I saw this music video more than a year ago, and the aerial dancers and a few of the lines combined in my head somehow to remind me of another story.

Consider the atmospheric elements this production has in common with Jacob’s episode at Bethel: a supremely low point in life; dreams; a mood of a powerful uncertainty; angels ascending and descending; direct revelation. Look at the way it uses light: shifting, dim, filtered and refracted, it appears alien and, at times, even oppressive, but always from above, and almost always with an attractive power, much as the bright sun would appear from the bottom of a lake — or as the light of Heaven would appear from under the fires, mists and dusts of Earth.

The lines in question have an obviously Biblical flavour, and I later found out that Flowers is well-known to be religious (Mormon); but I don’t see those things as directly relevant to the value I find in the video. The story of Jacob’s Ladder is a colourful and powerful one, and here’s something that actually helps to reveal that colour.

So Rebekah called Jacob her younger son, and said to him, “Surely your brother Esau comforts himself concerning you by intending to kill you. Now therefore, my son, obey my voice: arise, flee to my brother Laban in Haran”…

So he came to a certain place and stayed there all night; and he took one of the stones of that place and put it at his head, and he lay down in that place to sleep. Then he dreamed, and behold, a ladder was set up on the earth, and its top reached to heaven; and there the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.

— Genesis 27,28

Jacob's Ladder by William Blake