Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic/Chapter 18

by Signe Toksvig

 

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

"Arcana Celestia"

MEANWHILE, as to that "earthy loan," his body, Swedenborg had moved about a bit. In the summer of 1747, after he had finished all the work connected with the Board of Mines, he went to Amsterdam. At the end of September, 1748, he went to London, and about September, 1749, he returned to Holland.¹ Perhaps the house in Stockholm had not been secluded enough after all, but in any case he intended to begin publishing some of his new writing, and that could only be done abroad.

The interpretation of the Bible, his mission, was of course his chief interest. He settled down to this about the end of 1748 in lodgings in London, "at six shillings a week for half a year," with a reduction should he stay a whole year. The new interpretation (of Genesis and Exodus) was called Arcana Celestia ("Heavenly Secrets"). It was published in London during the years 1749—56, without the name of the author, which was not disclosed till 1768. The work ran to eight large quarto volumes. It received almost no public attention, and this despite the fact that his publisher, John Lewis of Paternoster Row, declared the author to have a "depth, which if once fathomed (and it is not unfathomable) will yield the noblest repast to a pious mind." To ward off low suspicion he added, "But if anyone imagines that I say this to puff a book, in the sale of which my interest is so nearly concerned, any gentleman is welcome to peruse it at my shop, and to purchase it or not, as his own judgment shall direct him." ²

John Lewis was plainly overcome by Swedenborg's personality; especially by his insistence that the books must be sold cheaply, though printed in so "grand and pompous a manner." The first volume cost the author, so the printer tells us, two hundred pounds, and he had advanced as much for the second, yet any profit was to go to the "propagation of the gospel." Quite understandably the publisher found this author modest, benign, and generous, but he had no hope of the immediate success of the work, comforting himself however with the knowledge that it took years for Locke's Human Understanding and Milton's Paradise Lost to make their way.

Lewis's insistence that this was a book-bargain beyond all book-bargains was not incorrect. But not till our day, really, with its nonsectarian interest in religion and ethics, new light on the subconscious workings of the mind, and great development of psychical research, can this rather chaotic mass of "heavenly secrets" be seen for the treasure trove it indubitably is, from several points of view.

The Bible interpretation had been freed from the cruder aspects of The Word Explained, which comprised Swedenborg's first, almost unchanged, automatic writings. A comparison: in the latter the "Philistines" (Genesis 26:15) are said to mean "the gentiles who do not profess the true faith and also the Jews who are not yet converted, and who thus are separated from the members who have entered into Christ's church," and in the "inmost" sense as being "the crew of the devil," or the devil's intermediaries.³ But in the Arcana the "Philistines" are interpreted as meaning the kind of people who "applied themselves little to life but much to doctrine," the kind who "being without good cannot understand truth and are not even willing to know it." ⁴

The first interpretation savors of those bellicose opinions, cited previously, belonging to the second century's strife between converted and unconverted Jews, but the second is purely ethical and universal. In general, although the Arcana continued, most tediously, to explain the Old Testament as referring symbolically to the New, the stress throughout was laid on the spiritual regeneration of man, with marvelous twistings of the text to suit the interpretation.

Swedenborg claimed for the Arcana, as indeed he did for all his theological works, that they were not his own, in the sense that they had been celestially "dictated" to him. That raises the question of the "authority" of these writings. It was one that preoccupied him considerably at the beginning. In the latter part of his life he always stated as an absolute fact that the Lord, or the Lord "in the Word," was his sole source of information, but at the beginning of his intercourse with the other world, when he so often quotes this or that entity, he felt he had some explanation to make. In a diary entry he insisted that he did not accept any "representation, vision or discourse" from spirit or angel without reflecting on them "as to what thence was useful and good, thus what I might learn therefrom." Now as he believed that all truth and good were from the Lord, he could reassure himself that he had been instructed "by no spirit nor by any angel but by the Lord alone from Whom is all truth and good . . ." ⁵

"God-Messiah," a Judæo-Christian expression, disappeared from his writings in January, 1748,⁶ and "the Lord" took His place, since in Swedenborg's developed theology, as with other Protestant mystics before him, there was only one God who had taken the form of Jesus Christ in order to divinize humanity, not by any "Atonement," but by ethical example.⁷

In the diary passage quoted above, Swedenborg explains the not unessential point as to how he knew whether what the spirits said was true and good and thus from the Lord; it was by "an interior and intimate persuasion."

