Julian’s account of what happened in her illness is extremely precise, and makes this part of her revelation an interesting psychological document. She fell ill early in May 1373; and on the fourth night was thought to be dying and given the last sacraments. For two days more she lingered, quite conscious and expecting death; and early in the morning of the third day, lost all feeling in her lower limbs. When the priest came to help her agony she was already speechless; but made her nurses prop her upright in bed, so that she could fix her failing eyes on the crucifix he held towards her. This she could see, though everything else grew dim to her sight. Then her head fell on one side, breath failed, and she was sure that the end had come. With this conviction and acceptance of death, the stress of the involuntary struggle for life seems suddenly to have ended. She had passed into a new state of consciousness, in which her mind was clear and her body free of pain, “as whole as ever before or after.” In this condition her old and forgotten desires came back into her mind. The first, for sickness, had been granted. Now, she was impelled to ask the other, for a keener realization of the Passion; and this buried wish, surging back abruptly into consciousness, became the starting-point of her mystical experiences. We cannot deny that these experiences had their pathological side. Her physical and psychic state were abnormal. With the perfect candour and common sense which add so much to our delight in her, she confesses that she at first mistook her revelations for delirium, and said to the monk who afterwards visited her that she had raved. There are, however, in these revelations, as in all visionary experience of any value, two distinct sides. One is the visual or auditory hallucination—the vision seen, the voice heard—the materials for which clearly come from the unconscious mind of the visionary, and can generally be traced to their source. The other is the intuitive spiritual teaching that accompanies it, and often far exceeds the visionary’s own knowledge or power. Julian, in her account of what happened to her, keeps these two elements perfectly distinct. “All the blessed teaching of our Lord God,” she says, “was shown to me by three parts—that is to say, by the bodily sight, by words formed in mine understanding, and by ghostly sight.”