"I have got hold of the rarest and most precious book extant. It was written before the world began. The text is easy enough to read; but the notes, which are very copious and numerous, are in such very minute and obscure characters that I cannot make them out. I want you to get for me the spectacles which Swedenborg used to wear; not the smaller pair—those he gave to Hans Christian Andersen—but the large pair, and these seem to have got mislaid. I think they are Spinoza's make. You know he was an optical-glass maker by profession, and the best we have ever had. See if you can get them for me"[29].
When I looked up after reading this letter, I saw the postman hastening away across the sands, and I called out to him, "Stop! how am I to send the answer? Won't you wait for me?"
He looked round, stopped, and came back to me.
"I have the answer here," he said, tapping his letter bag, "and I shall deliver it immediately."
"How can you have the answer before I have written it?" said I. "You are making a mistake."
"No," said he, "In the city from which I come, the replies are all written at the office and sent out with the letters themselves. Your reply is in my bag."
"Let me see it," I said. He took another letter from his wallet and gave it to me. I opened it, and read, in my own handwriting, this answer, addressed to you:—
"The spectacles you want can be bought in London. But you will not be able to use them at once, for they have not been worn for many years, and they want cleaning sadly. This you will not be able to do yourself in London, because it is too dark there to see, and because your fingers are not small enough to clean them properly. Bring them here to me, and I will do it for you."
I gave this letter back to the postman. He smiled and nodded at me; and I saw then to my astonishment that he wore a camel's-hair tunic round his waist. I had been on the point of addressing him—I know not why—as Hermes. But I now saw that it was John the Baptist; and in my fright at having spoken with so great a saint, I awoke.
This was the second suggestion of a Greek element in our work, the first having been the slight allusion to Phoibos Apollo in the illumination concerning the Marriage in Cana of Galilee[30]. The signification of the connection between Hermes and John the Baptist remained unintelligible to us until the key to it was given us in a revelation of the method of the Bible-writers explaining their practice of representing principles as persons. We then found that by the baptism or purification, physical and mental, practised by John, was meant the course of life and thought whereby alone man develops the faculty of the understanding of spiritual things. And Hermes is the Greco-Egyptian name for the "second of the Gods," called by Isaiah the Spirit of Understanding. Hence the adoption of this name by the formulators of the Hermetic, or sacred books of Egypt; and the favourite motto of the Hermetists:—