“I could not believe that Satan, if he wished to deceive me and take me down to hell, would have recourse to means so adverse to his purpose as this, of rooting out my faults, implanting virtues and spiritual strength; for I saw clearly that I had become at once another person through the instrumentality of these visions.”
Teresa of Ávila, The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus, ch. 28 §19 (trans. David Lewis, 3rd ed. 1904), public domain.public domain
How it works in the game: the move Rooting Out My Faults
In the gameThe test for a vision that might be delusion or deception: not how vivid it felt, but what it left behind. A false spirit does not root out a fault and plant a virtue in its place — that would work against its own purpose.
Learned byThe Life of Teresa of Jesus (Lv 1)
×2.5The Varieties of Religious Experiencean argument · why?
James studies mystics like her at length and asks what a vision means, psychologically. She is not offering a theory of what it means. She is offering a test for whether it is real — not its intensity, but what it leaves behind.