Appendix-Necromany,Recarnation, and The Last Judgment - A Speculation

Recently, America has been treated to a daily daytime television show called Crossing Over. In it, the host of the show, John Edward, appears to be bringing messages or impressions of departed persons to their bereaved loved ones. This supposedly proves that there is nothing to be feared from death, that death is just a dream within a dream.

A great while ago, before the advent of Crossing Over, there was a vogue for what is called Past Life Regression. In Past Life Regression, a hypnotist puts a person into a hypnotic trance, and in that trance leads them backward through all the ages they have been - adult, teenager, child, infant - and then back even farther to before they were born, where they seem to experience having been someone else in a previous life. In some cases a hypnotic subject can supposedly be regressed back into a series of previous lives. This hypnotic technique is supposed to have conclusively proven the Hindu doctrine of reincarnation.

In Christian doctrine the first phenomenon, communication with the dead, is accounted for as being the sin called necromancy. It is condemned as such in the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 18:10-12), which records a particular instance of it in the last days of bad King Saul (1st Samuel 28). The New Testament condemns it under the general term for occult practices, sorcery.

In Christian theory, the story behind necromancy is that demons are said to mimic and imitate the spirits of the departed in order to work a deception on unsuspecting necromancers, with a view towards either taking possession of them, or to simply invalidate Christian doctrine concerning the dead. This theory has never been proven from the scriptures, but the apostle Paul’s contention that demons are behind the supernatural powers that pagans worship as idols (1st Corinthians 10:20) has been seen as a general justification of this theory.

But in the second phenomenon, reincarnation, we have something seemingly new, that the Christian scriptures do not seem to have any explanation for. The Christian position on the dead has always been that "it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment" (Hebrews 9:27). Christians who have the union with Christ in the heavenlies, and are thereby regenerated, are considered to have "fallen asleep in Christ." (1st Corinthians 15:6). They are with the dead, but also "in the presence of Christ" (2nd Corinthians 5:8). There will be a first resurrection "from among the dead" (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18), at which the sleeping Christians will be re-united with their bodies, which will have been changed to be like "Christ’s glorious body." (Philippians 3:21). Then, later, there will be a general resurrection of the dead who remain, to receive their final judgment and disposition (Revelation 20:11-15). [Footnote 34]

But here today, we have reincarnation hopping and skipping about in front of us all, seemingly upsetting our Christian applecart in regard to the doctrine of The Last Judgment. And the story about demons mimicking the departed seems a little farfetched, almost like it is a patch over something unaccounted for by Christian doctrine. When one starts looking over the transcripts that have been made of mediumistic seances, the doctrine of demonic mimicry starts to seem like its just too pat an answer for what is going on.

What, the Christian may ask, is going on here? Is Christianity wrong and the Hindu and the necromancer right about what happens after death?

Well, I am going to layout some general facts here, and then engage in a speculation that I think will be helpful until the day we actually do find out what really happens after death (something no Christian should be afraid of). And I will show that the phenomenon of necromancy and the phenomenon of Past Life Regression are part of a single phenomenon that the diabolic realm has been casting in a light favorable to their view of death, and unfavorable to the Christian view of death.

"In the Spirit and Power of "

To buttress my speculation, I’m going to point out something that sometimes happens in Biblical prophecy. Malachi 4:5-6 records a prophecy about the Old Testament prophet Elijah. This prophet had been interrupted in his ministry on earth to the nation of Israel by being taken up into heaven (2nd Kings 2:11). The prophecy of Malachi 4:5-6 says that he would one day be returned to Israel at the terrible time known as "The Day of the Lord." The prophecy reads as follows:

"Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse."

In the book of Revelation we find an indication that indeed that is when he will show up (Revelation 11:3-5). But part of his ministry is to "turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers." And so when we turn to the New Testament, we find that the Jewish people were in expectation that Elijah would appear to them and perform that function (Matthew 17:10 - " And his disciples asked him, saying, Why then say the scribes that Elias must first come?" ). But instead we find that function being performed by John the Baptist. (Luke 1:17 - "And he [ John the Baptist ] shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elias, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord" ).

Hence, the disciples question of Matt. 17:10 to Christ. The Lord replies:

"Elias [Elijah] truly shall first come, and restore all things. But I say unto you, That Elias is come already, and they knew him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they listed. Likewise shall also the Son of man suffer of them. Then the disciples understood that he spake unto them of John the Baptist" (Matthew 17:11-13).

