringing them closer to God. St Paul puts this thought memorably in Ephesians 3.17-19, "With deep roots and firm foundations may you, in company with all God's people, be strong to grasp what is the breadth and length and height and depth of Christ's love, and to know it, though it is beyond knowledge. So may you be filled with the very fullness of God." This type of knowing is far beyond all rational understanding, for it reaches the mystical height of reality that cannot be defined except in negative terms.
The nearest positive concept of God is to be found in 1 John 4.16, "God is love; he who dwells in love is dwelling in God, and God in him." St Paul in 1 Corinthians 13 defines love in terms of the annulment of the dominating ego consciousness. Thus even giving away all our possessions and being prepared to sacrifice our very life does not bring us to love or to the knowledge of God (verse 3). Love, on the contrary, is known by its life-enhancing qualities: patience; kindness; an absence of conceit, boastfulness, rudeness and selfishness; and an unwillingness to take offence. Love keeps no score of wrongs, takes no pleasure in the sins of others. There is nothing it cannot face; there is no limit to its faith, its hope and its endurance. The most important quality comes right at the end of this recital: love will never come to an end (verses 4-8). It should be said that giving away all our possessions and being prepared to sacrifice our life itself in the cause of martyrdom for what we clearly see as the right action is strongly to be praised. But this mode of living should be a result of the qualities enumerated in 1 Corinthians 13.4-8; in other words, the way of decency should be an inevitable sequel of the life of love, and it should be essentially innocent of all conceit.
In this respect there are two types of innocence. The first affects us all indiscriminately when we are small children and gradually find our way in an increasingly complex world which is governed in the first place by our parents and teachers. The second type of innocence is to remain unsullied, though not untouched, by the temptations of the world when we have grown up into adult life. The world, the flesh and the devil are often presented as our essential agents of temptation. In the scheme of growth into something of the measure of the fullness of Christ that I accept - so that suffering, a fall into moral temptation, and cruel death are all part of a greater whole - I find St Paul's words in Ephesians 4.13 of great inspiration as well as comfort: "Until we all attain to the unity inherent in our faith and in our knowledge of the Son of God - to mature manhood, measured by nothing less than the full stature of Christ". Therefore in the second, or adult, type of innocence we remain inwardly pure even if we fail from time to time to attain the highest spirituality. The lives of the saints, and especially that notorious persecutor of the earliest Christians - St Paul - show that what matters most in adult life is not a childlike innocence of the world's ways, but a sincere urge to repentance that shows itself in a changed way of life, the way indeed of charity in the sense of a love to all our fellow creatures.
There can be little doubt that the adult type of innocence is of much greater use to society than the infantile one. Only the reformed sinner, once having had the courage and honesty to face the past without flinching, can really understand the psychology of their erring brethren. By contrast, the spontaneously "good" person, who has had little experience of the world's greater problems, may easily remain judgemental; as may also those who have been emotionally "converted" to an apparently impeccable faith which to them contains the whole truth, all other approaches being part of the temptations of the world, the flesh or the devil. We come to the interesting conclusion that the zenith of experience is innocence, a higher innocence that has grasped the inadequacy of worldly things in their own right. Such an innocence has tasted the fruits of personal sin and the relief of divine forgiveness. Thus the person is truly converted to the light of universal love.
And so we come once more to the Pauline dictum that all things work together for good to those who love God. The more we are in Christ, the more we are in the world also, but the world is no longer a wicked place; just as the present wicked age is now no longer as evil as before the advent of Christ (Galatians 1.4). The liberation effected by God in Christ has lifted the complete darkness of the world to the light of God's love as an earnest of good things to come.
