73. 8. This love was the greatest of loves among the ancients who lived in the golden, silver and copper ages. It cannot be known from historical sources that conjugial love was the greatest of loves among the ancient and most ancient peoples who lived in those first ages referred to by these names. It cannot be known from historical sources because their written records do not remain, and the records that do exist come from writers who lived after those times. It is, in fact, the later writers who give the ages their names, and who also describe the purity and integrity of the life of those earlier peoples, likewise its gradual deterioration afterwards as being like the descent of gold to iron.

The last or iron age, however, which began at the time of those writers, can be deduced to some extent from the records of the lives of some of the kings, judges and wise men, who were called sages, in Greece and elsewhere. But as it is foretold in Daniel, that age would not hold together, as iron holds together by itself, but it would become like iron mixed with clay, which does not stick together (Daniel 2:43).

[2] Now because the ages that were named after gold, silver, and copper passed away before the dates of our written records, and because knowledge of their marriages cannot, therefore, be gained on earth, it pleased the Lord to show them to me by a spiritual way, by conducting me to the heavens where they have their dwellings, so that I might learn from them personally there what marriages had been like among them when they lived in their ages. For all people whatever, who, since creation, have departed out of the natural world, are now in the spiritual world, and in respect to their loves they are all the same as they were and so remain to eternity.

Since the things I learned are worth knowing and telling, and because they confirm the holiness of marriages, I would like to make them public as they were shown me in an awake state of the spirit and afterwards recalled to remembrance by an angel and so written down. Moreover, because they are from the spiritual world, like the rest of the narratives at the ends of the expositional chapters, I have chosen to divide them into six accounts, presented according to the progressions of the ages.

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