For those who consider this authority enough, Swedenborg's Bible exegesis may have the value of "revelation"—there are many such revelations in the history of sects—but others find it hard to understand how so intelligent a man could so uncritically have accepted interpretations devoid of scholarship.

And the only explanation is of course that he was startled into belief because they came to him and continued coming to him either by way of automatic writing, or, as was probably the case later, by way of auditory hallucinations, or clairaudience, depending on the point of view taken of his experiences.

Were those experiences furnished by his unconscious mind or were they at least in part from some discarnate mind or minds? The "interpretations" furnished by much of the automatic writing in The Word Explained, those seemingly from the second century, are so unlike his known reading and interests that adherents of "spirit" hypotheses could be tempted to imagine them as coming from discarnate minds attracted to their favorite sport of Bible exegesis with which to slam their opponents, the "unconverted" Jews who still clung to Moses.

But we do not know everything read by Swedenborg.^7a In regard to the interpretations in the Arcana we know that many of the ideas are the same as those of Neoplatonist-influenced writers whom he might have read, but it is certain that he accepted them as "revelations" because they too came to him when he was more or less entranced, as we now should say. (He was to call it "a suspension of bodily sensations" during which man could receive "angelic wisdom" "by influx from above into the spiritual parts of his mind." ⁸)

Certainly it could be said that while in this state his unconscious mind produced ideas for him that seemed visible or audible, but which might have their origin in his past reading. For those who favor the "spirit" theory it could of course be maintained that as he recovered from the surprised shock of having his hand move of his own accord, he stopped accepting the more primitive "spirits" which were doing the writing and, reverting to his own enlightened beliefs, became connected, through the power of the association of ideas, with "spirits" sympathetic to those beliefs, who then took control either of his hand or of his attention.

It is clear from the handwriting of the first draft of the Arcana that he was not in a normal state when writing most of the work. Although it varies from the violent script to the almost normal, it is certainly written under stress.

But it is not the Bible exegesis of these volumes which is likely to be of interest now, nor even the frequent sublimity of the spiritual perceptions. They could be matched from the writings of other mystics. What cannot be matched are his reports from "the other world," "from things heard and seen"—they could not have been predicted from what we know of his reading or his experience. Quite the contrary. In the work on The Soul he asserted that once free of the body the soul would live a life pure beyond imagination. But after he had had, as he claimed, experience of the world of spirits, he said they had hardly changed a bit from this world, that, in fact, the Christians were the worst of all.⁹ He said, in effect, it is very different from the way you think it is, and merely dying is no admission to either heaven or hell.

Had he come to his new experiences with settled opinions and fixed ideas as to what the other world was to be like, one would expect that a consistent account would soon emerge, but it did not. Time and again he eagerly tried to construct the whole from some little bone of supposed fact, only to have to confess later that he had been wrong. His assertions in regard to memory, for instance, had often to be modified—in other words, his behavior was like that of a scientist coming into an entirely new field armed with an inadequate working hypothesis, and having to yield to first-hand observation of the phenomena.

He was right in having said that popular notions of heaven and hell were simply that there was felicity in the one and torment in the other, but he must have known that there had been people before him, even in Europe, who had progressed farther. Many of Jacob Boehme's sayings¹⁰ about self-will being the cause of torment in hell and abandonment of self being the cause of "heaven" even here on earth, could have been said (and often were) by Swedenborg.

Indeed the ethical, mystical and religious speculations of Boehme bear so much resemblance to Swedenborg's that later on he was constantly being asked if he had read Boehme.

This he constantly denied, but he could easily have found the same ideas in other books to which he had access. J. G. Gichtel,¹¹ who lived forty years in Holland and who wrote a book whose doctrine of the Grand Man much resembles Swedenborg's, was a disciple of Boehme's, while others of the "occult" fraternities entertained many of the ideas of the Beyond which Swedenborg seemed to regard as "arcana" revealed to him alone.