The essential component of dealing with psychic incursions of property therefore is a cleansing and strengthening of the character of those living or working there. Once we grasp the essential fact of life that there is no power, even if we call it God himself, that will come in from outside to rake our chestnuts out of the fire, we can begin to assume a degree of personal responsibility. As we work with adult commitment to serve the world with all our inner resources, so we come closer to the real God, who is no longer a power from beyond us so much as a presence within us bringing us ever closer to the light. When we know this spiritual truth, which to interpolate Ephesians 3.19 once again, is in fact beyond knowledge, we can understand the famous aphorism of 1 John 4.18, "In love there is no room for fear; indeed perfect love banishes fear." No one can locate God, but his presence is necessarily known to us in terms of indwelling or immanence.
The transcendent God is dismissed quite glibly by non-believers as a manifestation of the material universe and its scientific mechanism, all of which is true in its own right. But how did it start, and where did its building blocks originate? In other words, the workings of the universe can be increasingly satisfactorily explained rationally, but its origin remains a mystery, for reason itself tells us that nothing cannot be the origin of anything. An infinite regression - a return to an earlier stage of development continued as far as the mind will penetrate or scientific research reveal - does not solve this problem. Only a non-material principle can begin to fathom and approach the mystery, inasmuch as this type of being, which could conveniently be identified with the supreme Creator, might be the source of all the material substance of the universe.
Clearly God is both transcendent and immanent. The scientist who is a believer will tend to recognize the Creator God who is transcendent of all his creation, while the mystic, who knows God as a deep personal presence in the soul, will from earliest youth know the immanent God whom St Paul identifies with "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Colossians 1.27). Both approaches are essential to a proper knowledge of the Divine, for together they illuminate different aspects of reality. These are the material and the spiritual. Both are equally important not only for our own survival but for the growth and development of the world. The basis of all truth is balance, something almost outside the scope of most humans. Those who opt for a material way end up in bodily death, while those who stress their allegiance to the spiritual path to the exclusion of worldly matters share exactly the same fate. Only those who give of themselves to both worldly and spiritual matters will contribute to the transformation of the world by a spirituality that finds its apogee in the resurrection body of Christ.
When we consider psychic incursions of property we see how non-material energy can impinge on material substance and cause damaging effects of varying degree. These may vary from the production of depressing or terrifying atmospheres to very clearly physical phenomena like an interference of the electricity supply or the water system. I have known incidents where wastepaper baskets have been mischievously overturned so that their contents have stained the surrounding carpet or else spoilt the atmosphere of the room in which they were located. Some of these episodes were clearly of the poltergeist type, but others have been more malicious. It is the atmosphere pervading the affected locality that defines the nature of the psychic emanation and suggests its source.
I personally have never known an instance of total, permanent disappearance of any object that could be attributed to a psychic disturbance, but in the shorter term I have on more than one occasion been driven nearly frantic by the apparent loss of an article, which I have quite deliberately placed in a certain site, only to find it nearby - days, weeks or even months later. On some occasions when I had steeled myself to the loss of the article, it suddenly turned up near the place where I had remembered leaving it. All this could, of course, be attributed to a faulty memory, but the deliberate placing of the object makes this an inadequate explanation as far as I am concerned. And why should it return to its previous site after a long period of disappearance confirmed by repeated checking? In my own experience there are some places in various houses which I have visited where this strange phenomenon is liable to occur. Whether this unusual occurrence is set in motion by my own psychic capacity, or whether it is known to others in the household also I do not know, because too much investigation along these lines could appear quite impolite, even invidious to one's relationship with the owners of the house, unless they by chance or fell necessity broached the subject. This sort of conversation can also bring to light the experience of a ghost that various people are witnessing, though seldom all in even one small household, so variable are individual psychic capacities likely to be.
As I mentioned in chapter 2, ghosts are non-material deposits of obsessional material that have arisen from past experiences of people who have dwelt in a particular place. They are insubstantial, but frequently bear an invidious emotional charge apart from their actual presence, which can hardly fail to produce some feeling of discomfort ranging from sharing a space with a foreign entity to sheer terror following a psychic invasion. Of course, some ghosts are almost part of the household furniture of a dwelling place, and may even be great favourites, especially among the young. The thought of exorcizing them could be quite shocking to this type of person, but they would clearly come into the category of the lovable eccentrics on whose witness the world depends. The form of a ghost may closely resemble the appearance of the person when they were living in the locality, perhaps centuries ago. Sometimes a ghost may be a "thought form", the imagined or imprinted appearance of a person who lived in the place at a previous period.