Luke gives the explanation that John the Baptist came "in the spirit and power of Elias [Elijah]."

But what is my point here? My point here is that sometimes in prophecy a predicted function will take place, but the performer of that function may be someone else if he performs it "in the spirit and power" of that original person.

Now why am I making this point? Because I think that in the book of Revelation, which is a book of prophecy, a function is predicted to be performed by some objects which I believe will instead be performed by something even better then those objects.

Revelation 20:11-15 is what is popularly know as "The Last Judgment." There, the dead, "small and great" stand before God, and "the books will be opened," out of which the dead will be judged.

I pose the question: "why books?" My answer is that the apostle John, living in a "low tech" age, only knew of one means of recording present events for recall at a future time: books. So in his vision of The Last Judgment when he saw "the books" opening, what he saw and wrote of was actual books opening. So in John’s prophecy, "the books" are performing the function of recalling all the deeds of every person who has lived on the planet.

I have a suspicion that when The Last Judgment actually takes place, the things that will be opened will not be books per se, but something even more "high tech" that will be "in the spirit and power" of "the books."

Think about it. In our high tech age, we have all kinds of things that are more efficient and effective than books at recording present events for future recall. We have tape recorders, video tapes, Dictaphones, CD-ROMs, holograms, etc., etc., etc.

Do I believe that "the books" of the Last Judgment will be video CD player consoles? No. I believe the technology is even more advanced then that, and that the recordings that are going on, even as you read this, are on a medium that exists only in the spiritual world. I believe "the books" of Revelation 20:12 are nothing less than "the shells of the dead."

The Shells of the Dead

"The shells of the dead?" you ask. Yes. I will explain the origin of this expression a little later, but for now I will give you a model of it.

Let’s go back to my Chicagoland metaphor. Remember that the pseudo-Frenchman is in the tank in Chicago, while his robot body is in Paris. We speculated that the robot body might be operated by "soul waves" or "spirit waves" so that even his thoughts would be transmitted when operating the remote body from Chicago.

Now I want you to imagine that in the laboratory in Chicago, there is a device that records the "soul waves" being transmitted between Chicago and Paris. Imagine a device that records everything the pseudo-Frenchman sees, hears, smells, tastes, and touches and says as well as thinks. This recording starts the moment the pseudo-Frenchman is "born into" his robot body, and ceases the moment his robot body gets creamed by the Mack truck.

What would be the purpose of keeping such a recording? Well, suppose we wanted to judge the pseudo-Frenchman’s whole life before we decide what to do about him being blacked out in the tank in Chicago, no longer receiving any inputs and presuming himself to be dead. Suppose he committed some crimes with his robot body, or was planning to before he got stopped by the Mack truck. There is a principal of empathic justice that says "Don’t judge a person until you’ve walked in their shoes. "

Just so. If we fit a jury of twelve men and women with a input device similar to the one the pseudo-Frenchman in the tank has, and then connect it to the device that recorded his "soul waves" and then replayed it to the jury, starting from the moment of his "birth" to his pseudo-death, what would be the result?

Well, that pseudo-Frenchman in the tank would get the most empathetic justice that was ever given in the history of man. That jury of twelve would have experienced his whole life, as he lived it, from birth to death, experiencing everything he ever experienced, and knowing everything he ever thought, and everything he ever said, and everything he ever did.

I believe that in the spiritual world, which we can’t see, there is such a record being kept of all that happens to us and through us. When we die, our essential, conscious self goes one place, and this recording of our life stays put where it is, just like a hermit crab leaving a seashell that has become too small for it. This happens to all of us, and these things we leave behind in the spiritual world are aptly called "the shells of the dead."

As I said before, I believe that these are "the books" that are going to be opened at The Last Judgment.

There is a reason why I believe this. The reason is that Christ said something very much like it in Luke 12:2-3:

"For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known. Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops."

I believe that at The Last Judgment, all the "shells" of every human being who will be judged will be experienced by every other human being who will be judged, as well as all the hosts of heaven. The secret information of all the human souls who have ever been will at last become the public property of heaven.

Think about what this means in terms of final justice.