And, on the spirit hypothesis, perhaps they were, as far as he knew.

But where others had described heaven and hell as immaterial states of mind in exalted but vague language (though often surprisingly similar) Swedenborg was as specific as when he had been sent out by the Board of Mines to report on the supplies of charcoal and metal in Sweden. His contribution was not so much toward a new understanding of those ultimate conditions of joy or sorrow as toward a factual survey, more especially of the in-between state, which he called the world of spirits. It was, he said, beyond our space and time, yet with local or psychological space and time, into which human beings consciously arrived soon after the departure of the spirit from the material body. Unconsciously, he maintained, their spirits while still in the body could commune with this region or state, and he believed that in his own case he was able to visit it consciously when he "suspended bodily sensations."

While, as has been said, he at first incorporated these experiences in The Word Explained, he soon put them into separate diaries, which are most valuable source material for a study of a "medium" or "sensitive," as these supposed links between two worlds are now usually called.

From the point of view of psychical research a "medium" is defined (by G. N. M. Tyrrell) as "a person who manifests paranormal phenomena, usually in a state of trance," and a "sensitive" as "one who possesses the special faculty of experiencing paranormal phenomena, especially of the extra-sensory type." ¹²

Psychical research notes but does not underwrite the medium's customary assertion that while he or she is in a state of trance (usually unconscious) "spirits" speak through the entranced body, sometimes giving veridical information. The sensitive may or may not believe in spirits, but he or she claims to be capable of acquiring correct information by other than normal means, such as clairvoyance, etc., or, sometimes, by automatic writing.

Swedenborg was a most unusual combination of the two, except that his mediumship differed from the customary form by his being conscious of his experiences.

For a long period he noted them in his diary as they came to him day by day. Between December, 1747, and November, 1748, he wrote about fifty folio pages a month.¹³ He also wrote a detailed index of what he "saw, heard and felt," in order to use his observations in a sort of guidebook.

This guidebook he combined with the Bible commentaries of the Arcana Celestia in a way reminiscent of modern magazine-wile when advertising is sandwiched into a story. Before a chapter of exegesis he put an account of life in the spirit world, ending it by saying that the continuation would be found at the close of the chapter.

Sometimes he copied his diary entries literally; sometimes he trimmed and arranged them. Still the descriptions in the Arcana are often nearer his unedited and unrationalized impressions than what he was to write in his later theological books. The latter did gain in clarity, but lost very much in that Swedenborg often omitted or only referred in passing to what he meant by saying that the "objects" in the "other world" were "appearances" only. This may have been prudence on his part—orthodox churches still had power—for although his books were anonymous their authorship did leak out eventually; but he may also have become tired of forever having to explain his theory that matter was energy and psychic organisms still finer energy, and thought something still subtler which could be visibly projected by the psychic organism.

It may have been something like the weariness that overcomes the writer on psychical research, who has to say for the nth time something like "the dissociated fragment of the medium's personality and or the alleged communicating spirit," and who finally lapses into saying "the spirit" or "Jones," slipping in an "alleged" now and then to pacify his conscience.

In any case, Swedenborg thought that he had cited particular cases enough in the Arcana Celestia (eight volumes of which people could go and buy if they wanted to, and if they could read Latin). In Heaven and Hell (1758) he went in more for general principles, giving a partial survey of the world he felt he had visited without putting in very much of his theory about its "reality" and without quoting many of the specific experiences on which the survey was based.

It is convenient to take a look at this map¹⁴ before going into his absorbing account of what he felt was the symbiosis, the close "living-together," of men and spirits, especially Swedenborg's own case.

