I finished the book "Ardath" by Marie Corelli. It was a big one but a good read.
Synopsis:
There's a guy named Theos Alwyn, a poet from England who's also skeptical in the religious sense. He happens to be in the East somewhere, the Caucasus mountains, and meets with a monk named Heliobas. (Heliobas is also the main character in Corelli's novel "A Romance of Two Worlds.") He's a mysterious, all-seeing, all-knowing kind of guy, with some deep in's when it comes to religion.
Alwyn stands against religion and Heliobas guides him along. Soon Alwyn takes a serious nap and is transported into realms somewhere above, where he meets an angel he comes to love, and he comes back around and immediately writes a long, inspired poem. One sitting.
Now he's interested in religion. Heliobas opens to him certain mysteries from the book of 2 Esdras, and sends him to the field of Ardath, mentioned in 2 Esdras, which is at the ruins of Babylon. He gets there, goes to the field of Ardath, has some mystical experiences involving the same angel figure from before, then he seems to be transported to a whole other time and place.
The bulk of the book is his experiences in this other time and place, the city of Al-Kyris. In Al-Kyris, they have a king, priests, a High Priestess figure, poets, critics, professors, the whole thing. Alwyn doesn't have recall of who he is, just vague hints come to him occasionally about his life and religion. In Al-Kyris he becomes fast friends with the Laureate of the realm, Sah-luma. There's enough hints dropped along the way that it's obvious the two of them share something very intimate in common.
I can't summarize the whole Al-Kyris section since it's huge. He's there when the whole kingdom experiences its downfall and Sah-luma is killed. Then he's back to the present day. It's revealed to him that all that was a dream, but it was a dream of actual people and things that happened. In fact Sah-luma was a prior incarnation of himself. That explains why all of Sah-luma's poems are poems that Alwyn also wrote, including the long one, Nourhalma, the inspired one from before.
In the experiences he had he focused in on many presentiments of Jesus Christ, the Cross being used as a mystical symbol in anticipation of the Gospel, prophesied to come into the world in 5,000 years. So he was reliving things that happened close to 7,000 years before.
Because of his life of flesh and denial of the spiritual things, he has been denied a final consummation and life with the female angel figure, his everlasting beloved Edris. But obviously he's well on the right path now, being aware of the reality of spiritual things and God.
The last section has Alwyn back in England, where he's with friends and heavily engaged in the social scene. His big inspired poem was a bestseller and everyone wants to meet him. The last section has some truly boring parts. It's kind of a let-down. The big thing in it is that he's a completely different person and fame holds no charm. So he's put off by all the hangers-on, etc.
He meets Heliobas, who's in England on his way to Mexico. They talk over Alwyn's transformation and what his life has in store for him. He knows he'll someday be with Edris. He also knows he has some kind of power to bring her back, but keeps avoiding it out of true love. He's denying himself, which turns out to have been a good move.
Finally he meets Edris in a cathedral and it's revealed that she's come down to spend mortality with him after all, because every time he prayed that she be spared this and that he get along as well as he can, it actually meant she was that much closer to being sent.
They go somewhere, to some mountain retreat somewhere, and live there. He's writing poetry, as I recall, and doing his best to convert the world to spirituality through poetry and away from their vain ways.
