"Est in Mercurio quicquid quœrunt sapientes,"
All is in the understanding that the wise seek,—Mercury being the Latin equivalent for Hermes.
The mention of Swedenborg and Andersen implied their possession of the faculty indispensable to our work, that of mystical insight, of which they were the most notable recent representatives.
A larger part was played by Hermes in another instruction received a few months later[31]. This was also given in sleep, the vision taking the form of a "Banquet of the Gods" in which the seeress received the following exhortation from him, in enforcement of the necessity of pure and natural habits of life for the perfectionment of the faculties requisite for full spiritual perception, when, having put into her hands a branch of a fig-tree bearing upon it ripe fruit, he said:—
"If you would be perfect, and able to know and to do all things, quit the heresy of Prometheus. Let fire warm and comfort you externally: it is heaven's gift. But do not wrest it from its rightful purpose, as did that betrayer of your race, to fill the veins of humanity with its contagion, and to consume your interior being with its breath. All of you are men of clay, as was the image which Prometheus made. Ye are nourished with stolen fire, and it consumes you. Of all the evil uses of heaven's good gifts, none is so evil as the internal use of fire. For your hot foods and drinks have consumed and dried up the magnetic power of your nerves, sealed your senses, and cut short your lives. Now, you neither see nor hear; for the fire in your organs consumes your senses. Ye are all blind and deaf, creatures of clay. We have sent you a book to read. Practise its precepts, and your senses shall be opened."
Then, not recognising him, I said, "Tell me your name, Lord." At this he laughed and answered, "I have been about you from the beginning. I am the white cloud on the noon-day sky." "Do you, then," I asked, "desire the whole world to abandon the use of fire in preparing food and drink?"
Instead of answering my question, he said, "We show you the excellent way. Two places only are vacant at our table. We have told you all that can be shown you on the level on which you stand. But our perfect gifts, the fruits of the Tree of Life, are beyond your reach now. We cannot give them to you until you are purified and have come up higher. The conditions are God's; the will is with you"[32].
The allusion to Prometheus, and the fact that Hermes had been represented in the Greek tragedy of that name as the executor of the vengeance of the Gods upon Prometheus, as well also as the significance of the fig-branch and the fact of its being the symbol of Hermes as the Spirit of Understanding,—all these things were beyond her knowledge at the time, some of them indeed having been long lost. But all were made clear as our education for our work proceeded, and we learnt the intention and recognised the necessity of restoring the Greek presentment of the Sacred Mysteries in explanation of the Hebrew, and in correction of the ecclesiastical presentment of Christianity. The restoration was to be twofold, of faculty and of knowledge, the knowledge to be recovered through the faculty by which it was originally obtained. Hence the insistance on our adoption of the pure regimen of the Seers of all time. Hence, too, the presentation to her by Hermes of the fig-branch bearing ripe fruit. The parable of the cursing of the barren fig-tree was explained to us as denoting the loss by the church of the inward understanding, the Intuition. In the Seeress it was restored; she was the appointed representative of it. The "time of the end" was at hand, of the approach of which the budding of the fig-tree was to be the sign. And here it was not merely budding and blossoming, but bearing mature fruit to signify that in her the faculty was restored in its perfection.
In an instruction subsequently given to me by her Genius, he said of her, "I have fashioned a perfect instrument," implying that the process of her preparation under his tuition had extended over numerous lives. And again, "The Gods have given to their own a perfect ear."
Being desirous once to test the powers of a medium to whom she was totally unknown even by name, she asked his controlling spirit about herself and her faculty. "You are not a trance-medium at all!" the spirit exclaimed in reply. "My medium is a trance-medium. You are far beyond that. You are a spiritual lens. You are a mirror in which the highest spirits—the Gods—can reflect their faces. You take the light of the whole universe and divide it so that it can be understood, as it has never been understood yet. Your gift is very extraordinary. You are a glass to reflect the highest and the greatest to the world." This was in 1877, before she was known in connection with the spiritual movement of the age.