To read the map, his ideas must be reviewed once again. Swedenborg brought to his experiences the belief that man had several "natures," one dependent on the other, and yet, in subtle ways, each distinct and capable of taking dominion over the rest, because of a certain amount of free will. He also believed, as firmly as the most convinced worshiper of Brahman, that no "real" life existed except God's. The spirit or soul of man was created to be a receptacle of the divine life, whose essence was love and wisdom. With this indwelling capacity, the soul made for itself a physical body, vivifying it in every cell by means of "the animal spirits." This was itself a psychic organism, in between the material and the spiritual. It had its own kind of instinctive sensual mind which recieved the sense impressions from the organs and passed them on to the intellectual mind. This, also called the rational mind, had, it will be remembered, an upper and a lower division, and enough free will to choose whether life was to be lived on the terms of indulging the senses at the expense of the soul or of using the sense impressions in order to advance in goodness and wisdom.

In the latter case, communications were kept open with the spiritual mind, or with that in man which was capable of letting the Divine enter and rule all the rest of his natures.

Swedenborg kept changing the names of these natures, but generally speaking he called them external and internal. He insisted that even if the gross material body were sloughed off, a considerable part of the external man remained—his sensual psychic organism with its instinctive desires, and the lower half of the intellectual mind, the part which dealt with impressions from the outer world. This it usually had learned to do with such competence and gusto that it seemed to itself to be the better half or even the whole man. The inner self, capable of receiving divine wisdom in its understanding and divine love in its spiritual mind, could atrophy or be perverted because of the gross dominance of the outer.

This aged, and ageless, conception of the inner and outer natures of man has been put into modern psychological terms by Dr. Jung. He calls the "external man" the "Persona," or the mask, which he defines as "a compromise between the individual and society, based on that which one appears to be." ¹⁵

The destruction of that compromise Swedenborg "saw" as taking place in the other world, in the "world of spirits," as he called it. This was the limitless region, or rather state of mind, between the ultimate states of heaven and hell into which nearly all men come after death.

In this region, about which Swedenborg was much more articulate than about either of the others, "there are three states of life through which a man passes before he enters either heaven or hell." The first state is that of his outer mind.

"There is an inner region and an outer region of every man's spirit. In the outer region reside those powers by which in the world he adapts his body, especially his face, speech and demeanor to the society in which he moves, but the inner region of the spirit is the seat of his own will and thought." These he rarely exhibits, if they are selfish. "For man is accustomed from childhood to make a show of friendship, benevolence and sincerity, and to conceal the thoughts springing from his will. He has consequently acquired the habit of living a moral and civil life outwardly, whatever he may be inwardly; and the effect of this habit is that man scarcely knows or thinks anything about his inner mind."

"The first state of man after death is like his state in the world, because his life is still external. He has therefore a similar face, speech and disposition, thus a similar moral and civil life; so that he thinks he is still in the world, unless he pays close attention to the experiences he meets with . . ."

He does not usually pay close attention. Swedenborg has explained that immediately after death there has been a little interlude in which angels try to do their best for the new arrival, but he generally leaves them as quickly as he can and forgets about them.

And he meets his friends and acquaintances from this world; they know each other because, all being in the first or external stage, they still look the same. "When anyone in the other life thinks of another, he thinks of his face, and at the same time of many of the facts connected with his life, and when he does this the other enters his presence as if he had been summoned. This is so in the spiritual world, because thoughts are there diffused around, and there is no space such as exists in the natural world."

But these and other little oddities soon become familiar to the new arrivals, and they cease to notice them, because, as Swedenborg says, they are from the order of things in the other life, and "that which happens according to order is like a familiar thing, which is not thought about." ¹⁶

There are many reunions in this stage, at least temporarily. "I have frequently," Swedenborg says, "heard those who have come from the world rejoicing at seeing their friends again . . . Very often a husband and wife meet and congratulate each other, and also remain together for a longer or shorter time, according to the delight they had felt in living together in the world. If true marriage love, which is a union of minds brought about by heavenly love, has not joined them together, they are separated after a while. But if their minds have been discordant and inwardly opposed to each other, they burst forth into open enmity, and sometimes in actual fighting; not withstanding this, they are not separated until they enter the second state . . ."

