Abstract

Author Johannes Greber (1874–1944) was a Catholic priest in rural Germany when, in 1923, he began sitting with several trance mediums, through whom he received profound messages about God, Creation, Christ, and the laws governing spirit communication. The revelations recorded by Greber were so much in conflict with what he had come to believe that he left the priesthood several years later and moved to the United States, eventually settling in Teaneck, New Jersey, where he began a church focused on spiritual healing. This book was first published in German and English in 1932. A later book, The New Testament, was initially published in 1937. The reader looking for evidential mediumship will find little, if anything, in this book to satisfy him or her. If any deceased relatives or friends communicated with Greber or those in attendance with him, he does not mention it, although he alludes to such communication and mentions hearing from many spirits, both advanced and low-level ones. No names are given for the spirits and indications are, though not totally clear, that the messages set forth in the book came from what other sources identified as “group souls”—a number of enlightened souls speaking as one. Greber refers to them as “messengers.” Clearly, Greber’s objective was to offer enlightenment, not evidence. For Greber, the evidence that the communication was from the spirit world came from his conclusion that the knowledge and wisdom communicated through the young trance mediums far exceeded their maturity, education, and experience. In this sense, Greber’s research was much like that of Alan Kardec, the pioneering French psychical researcher, who recorded volumes of “truths” communicated by purportedly advanced spirits. Today, it might be called “channeled” information. As an example, one of the early messages recorded by Greber reads: Your scientists include among mediums those individuals who have the gift of clairvoyance and clairaudience. This is not correct. It is true that clairvoyants, clairaudients, and clairsentients have mediumistic powers, but they are not true mediums. With them it is their own spirit which is active, which sees and hears, whereas in mediums properly so-called it is a strange spirit which acts while the medium’s spirit is temporarily dispossessed. The gifts of clairvoyance and clairaudience do indeed enable the spirit of a man to see and hear the spirits about him, but a clairvoyant is not an instrument of these spirits and should therefore not be classed as a medium. The spirit of a person endowed with clairvoyance, clairaudience, and with supernatural powers of feeling, smelling, and tasting, owes these faculties exclusively to the fact that it can detach itself from the body of [to] a greater or less degree.... (p. 116)