Gradually the nature of the possession becomes more acutely defined and is recognized as a different personality--an evil personality resident in the same body using the same mind. It is in all human probability only the repressed wishes--all the pent-up unfulfilled evil of a lifetime taking shape and urging gratification rather than repression in a new and secondary personality. Possession by evil spirits is invariably connected with violence and vice. Sometimes the attacks are periodic; always they are signs of mental instability and psychic disease. A possessed person is a fit subject for psychotherapeutic treatment by qualified medical men, but a source of very real psychic danger in a séance or as a subject for well-meaning experiments in faith healing by amateurs. In psychic healing the doctrine of sacrifice and the scapegoat had a very literal interpretation. The healer often takes upon his own soul the burden that he lifts from another. This psychic transference can only be done in safety by certain and specific ways beyond the scope of this work. It is sufficient to indicate the danger. Possession in its varying aspects has given rise to many myths and legends. Larvæ, Incubi, and Succubi were all demons of temporary possession that tempted man. In the Middle Ages and far later the Faith strove lustily with them, and where exorcism failed the stake was found effective. According to the older writers, Incubi were male demons who possessed the bodies of mortal women; Succubi, she-devils who seduced the souls and possessed the bodies of men. Sorcerers had the power of despatching these erotic demons to gratify their associates or plague their enemies, and it is notable that this doctrine of vicarious enjoyment or satisfaction reappears in the Spiritualist belief in gross and earth-bound souls of sinners who haunt drinking booths and houses of ill-fame, deriving vicarious satisfaction from the sins of the living. The old demonographers give lurid and disgustful accounts of these “possessions”[42] and insist on their contagious nature. Prosecutions for sorcery, “possession,” and similar crimes raged throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in the pages of the records we can trace the Incubi and Succubi now hidden as familiar spirits, now described as the devil himself, but curiously true in their nature to the occasional demoniac possessions that trouble the twentieth century. Even if one admits that the average “possession” is one’s own evil subconscious personality attempting to overthrow the conscious mind, certain questions and possibilities arise. That the astral body or mind can make discarnate journeys is a well-known fact to all Spiritualists. There is, then, no reason to suppose that this faculty would be less material in a possessive personality whose origin was specifically in the dream realm of the subconscious.