The length of the stay of a spirit in the first state differs, from a few days to about a year; it depends on "the agreement or disagreement of his inner with his outer mind." Even in the other world it seems to take time to ferret out hypocrites, but gradually they show their true colors until they are in the second state, where every spirit is obliged both to be and appear as his real self. This is his "ruling love" or his will, the desire of his thoughts when he is unrestrained by any social bonds.

"Thought means everything by which man confirms himself in his affection or his love; for thought is nothing but the form of the will, or the means whereby the desires of the will may be made manifest."

Any external morality the wicked may have flaunted drops away from them, even if it has become as it were second nature to them, before they are irresistibly attracted toward hell, "because no one there is permitted to have a divided mind, that is, to think and speak one thing and will another."

But before a spirit is thus integrated downward, a good many punishments may have to be administered. Many of the evil ones cling to their shreds of moral respectability, and it takes force to make them drop it. "In the world of spirits there are many kinds of punishment, and no respect is shown to persons; it matters not whether the offender has been a king or a slave in this world." And then, like the most orthodox Buddhist, Swedenborg asserts that: "Every evil brings its own punishment with it. They are inseparably connected . . ." The punishment seems to be that being evil gives evil its power over one. Like natures are attracted to each other with the force of gravitation. In the first state after death the good and the bad and the indifferent still are mixed with each other, only the more advanced spirits being able to pierce the various moral disguises; but in the second state the inner mind is disclosed for all to see, even in the new face of the spirit, fair or foul, according to character.

Infernal spirits, candidates for hell, roam about in a region of the World of Spirits which Swedenborg calls "the lower earth," and when a spirit in the second stage does "evil from an evil heart" he "discards all protection from the Lord," and the infernal crew falls on him, induces him to believe he has a real physical body, and then they mangle or change it in various startling ways. Hieronymus Bosch would be needed to paint the somber horrors that Swedenborg relates in his cool way.

Good spirits also, or ordinary human mixtures, have their troubles in this second stage, which has aspects of purgatory. They are not, Swedenborg insists, punished for any evil they have done out of a badness of heart inherited from their parents. But those who are not altogether good, with blots on their character due to "falsities," are not immune to attacks by evil spirits—the latter seeming to be like moths that go for the grease spot on the garment. They "infest" those who have falsities to get rid of before they can leave the second stage; and sometimes they "vastate" them—a specifically Swedenborgian expression which might be translated "purify" or "purge." He sometimes speaks of the evil being vastated of all pretense of good in them, and the good of their "falsities."

When the good have shed their worse selves they enter the third stage, that of preparation for heaven. This, Swedenborg says, is a period of instruction. Angels from the heavenly societies, for which the good souls have begun to qualify by their life in the world, come to instruct them about their new state; "those [souls] that have been brought up from childhood in heaven, not having imbibed falsities from the falsities of religion or defiled their spiritual life with the dregs pertaining to honors and riches in the world, receive instruction from the angels of the interior heavens"; those who have died adult "mainly from angels of the lowest heaven."

For the evil souls who have been made to give up the pretense that they had better selves, there is no third stage. They are as it were magnetically attracted to the societies of infernal spirits, from which no instruction is needed to proceed into hell, the reservoir of rampant egoism.

As Swedenborg describes the process of evolution in the other world, it seems to be a succession of states in each of which the "person" who is in it finds it hard to imagine or to believe that there is another state. He fears "death." In a diary entry Swedenborg describes a discussion he had with spirits "of a middle character" on this subject. He told them (in the best Upsala University style) that "the better kind of spirits live a more interior life than souls recently deceased; the angels of the exterior heaven after having laid down the former life lead a still more interior life; and the angels of the interior heaven when they have laid down the former exterior life lead a still more interior life, of which the exterior angels can have no conception, but all the superior angels can." ¹⁷

The middle-character spirits tried to deny this, and Swedenborg could understand their attitude, for, he said in effect, if they were to lose the life they had at the time and come prematurely into another more advanced state, "they would not know what life it was." When he then asked them in plain language if they did not wish to become angels, they said yes they did want to become angels, but they did not want to lose their life. "When I replied that they would then receive a better life, they could not understand it."

