Dionysius the Areopagite in the 4th century pointed to nine distinct choirs of angels, each a level miraculously incomprehensible to the stage of Being just below it. And the guardian angels are only but the ‘lowest’ and closest to the humans of these nine…
True, not fictionalized, to the best of my recall. (Because the memory function rapidly deteriorates immediately upon crossing the membrane from sleeping to waking — the sudden influx of sensory inputs taxes one’s will in an overpowering way.)
Paracelsus was the last natural healer, revered and loved by the common folk of many places in the late Middle Ages. Outcast and demonized because he did not undergo a traditional academic medical education, instead he wandered about from a young age observing the capacities of wild plants and earth substances via direct spiritual perception. He knew that poison and remedy were the same substance, differentiated only by a matter of dosage, and discerned the correct dose and preparations as if ‘demonically’.
The opening of Dante’s Inferno reads: ‘Nel mezzo del cammino di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura / che la diritta via era smarrita.’ — which could be poetically rendered in English as: “When I had traversed midway on this life’s trail, I woke to myself alone within a shadowed wilderness, for I had lost the right and proper path that never strays.”
||skirmishes|| ||with|| ||reality|| 