The man who sins against his fellow man will finally get to see what his sin did to that other man’s life. The parents that sin against their children will finally fully know what their sin did to their children’s lives. The children who sin against their parents will finally know what their sin did to their parents. The robber will finally be brought into full knowledge of what his act did to his victim’s life and the lives of that victim’s loved ones, as will the rapist and the murderer. The bomber pilot will finally fully know just how precious all the lives were that he maimed and snuffed out with his payload. The lecher will finally know just how many women’s lives he effected for the worst by providing a market for pornography. The centerfold model will find out just how many men were moved that much closer to hell by her display of herself. Osama bin Laden is going to know exactly what went through the minds of the estimated 200+ people who jumped from the World Trade Center towers in order to avoid being incinerated a second sooner. Adolf Hitler is going to know exactly what he did to every single one of the millions he maimed and murdered as well as their loved ones, as will Joseph Stalin, and Pol Pot.

The Last Judgment is going to be a final and complete judgment of all (including God) upon all (except God). And then all created beings will know what has been before the face of Almighty God since creation. And the Record says that at its end, "every knee shall bow" (Romans 14:10-12, Philippians 2:9-11) to its justness before the final, eternal, penalty is imposed.

A Breach in the Estates

You may ask, if the "shells of the dead" are part of the spiritual world which we cannot sense, then how were they made known? Easy. Somebody breached the estates of the human realm and the angelic realm!

From all that I have read, I have come to the conclusion that, in a nutshell, the way a human being becomes aware of the spiritual world is by becoming unaware of the physical world. There are a number of ways of doing that, but the two most common ones are hypnosis and the Eastern form of meditation.

Now let me stop right here for a moment and clarify something about the hypnotic state.

A hypnotic trance can occur naturally, and has nothing wrong with it, in and of itself. If you have ever driven home in a car the same way every day, day after day, you will have at some point have dropped into a light hypnotic trance. The evidence of this is that at some point you will have driven home, gotten out of your car, and then realized you cannot remember what happened during your drive home.

The reason is that the naturally occurring hypnotic trance is a by product of the efficiency of the human brain. Your brain would just choke up with too much information if you had to exactly concentrate on remembering to do every little thing you do when you do a complex series of tasks (like driving) every day.

What the human brain does is figure out when it is doing a complex set of actions on a routine basis, and then begin to isolate and store those routines in your subconscious mind until you get to the point where you can automatically do them without interfering with another task (like "wool gathering").

The basis of the natural hypnotic trance is those automatic routines which come up and take over while you day dream and wool gather.

In this sense, military training and sports training rely on naturally occurring hypnotic trances. One practices a complex set of actions over and over again until they become a reflex action that completely bypasses your conscious mind.

That is naturally occurring hypnosis.

The other kind is induced hypnosis. How does that kind of hypnosis work? In its simplest form, it works like advertising. We human beings are creatures of the senses, like the animals are. But unlike the animals, we also use words to convey mental pictures of something we want to communicate to our fellows.

If an ape wanted to show another ape a tree, he would have to uproot one and take it over to that other ape for his or her inspection. We humans have the advantage that we can say "tree" to another human being, and that human being will get a picture in his or her mind of a tree.

But the interesting thing about this process is that the mental images that we call up from the words presented to us often have emotional qualities attached to them that can actually affect how we feel.

For example, if I said to you "evergreen," besides recalling a picture of an evergreen, you might also think of winter and feel just a little bit cooler than before, or you might think of Christmas and feel a little happier than before (provided you have enjoyed your Christmases for the most part). But if I say "cactus" you might start feeling a little warmer than before, or a little bit thirstier than before.

These slightly associated feelings might not be very strong at first, but if you were presented with enough images associated with a particular feeling, you would start to feel it more. This is the part of hypnosis that is like advertising. The same principle is used in television commercials. If the product is associated in your mind with enough tantalizing images, you will eventually buy the product.

And so now we come to the work of the hypnotist. He starts off by saying things to his subject that recall mental images of relaxation. He will frequently say the word "relax," and maybe even tell a little story about someone sitting down and relaxing in the shade of a oak tree. So the subject begins to relax.

Then the next step comes. The hypnotist starts to change the mental images he suggests from things that are outside the subject’s body, to things that are part of, or inside the subject’s body. He may mention the feel of air on the skin, the heaviness of the legs, the feeling that hair makes on the scalp. And then he will go on to mention the subject’s digestive processes.

The hypnotist is leading the attention of his subject away from the outer world to the inner world of the mind. And this is where hypnosis is sort of like reading a very interesting book. Have you ever read something interesting and not noticed some activities going on around you? That was a naturally occurring light hypnotic trance. Essentially a directing and concentrating of your consciousness away from one place and exclusively towards another place that is inside your mind.