"Heaven" consists of innumerable varieties of selflessness, as "hell" consists of the opposite. There is no personal "Devil." No schematic presentation of Swedenborg's ideas, however, is fair to him. What charms and astonishes the reader is the wealth of vivid detail "from experience" with which the stark generalities bloom. These are in all his books, though most frequent in the diaries, but none can be rightly appreciated unless his fundamental conceptions are studied with whatever light one can bring to them.

There is first of all that unit of the "new structural relationships" in the other world—the "society." This is the outcome of the great law Swedenborg sees as reigning throughout creation: like ultimately attracts like. Through its force evil punishes itself and goodness is truly its own reward. In "heaven" "those who are in spiritual relationships know each other at first sight, exactly as if they had been kinsfolk and relatives on earth. They are like intimates, although they have never seen each other before." ¹⁸ Elsewhere Swedenborg speaks of coming into his own society, where he observed that they were like acquaintances and friends of long standing. Man, he says, "after death receives many companions, friends and brothers, as if they had been known to him from infancy." ¹⁹ This is due to "similitude of soul," and the society is so likeminded that it seems like "a composite person."

Many of Swedenborg's observations concerning the nature of "societies" bear a resemblance to the modern "field" theory of psychic phenomena, as presented by Professor Gardner Murphy.²⁰ It is not a contradiction of Whately Carington's law of the association of ideas applied to telepathy, but, as has been said, it stresses another aspect: the "interpersonal" nature of the phenomena. In other words, better results have been obtained in experimental work if two or three persons are working together. Gardner Murphy makes it part of his hypothesis that "such interpersonal powers are much richer and more complex than any possessed by the individual when isolated from his fellows."

They make a "field . . . a distribution of energy in time and space . . . a unitary, structural whole."

(This might be said to be a part of that great underlying field of deep-level psychic activities which has been supposed to be the common subconscious of mankind.)

Human beings may, as Gardner Murphy has suggested, be mere aspects of that interpersonal field, not so separate as our physical uniqueness implies, and, if psychic activity does continue after death, Gardner Murphy supposes that it would be knit still more closely into the "complex structural whole of which it is an aspect," without therefore necessarily giving up conscious individuality.

It would still be a weak or a vigorous part of the whole. And that whole might include both the quick and the dead. "If," Professor Murphy continues, "on independent grounds there is reason to believe that the discarnate exist and are capable of contact with the living, there is no theoretical difficulty involved in their participating jointly with the living in an interpersonal field."

With hundreds of examples drawn from what he called "experience," Swedenborg maintains practically the same theory. But he calls the "interpersonal psychic field" a "society."

In the spirit world especially, Swedenborg saw the "society" as of such importance that he ascribed the state of confusion of the newly arrived soul to his not having had spirits "adjoined" to him yet. In his diary he says: "The souls of the dead, whether a short or a long time after the death of the body, are very dull and know almost nothing before they are consociated with spirits . . . But as soon as they are associated with their like in a certain way . . . they are much more acute than when in the life of the body." ²¹

He mentioned specifically a man whom he had known who couldn't remember who he was (about five months after his death) until "spirits were adjoined," when he came into "full understanding and remembrance." And he was then able to recognize himself from having "his own image when alive" presented to him in Swedenborg's imagination.²²

Swedenborg had indeed, he said, been spoken to by "separate spirits," but they were, whether they knew it or not, what he called "subjects"—or spirits whose job it was to "receive the reasonings of others and thus express the general sense of the genus to which they belong, and collect their thoughts and thus converse with me. When these spirits had departed from me, they were seen to unite again with their own species, that they might lead a life in harmony with them." ²³

Such spokesmen were a feature of the other world. While his acquaintance was still mainly limited to the in-between state or "world of spirits," Swedenborg said he could only communicate with "the interior heaven . . . through an intermediate angel, who told me that he was then made a medium by which a conversation could be established between them and me." ²⁴

These angels were aware of their being mouthpieces of their societies and rejoiced in the greatly increased happiness they derived from the "communication of delight" that being "consociated" gave them, but spirits were not usually pleased with the idea, even if they could be made to believe it through Swedenborg's arguments.

