The memory of the soul is recovered by a threefold operation—that of the Soul herself, of the Moon, and of the Sun. The Genius is not an informing spirit. He can tell nothing to the soul. All that she receives is already within herself. But in the darkness of the night, it would remain there undiscovered, but for the torch of the angel who enlightens. "Yea," says the angel Genius to his client, "I illuminate thee, but I instruct thee not. I warn thee, but I fight not. I attend, but I lead not. Thy treasure is within thyself. My light showeth where it lieth."...
The voice of the Genius is the voice of God; for God speaks through him as a man through the horn of a trumpet. Thou mayest not adore him, for he is the instrument of God, and thy minister. But thou must obey him, for he hath no voice of his own, but sheweth thee the will of the Spirit.
We noted that the inspiring angel of the Apocalypse had twice similarly spoken when the seer was about to worship him;—"See thou do it not; for I am thy fellow-servant, and of thy brethren the prophets, and of them which keep the sayings of this book: Worship God."
The like positive injunctions were given us also against according divine honours to Jesus.
Besides Socrates, there is another notable historical "Spiritualist" of whom our experiences vividly reminded us. This was Joan of Arc. The correspondence between her and "Mary," in gifts, experiences, and personal characteristics, was of the closest. We had no difficulty in believing her history. Each of them, moreover, had a mission of deliverance, the one political and national, the other spiritual and universal.
Although we had learned to trust our Illuminators implicitly long before the receipt of the above instruction, we were still without assurance as to the source and method of the revelation. Be the knowledges received by us as new as they might to our external selves, they never failed to be familiar as recovered memories, excepting in such cases as they were couched in terms of which the sense, being mystical, was not at once recognised. But such difficulties were soon overcome, and the doctrine, when fully apprehended, was always to us as necessary and self-evident truth, and such as to excite wonder at the potency of the glamour which had hitherto withheld it from the world's recognition. In every detail, the revelation represented for us Common-Sense in its loftiest mode. For the agreement it represented was not that of all men merely, but that of all parts of Man: of mind, soul and spirit, intellect and intuition, and these purified and unfolded to the utmost, and perfectly equilibrated. Whatever the manner of its communication, whether heard by the interior ear, seen by the interior eye, flashed on the mind as vivid ideas, whether acquired waking or sleeping, or in the intermediate state of trance-lucidity, or given in writing, it always seemed that we knew it before, and did not require to be told it, but only to be reminded of it.
The problem specially exercised myself. "Mary" had other work than the analysis of our spiritual experiences. That was my special function. I learnt to see in her a soul of surpassing luminousness and variousness, who had been entrusted to my charge expressly in order that by my study of her I might recover for the world's benefit the long-lost knowledge of the soul's being, nature, and history. And so many and various were her spiritual states, that she seemed to me to represent in turn every stage of the soul's evolution, and to be "not one, but all mankind's epitome."
This also used to occur so frequently as to be observed by both of us and discussed between us. When in the process of my endeavour to find the solution of some problem, such as the meaning of a parabolic or otherwise obscure passage in Scripture, I had exhausted my stock of tentative hypotheses, but, through consideration for her other and engrossing work, refrained from imparting my need to her, she would receive in sleep the desired solution, which she wrote down on waking, and which invariably proved satisfactory beyond my highest imaginings. And besides showing intimate acquaintance with the course of my thought, it was couched in language which, for simplicity, dignity, purity, and lucidity, was without an equal in literature; the English being that of the best period of our literature, and better than the best even of that period. She herself had a remarkable mastery of English, but these compositions reduced her to despair, causing her to exclaim, "Why cannot I write as well when I am awake as I do in my sleep!" Of course the explanation lay in the limiting influence of the physical organism.
The frequency of this occurrence led me, in the absence of authoritative explanation, to try the following, as an hypothesis purely tentative. The revelations generally came to her when, through my inability to find the interpretations which satisfied me, my work required them, and they came independently of any desire or knowledge on her part. Might it not be, then, that it was my own spirit who knew them and gave them to her, finding her more sensitive to impression than myself? The explanation was not one that either pleased or satisfied me, one reason being that I took a delight in recognising the primacy accorded to her. The idea occurred to me one night, and I pondered it the next day, but did not divulge it. What happened on the evening of that day led me to suspect that our Genii had suggested it to me in order to make it the occasion of imparting to me the knowledge in question, namely, that of the real source and method of the revelation.
For the experience to be properly appreciated it must be remembered that "Mary" had no knowledge of the explanation suggested to me, and neither of us had as yet entertained the idea of past lives as the key to our present work. The question of Reincarnation itself had not come before us, and far less the possibility of recovering the memory of the things learnt in previous existences, much as we had been puzzled to account for our experiences in the absence of some such explanation.