A similar transfer of soul, effected while both persons are living but caused by the malignance of an evil dead spirit, is found in Blackwood's _The Terror of the Twins_. A father, who resents the fact that instead of a single heir twins are born to him, swears in his madness before he dies, that before their majority he will bring it to pass that there shall be only _one_. By the help of powers from the Pit he filches from the younger his vitality, his strength of mind and soul and body, his personality, and gives this access of power to the elder. The younger dies a hopeless idiot and the elder lives on with a double dower of being. Ambrose Bierce carries this idea to a climax of horror,[169] when he makes an evil spirit take possession of a dead mother's body and slay her son, who recognizes his loved mother's face, knows that it is her eyes that glare fiend-like at him, her hands that are strangling him,--yet cannot know that it is a hideous fiend in her corpse. [169] In _The Death of Halpin Frazer_. The theme of metempsychosis is found tangled up with various other motives in fiction, the use of the elixir of life, hypnotism, dream-supernaturalism, witchcraft and so forth. Rider Haggard has given a curious combination of metempsychosis, and the supernatural continuance of life by means of the elixir, in _She_ and its sequel, _Ayesha_. The wonderful woman, the dread She-who-must-be-obeyed who keeps her youth and beauty by means of bathing in the magic fluid, recognizes in various stages of her existence the lover whom she has known thousands of years before. Not having the advantage of the Turkish bath or patent medicine, he dies periodically and has to be born all over again in some other century. This is agitating to the lady, so she determines to inoculate him with immortality so that they can reign together without those troublesome interruptions of mortality. But the impatient lover insists on kissing her, which proves too much for him, since her divinity is fatal to mere mankind, so he dies again. The close relation between metempsychosis and hypnotism is shown in various stories. Several cases of troublesome atavistic personality or reincarnation are cured by psychotherapy. Theodora, a young woman in a novel by Frances Fenwick Williams, bearing that title-name, realizes herself to be the reincarnation of a remote ancestress, an Orientalist, a witch, who has terrorized the country with her sorceries. She is cured of her mental hauntings by means of hypnotism. Another novel by the same author,[170] gives also the reincarnation of a witch character in modern life, with a cure effected by psycho-analysis. The young woman discovers herself to be the heiress of a curse, which is removed only after study of pre-natal influences and investigations concerning the subconscious self. [170] _A Soul on Fire._