73. 8. This love was the love of loves among the ancient people who lived in the Golden, Silver, and Copper ages. The histories do not teach that the love in marriage was the love of loves for the very ancient and the ancient peoples who lived in those early ages named as above, because their writings did not survive. Those that did survive come from later writers, who do mention them and also describe the purity and soundness of their life, as well as its gradual decline, figuratively, from gold to iron. But something of the last, or Iron, age, which began at the time of these writers, can be pieced together from the histories of the lives of some kings, judges, and sages who were called Sophi in Greece and elsewhere. But Daniel (2:43) predicts that this age will not last the way iron lasts by itself, but that it will become like iron and clay mixed, which do not hold together.
Now, the ages called Gold, Silver, and Copper were over before the days of the writers, and therefore we lack knowledge about marriages in those ages, on earth. So it suited the Lord to open it up for me by a spiritual route, bringing me to the heavens where those people's homes are, to verbally learn from them what marriages among them were like when they were living during their epochs. For everyone who has ever left the natural world, since creation, is in the spiritual world, and as to their loves they are all still the same and stay that way forever. Since these things are worth knowing and telling about, and they will establish the holiness of marriages, I want to publish them the way they were shown to me while I was wide awake, in a spiritual state, and were later recalled to my mind by an angel, and in this way written down. And since they are from the spiritual world like the other accounts following the chapters, I will divide them into six stories, according to the progress of those ages.