Then finally the hypnotist uses words to suggest that the subject no longer needs to notice what his eyes see, his ears hear (except for the hypnotist’s voice!), his nose smells, his tongue tastes, and his skin feels. The subject is now completely unaware of the physical world around him. Attention to the outside physical world has now been withdrawn and taken completely into the subject’s own mind.

Now, I’ll stop here for a moment and tell you something you may not have known before. The Eastern form of Meditation works exactly the same way. It is a form of self-hypnosis. Remember that "thought-stopping" exercise I mentioned before? Well that is a good example of how a meditative state is achieved, which is also a self-hypnotic state. On one’s own, without the aid of a hypnotist, one gradually ignores more and more of the outside world around one, and one begins to draw one’s focus of attention inward until one ignores even one’s own five senses. The same state of hypnosis is achieved. Just a different method is used. [Footnote 35]

Most people are just not very good at achieving this total state of inwardness, even with the help of a hypnotist. There is always some inputs that keeps getting in through the senses.

But some people are very good at this. They are able to lose contact with the physical world, and they become aware of the spiritual world. And that is where the mischief begins.

The degree of mischief you can get into depends on the intentions you had before getting into this state, and whether you had any immediate ancestors who had gotten into mischief in this state. I believe that this state is the basis state for all occult phenomena.

I do not say that mischief will occur every time somebody gets into this state. But I will say that if you get into a state like this without the protection of eternal God, you are really asking for it.

The main mischief that concerns me right now is encountering a "shell of the dead" while in such a deep hypnotic trance. There are two problems you can have when you do. The first problem is getting into communication with one. The second problem is getting enmeshed in one.

Communication with a Shell

Let’s take the communication problem first.

Because it retains so much of a departed person’s personality, a "shell of the dead" is able to respond to questions put to it, and thereby acquires some of the aspects of a seemingly conscious existence of its own. If you recall my metaphor of The Accident Victim - the man who was actually dead even through parts of his brain were still alive and able to move his body around - you will get a picture of what a "shell" is like. It can be thought of as a psychic collection of not only all the departed persons memories, but also all his accumulated unconscious habits.

Indeed, it is this communication that first gave this spiritual phenomenon its name. The term comes from the occult use of what is called the Kabbala (or "the tradition"), which is the tradition of Jewish mystical thought. In the Kabbala of Jewish tradition, the "Qlippoth" (Literally "shells.") are the empty husks of various kinds of spiritual entities.

But the occult practitioners of deep hypnotic states, in their trances, encountered these automated mannequins of their former owners, and called them "shells of the dead." In doing so, they recognized that they were not dealing with real persons, but with spiritual "afterimages" of departed persons.

And here we discover where the necromancer makes a mistake that a student of the Kabbala does not. The student of the Kabbala knows these things are not real people. The necromancer does not. The necromancer mistakes the animation of a shell for a person who is alive, and ends up having stilted, stylized conversations with the castoff demi-personality. And this is the basic way that a mediumistic seance works. It’s not real people being contacted. It is their shells.

These shells can disgorge all kind of information that seemingly proves the identity of the person who the shell came from.

An interesting side effect can sometimes occur to a person who has undergone this kind of communication with a shell during a trance. That person can develop the ability to see these shells when outside of the trance. I.e., the person can develop an Extra Sensory Perception of the shells during normal, waking hours.

This can then be passed down to the person’s descendants as an unsuspected "psychic power." This is very likely the source of the phenomena of "ghosts." If you saw the movie The Sixth Sense, you could just about assume that the young boy in it, who can "see dead people," likely had a grandfather or great grandfather who dabbled in the occult in some fashion. He has inherited the ability, without knowing it’s an inherited trait. And interestingly enough, he reports that the "dead people" "do not know they are dead."

Then, too, there is the interesting fact that since a shell was once worn by a human being, it can also be "slipped into" by a being of the diabolic realm, just like a hermit crab can slip into an abandoned seashell. Yes, that does bring us full circle back to the old Christian idea of demons mimicking the departed, but this time with a twist to it that no longer seems so farfetched. In some doctrines of the traditional Kabbala, the "Qlippoth" are actually considered the incarnations of demonic beings. Sometimes these beings will, when introducing themselves, actually admit to using a departed person’s discarded persona before revealing themselves as a yet more higher level kind of being.

