Helene's trances came in many forms. Sometimes they appeared little different from those of most mediums, while at other times they appeared more like the major manifestations of hysterical somnambulism. Like St. Theresa or Joan of Arc - probably the greatest "medium" of all time - Helene talked to her spirits, heard them answer in reply and often saw them - or so it seemed to her. Whether or not she actually experienced genuine sensory hallucinations or wheather they were a product of subjective delusion is difficult to say.

The central figure of her hallucenations was a benevolent spirit named Leopold. Leopold was her guide, mentor and protector, not only in her trance adventures in medieval India or forty-three million miles away on Mars, but also in ordinary life. Socrates had a similar protecting spirit or daemon whose voice he heard internally and which, to him, as was the case with the hallucinatory angels of Joan of Arc and Helene Smith's Leopold, was completely convincing evidence of the reality of a world of spiritual beings. Socrates' daemon certainly enabled him to face death calmly in the conviction that within a few minutes he would find himself in another world. St. Joan went to torture and death rather than disbelieve in the reality of her guardian voices. Helene never wavered in her belief that Leopold possessed a reality of his own. Helene died in 1930. She was saved from the possibility of ending her life in an insane asylum by one of her sitters at the seance table, a rich American woman, who left her an annuity for life.

In spite of the claims of the spiritualists and the believers engaged in psychic research, it can be amply demonstrated that the so-called spirit personalities exhibited during the mediumistic trance show the same peculiarities as the secondary personalities seen in hypnosis, automatic writing or in certain hysterical phenomena. The spirits, controls and guides of the spiritualistic pantheon are nothing more than products of the medium's own mental processes. They are personifications or mirrored projections of the medium's own repressed impulses and wishes, molded and conditioned by the ideas of spiritualism and the influences of the seance room. There is no need for the psychic investigator, however sincere he may be, to bring back the ancient theory of external possession to account for the phenomena of the medium's trance. Such theories should remain what they are - either psychological problems or anthropological curiosities.