Many learned theologians have been puzzled by the attitude of Jesus toward demoniac possession, for, in casting out evil spirits, he always addressed them as real beings. This attitude of the Master is usually deemed a concession to the ignorance and superstition of those days; whereas, acquaintance with certain occult teachings would convince the inquirer that Jesus was wholly sincere in addressing the "devils" as such.

The eighth sphere, the subject of a former chapter, was once of larger girth than the solid material globe, but, for several reasons, it has experienced periodical shrinkings, and another is almost due. With the descent of a major Avatar, the distinction between the irreclaimables and the improvables becomes more pronounced than ever before, and so the sphere of the wholly depraved shrinks away from other spheres of the globe chain, some of which are actually expanded through the spiritual force generated by the Avatar.

The devils cast out by Jesus and his disciples, were certain hopeless creatures who, having lost their human shape, were debarred from entering material life through legitimate channels, but who, to gratify their debased desires for physical sensation, forced an entrance through the human aura whenever possible. This they did either singly or in groups, as witness the seven devils that obsessed Mary Magdalene.

When Jesus had cured the man possessed by a legion of devils, these creatures immediately realized their unfitness for the human form, and so asked entrance into the bodies of the swine. This the Master permitted, because the wise would understand that the forms of these devils had become wholly animal, and possibly swine-like.

A little known result of Jesus' life, ministry, and supreme sacrifice, was the curtailment of the power of such devils through the contraction of Avitchi to a diameter much less than that of the material globe. The words of the devils to Jesus as recorded in Matt. 8, 29, "Art thou come to torment us before the time?" had reference to their future imprisonment beneath the crust of the earth. As the result of their confinement, the world for centuries has been free from a form of obsession which the New Testament writers evidently believed in.

The majority of those actually in Avitchi have lost much of human shape, and more of human reason. As for the Black Lodge, its members are all candidates for Avitchi, to whose border line multitudes of the fellowship have gravitated; but, like cunning animals, they avoid the trap. However, they are gradually deteriorating, and eventually will be drawn into the eighth sphere.

Swedenborg almost always proves a real seer, providing we find the right key to the teaching examined; but that key perhaps he in no way would acknowledge: for example, we acquiesce in his statement that one object of the Lord's assumption of the human was the reduction of the hells, but our explanation is wholly foreign to his philosophy.

H.