One case with which I was involved concerned the recurrent appearance of a nun running down a flight of stairs. It seemed that centuries ago a nun who had stolen a small amount of money was eventually found out. In order to escape she had run precipitately down the staircase, but during the course of her flight she had fallen and sustained fatal injuries. Apparently the horror of the incident had imprinted itself on her mind and perhaps the community's mind also. It had persisted as a permanent psychic landmark which seemed to reveal itself in the presence of some psychically sensitive people. Some of these saw the form of a young woman on the stairs, others a nun fully dressed in a habit, and others still were aware of someone falling on the stairs accompanied by screaming. I believe that, for a time after our death, each of us becomes a discarnate entity, before we move on to higher things according to the worthiness of our life on earth. But I do not believe such an entity was present in this case. The form was a psychic imprint of a horrifying episode, similar in its own way to a tape recording of a speech or a concert. Dabbling in this area can encourage the form to persist. It can live on for ever even though the incident ended in a matter of minutes, or at the very most hours.
Dealing with thought forms is quite simple. The principle is to sweep them away from our world just as we would some paper from the floor. Therefore one lifts up the thought form to God's care by strong prayer, asking that it may be dissolved according to God's will. It certainly need cause no one to fear. The concern is that it may take its rightful place in God's universe, and not remain sequestered in a backwater, speaking metaphorically. I should mention in passing that the young nun continued to appear as a thought form long after the convent where she had died had been closed. The precincts were now a fine charitable foundation with a somewhat secular ethos, though not hostile to Christianity. In the greater life beyond death, time and space take on such a different form that our worldly concepts cease to fit in a greater understanding of reality.
The unquiet dead can also appear as ghosts, but in this situation they show their independent personalities, making their emotional responses very obvious. In my experience the unquiet dead manifest themselves much more frequently by the emotional atmosphere they set up than by any visual phenomena, so much so that I tend to regard ghosts with interest rather than alarm.
The most important function of a minister of deliverance in dealing with a family which had come in contact with what appears to be a ghost is to reassure them of the probable nature of the situation but, of course, before any authoritative statement can be made to them, the minister themself needs to be psychic, so as to assess the situation accurately. It is as inadequate to minimize the significance of a ghost as to proceed with a dramatic exorcism without delay. As any physician knows, there is no universal panacea for any disease; each has its own treatment, if indeed the disease is as yet curable by any means that we know. Nevertheless, there is one weapon, available to all of us: rapt prayer.
As I have already explained, this may not always be immediately effective for the purpose that is concerning us, but it gives us strength for the trial awaiting us. Likewise the minister must be quite literally steeped in prayer if they are to do their work effectively. Prayer alone brings us into the Divine Presence, but we also need psychic sensitivity for deliverance work. The combination of the two is rare, and it is for this reason that effective exorcists will always be rare individuals. It is far easier to cast doubts on the integrity of anyone who is claimed to have psychic gifts (the person is always unwise to make such a claim themselves, remembering that self praise is no recommendation), because the attitude of most people in sophisticated society is one of compulsive agnosticism to which more than a little pride is often added. On the other hand, ignorant people are often notoriously superstitious and fear-ridden, so that any unusual occurrence can easily assume a demonic or divine character. The ideal type of person is one who is well educated by always being open to new possibilities; who can see that the world, and even their own life, is not a fixed system, but capable of enormous expansion. Such a person combines within themselves humility and courage, both qualities being essential for an effective exorcist. The supreme paradox of our life on earth is that "the prince of the world" is evil, and necessarily so, but even from this source of evil in its darkest intensity good can arise and fulfil itself in glory.
Chapter 7