We usually hear of demonic activity in far off primitive places, but not always. Closer to home, I suggest not playing around with that pendulum thing too much. Some activities seem to invite demonic manifestation, for lack of a better word. The wife of one of my deacons practiced an old Bohemian pendulum trick with a threaded needle stuck into the eraser end of a pencil. Hold it over a woman's wrist and it would move back and forth horizontally for a boy and 90 degrees vertically for a girl. It would pause and stop between children and accurately tell how many children the woman had and in which order by sex. One young lady said, "see, it's not true because it said I had two girls and a boy and I only have two children. Eight months later, she gave birth to a girl.
The lady maintained it was a harmless cultural practice until the night she sat up in bed, and according to her husband, levitated about 6 inches off the mattress while speaking an unknown language. The Deacon (when he got over the shock somewhat) happened to record her speaking on an old cassette player, and took it to Baylor University nearby where one of the professors proclaimed she was speaking very rudimentary Hebrew, like that of a little child.
The night it all happened, the Deacon was mightily motivated to pray, and when he said the name of Jesus in his prayer, she dropped back down onto the mattress. She still maintained it was a good spirit that had been involved, because she felt happy. But her husband asked, "then why did it leave at the name of Jesus?" This happened out in the country outside Waco TX. They were both my church members and I knew them well.
In Sudan, I met a woman who had been demon possessed with the peculiar distinction that whenever the demon entered her, she would suddenly insist on being called by an entirely different name. The day she prayed to accept Jesus as her savior, as soon as she said the name Jesus, the demon left, never to return. As an aside, when I met her she was doing laundry on a cow dung floor. You would not believe how clean that floor was unless you saw it. She kept it swept with a home made broom.
