To Wilfrid she said she loved “God.”  To Minna she used the term “Heaven,” and when Minna questioned:  “But art thou worthy of heaven when thou despisest the creatures of God?” Seraphita answered: 

“Couldst thou love two beings at once?  Would a lover be a lover if he did not fill the heart?  Should he not be the first, the last, the only one?  She who loves will she not quit the world for her lover?  Her entire family becomes a memory; she has no longer a relative.  The lover! she has given him her whole soul.  If she has kept a fraction of it, she does not love.  To love feebly, is that to love?  The word of the lover makes all her joy, and quivers in her veins like a purple deeper than blood; his glance is a light which penetrates her; she dissolves in him; there, where he is, all is beautiful; he is warmth to the soul:  he irradiates everything; near him could one know cold or night?  He is never absent; he is ever within us; we think in him, to him, for him.  Minna, that is the-way I love.”

And when Minna, like Wilfrid, “seized by a devouring jealousy,” demanded to know “whom?” Seraphita answered, “God.”  This she did because the one whom she loved became her God.  We are told that “love makes gods of men.”  Perfect love, the love of those who are spiritual-mates—­soul-mates—­the “man-woman-god whom we await,” becomes an immortal:  and immortals are gods.

Moreover if Seraphita had intended to teach the love of the religious devotee to The Absolute instead of a perfected sex-love, she would not have pointed out to both Wilfrid and Minna that which she, in her superior vision, her supra-consciousness, perceived, namely, that Wilfrid and Minna were really intended for spiritual mates, and that what they each saw in her was really a prophecy of their own perfected and spiritualized love.

The subject is one that is positively incomprehensible and unexplainable to the average mind.  All mystic literature, when read with the eyes of understanding, exalts and spiritualizes sex.  The latter day degeneration of sex is the “trail of the serpent,” which Woman is to crush with her heel.  And Woman is crushing it to-day, although to the superficial observer, who sees only surface conditions, it would appear as though Woman had fallen from her high estate, to take her place on a footing with man.  This view is the exoteric, and not the esoteric, one.

They who have ears hear the inner voice, and they who have eyes see with the inner sight.  The mystery of sex is the eternal mystery which each must solve for himself before he can comprehend it, and when solved eliminates all sense of sin and shame; brings Illumination in which everything is made clear and makes man-woman immortal—­a god.

Swedenborg’s theory of Heaven as a never-ending honeymoon in which spiritually-mated humans dwell, has been denounced by many as “shocking” to a refined and sensitive mind.  But this idea is shocking only because even the most advanced minds are seldom Illumined, their advancement being along the lines of intellectual research and acquired knowledge, which, as we have previously explained, is not synonymous with interior wisdom.