I took Jerome Clark to task in these pages for stating that mediæval “fantastic visionary phenomena” are “without analogue in our post-Enlightenment times”, and suggested that disproof of this wayward assertion could be found in channelled ‘revelations’ about crop circles. True, but for full-blown refutation I should have adduced the angel industry: the word plethora might have been invented for its literary effusions over the last decade and a half. Some of these – an example to hand is Lorna Byrnes’s Stairways to Heaven (Coronet 2010) written, it says, with the guidance of “the Archangel Michael and other angels” – are sincere if often syrupy accounts of visionary experiences and their effects on individuals’ lives.