And this sheds even more light on another phenomenon of necromantic séances: false religious systems. C.G. Jung got his start in looking into the occult when he attended a séance being conducted by a young woman with mediumistic talents. The thing that attracted his attention was that this uneducated young woman was able to declaim a very complex and sophisticated Gnostic system during her trance states. And then too, our next topic, reincarnation, is often a staple of the doctrines propounded by the beings who show up during séances after they have dispensed with the shells of the dead they used for their disguise.

Enmeshment with a Shell

So now we come to the next problem with "shells of the dead", enmeshment.

What is that? That is when the hypnotic subject’s consciousness gets "enmeshed" with a "shell of the dead." The result is that the hypnotic subject starts to experience the memories of that shell. The subject’s consciousness has "bumped into" the shell, in a sense, and the result is that the subject mistakenly thinks he or she has lived another life as another person, when in fact he or she is just remembering with the memories of the shell.

This typically happens during a Past Life Regression performed by a hypnotist, although it can happen during a meditational state as well. And in fact, during a Past Life Regression, some people brush against more than one shell and end up with the illusion of having lived many lives in the past.

So I have now dealt with the two major challenges to the Christian view of death, necromancy and reincarnation. But I have had to reach a little, and have not been able to completely nail this down with Scripture, as all true Berean’s must do. So I am calling this "A Speculation." If it helps your faith, fine. If it hinders it, feel free to drop it at once.

But before I go, I want to consider what light my speculation sheds on two major world religions: Hinduism, and Buddhism.

Hinduism and Buddhism

Aldous Huxley said that while Western religion concerned itself with belief and morality, Eastern religion concerned itself with practices for altering consciousness and mapping those altered states.

The latter statement reminds me of a science-fiction book I once read, Jack Vance’s The Eyes of the Over World. In this novel there was a society of mud-hut dwellers living a very miserable external existence. They lived in mud huts, and they ate food not much better than mud. But each of the members of this society owned a single piece of advanced technology, called "The Eyes of the Over World." It was a virtual reality machine built into something like glasses that the mud-hut dwellers could then wear. And when they wore them, they were no longer mud-hut dwellers, but aristocrats living in ivory palaces in which they were served gourmet food, and which had grand entertainments, and in which they could spend their time plotting against each other. Because of those glasses they remained mud-hut dwellers.

Now I don’t mean to suggest that lands of Eastern culture are populated solely by mud-hut dwellers. And I don’t mean to suggest that Eastern culture has not produced many fine and beautiful material things, including aristocrats of their own.

But I do take that novel’s mud-hut dwellers as a metaphor for the difference in direction that Eastern culture went in, versus Western culture. In Eastern culture, the material has been sacrificed to the "spiritual." In Western culture almost the reverse has taken place.

In Hinduism, there is a whole plethora of different practices for altering ones consciousness, from meditation to yoga. And once there, the practitioner finds him or herself in a spiritual world populated with "gods many, and lords many", and in mental states in which the doctrine of reincarnation seems like the only logical explanation for existence. Hindu philosophy is then constructed on this ever-changing bedrock of idols and the deceptions of reincarnation. And underneath it all are the demons, working their deception game.

And then there is Buddhism. It is the Eastern religion which arose in response to the endless hopelessness of successively more dreary reincarnations. Where the Hindu seeks to change his consciousness, the Buddhist seeks to eliminate his and stop the endless cycle of reincarnation. And if Hinduism is a deception wrought by demons, what does that make Buddhism but the reaction to something that was false in the first place?

If I have invalidated Hinduism and its doctrine of reincarnation with my speculation into what is really behind it, and if I have invalidated Buddhism as a reaction to the falsities in Hinduism, then what do I leave behind in their place? I leave behind a hope that one day these two false systems of belief will be replaced by the true union of the human spirit with Christ in the Heavenlies by the Holy Spirit of God. For then will there be the true joining of the spiritual and the material. We are all not only meant to be mystics, but also platypuses.
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(34) I have heard Revelation 20:11-15 called "the scariest verses in the Bible." But I’m afraid that I find Genesis 11:6 a whole lot scarier. Perhaps Genesis 11:6 accounts for Revelation 20:11-15?

(35) This can be contrasted with the meditation that is found in the Bible. In the Bible, the word "meditation" would be better rendered in today’s world as "rumination." In Biblical meditation, one goes over the scriptures one has learned again and again, "comparing scripture with scripture," and mulling it over, much like a cow chews a cud. The purpose of this rumination is to better understand what the scriptures mean, and how they apply to one’s life.