Jonathan Black - The Sacred History: How Angels, Mystics and Higher Intelligence Made Our World

The stories retold in this book, taken together and told in sequence, represent a sort of folk history of the world.

But more than that, they work on many different levels. They are part of a mystical tradition.

Many describe dramatic events not in the physical world but in the realms of gods, angels and other spiritual beings. Many follow people who entertain gods and angels unawares, or travellers between the worlds who slip through into alternative realities. These stories may show what it feels like when the spiritual realm intrudes on the everyday, when spiritual beings break through, when we suddenly feel a presence, or when we, unwittingly perhaps, step through into a world that is different upside down and inside out.

Many of these stories have long loomed large in the collective memory but can still quicken the blood today, because they represent great turning points in spiritual evolution or, to put it in modern terms, turning points in the evolution of consciousness.

According to mystical tradition, this evolution is the unfolding of a divine plan. Great spiritual beings lead us era by era, stage by stage, drawing us out and helping us to evolve. When we fight, when we love, when we are tested to our limits and find a kind of victory in a kind of defeat, we are following in the footsteps of gods and angels, following patterns of meaning and behaviour that they have laid down for us.

But, as with all things mystical, this history is not simply linear. Because time does not operate in the same way in the spiritual worlds, there may be historical events which are in a sense still going on. Events in world history may also be recapitulated in all our individual lives, so that we must each endure an exile in the desert and go on a quest for the Holy Grail. Some events may have been re-enacted as part of religious ceremony. For example, the story that has come down to us as Cinderellaoriginated as the sacred drama of Isis, enacted in the temples of ancient Egypt. Some stories, including those of rebirth, may have been part of initiation rituals, where someone was born again into a higher state of being or consciousness. And some of these rituals are still being re-enacted in secret today.

In the form that they have come down to us, these stories are meant to be wise. They are teaching stories, meant to work on us at what we today might call a subconscious level, but they are also intended to help us become more conscious of the shapes and mystical patterns of our lives. I will argue that this is one of the reasons why stories are important. Stories, I want to suggest, tend to show the immanence of the divine in human experience.

That is why great events in the unfolding of the spiritual history of the world can be seen in stories which might seem entirely fictional in fairy stories, tales of the Arabian nights and folk tales of encounters with elemental beings and the spirits of the dead.