Those who have been used to seeing pictures of Angels may be reminded that the wings are symbolic only, of beings whose flight is swifter than our thought. They need no wings, who flash with the speed of light upon their journeys.
Those of us who have not read the modern lucid books describing the planes of being may care for a moment to consider the lilies, which offer the best analogy we have for understanding the Heavens. The bulb of the Liliacese, that is, of such plants as the lily, camas, onion, and hyacinth, consists of many layers or spheres concentrated round one nucleus. In our planet Earth, the nucleus is the world visible, which has three layers of subplanes, the land, the sea, and the air, of different densities, for the water is thicker than the air, and the rocks more compact than the ocean which rests upon them. Outside these three layers of the bulb there are others, concentric spheres of ether, less in their densities, quicker in their vibrations, too tenuous for perception by our gross animal senses. Our astral bodies are attuned to the vibrations of the astral subplanes, which we visit in dreams and dwell in after death. Our spiritual body, when it grows, is able to inhabit the land, sea, and air of the lower spirit-plane or heaven spiritual. Beyond are the heavens celestial, and their outermost layers are those of the Christ-sphere, an orb enormously transcending the material sun in size and radiance. In all there are forty-nine, or seven octaves of subplanes, alluded to in Genesis as that Ladder of Being, on which the patriarch Jacob saw traffic of ascending and descending Angels.
Imagination, the formation of images in the mind, may have two separate modes, that of an artist creating forms to which he shall give expression, and that of the seer who is able to perceive things which are shown to him. One cannot ever know to what extent one creates, or in what degree one perceives.
My vision is set down as it occurred with some of the mental comments.
Each of the four Angels bears upon his shoulder a limb of the lambent cross. On this Storm sits naked as he was crucified, but Rain wears a robe which has the texture one sees in the petals of an Easter lily. It is edged with a decoration of pistils and stamens, sprinkled, made out of dust of light seeming to signify fertility. Both figures are strongly radiant.
Behind them is Hiawatha, a great figure, august, serene, luminous. Catherine and Thunder Feather have fallen away, unable to endure the increasing splendor of the light.
The foreground is of tawny plains, reaching away downward to a sea deeply blue. Hull down, beyond are far-away white Alps.
This landscape, a province in extent, is, as it were, the arena of an amphitheater, but the floor of the lowest tier or circle is far above the summits of the alps. The edge of the tier is not defined like the frontage or balustrade of a balcony, but vague, as when one looks up at the floor of a cloud field. It is the margin of a world which has its plains, seas, hills, ethereal Andes, all glittering etched in light, with a detail of trees luminous, temples opalescent, and iridescent palaces. There are innumerable multitudes of people watching.
It is as though this upper world were (invisibly) continuous overhead, but only becomes visible towards the horizon.
Above this first tier of the amphitheater there is a second, even a third, perhaps more. But against even the second tier our sun would look like a round patch of darkness. And this second tier is like a shadow cast by the third. The light is utterly beyond human endurance, yet it proceeds from the spectators, circle on circle, world above world, populous with an innumerable throng, millions of millions, either of the redeemed or of the angelic hosts.