"It can never happen," he wrote, "that any spirit can be absolutely alone; he must be in a certain association with spirits who speak together; certain spirits, however, think that they are alone and that they speak from themselves, and when they are told that it is not so, they are wont to be indignant . . ." ²⁵

Swedenborg confessed that he himself was indignant at first when "all the others who are near" would understand and perceive what he was thinking about, but he soon asserted that all men in the body were aspects, as we should say, of interpersonal fields, made up of both the living and the dead, the incarnate and the discarnate. He said:

"All men whatever are kept through the medium of subjects in some society of spirits—apart from which one could not live—and that too in a society suited to the nature of each; so that if we suppose a thousand men at once, each of them is kept in his society." ²⁶

"There was a certain spirit who believed that his thought was independent of all else, neither diffusing itself beyond himself nor communicating with other societies. To convince him of his error, all communication with the societies nearest to him was cut off, whereupon he was not only deprived of thought, but fell down as if lifeless, except that he threw his arms around like a new-born infant." ²⁷

Each society was itself a facet of still larger aggregations in the spirit world, and, through these, man was even linked with the societies of hell and heaven, those states into which he would be irresistibly attracted by the law of affinity. Some time after death he was to step into his ultimate society as naturally as an absentee member into a club to which he had long paid dues. Whether he would like the members was another matter, but it was one which he had a chance to provide for by his good or bad behavior in the earthly body. "For in the life of the body they (men) are much more left to themselves than after the life of the body . . ." ²⁸

Swedenborg maintained that man could by the right kind of mental effort cultivate the right kind of emotions, and the importance of this was that good or evil feelings "conjoined" man with similar spirits. Ordinarily neither party was aware of this. It did not usually imply obsession of man's body by spirits. As Swedenborg generally explains this, it resembles an association of feelings as well as ideas (both "psychons," of course!) between minds. He speaks of the many changes of understanding and affection in the mind of man, so many as to vary every moment, and "into whatever state a man passes or comes, spirits with whom a like passion was dominant in their lifetime correspond and cooperate . . ." ²⁹

These spirits, by adding their passions to that of the man, make a double battery of emotions, good or bad, according to circumstances. Mostly bad, of course. They tend to enforce man's evil passions; "they smell them out as dogs smell wild beasts in the forest." Around every living being, alive or "dead," Swedenborg, like the ancient Hindus, claimed he saw a kind of "sphere" or "aura" indicating the predominant thoughts and affections, and "such as the sphere is, such are the spirits, whence it appears what kind of spirits are with those who think of nothing else and are affected by nothing else than cupidities, hatreds and revenges. Where the carcass is, there the ravens are." ³⁰

As an example of how spirits confirm men in their desires or fears, Swedenborg mentions in his diary (while he was still abroad in 1748) that as soon as he thought of his garden, "of him who had charge of it, of my being called home, of money matters, of the state of mind of those who were known to me, of the state or character of those in my house, of the things that I was to write and the probability that they would not be understood, of new garments that were to be obtained, and various other things of this kind . . ." then, he said, the spirits would immediately add their "inconvenient, troublesome and evil suggestions" and thus fan his worries. But, he philosophized, "when I had not been in the thought of such things for months or years, I had no care of them, still less did they give trouble." ³¹

He also warned (as we should say) against getting a compulsion neurosis. He said it was bad to make up one's mind that something had to come to pass in a certain way, if it were only a trivial matter, because spirits might seize on the idea and add to it and induce the thought that it absolutely must be so, blowing it up into undue importance, and in that way man lost his liberty. This, he said, he knew also from experience.³²

So overcome was Swedenborg at times by his sense of the interpersonal field in which man lived, this shower of discarnate influences affecting him continually, that he could sometimes say man had nothing at all from himself—all his thought was in a sense thought transference. But at other times he maintained that spirits also had many of their thoughts from men. In fact kindred spirits often associated themselves with men's thoughts and memory to such an extent that they believed them to be their own, especially since, generally speaking, they were wholly unaware of their [telepathic] association with men. Swedenborg said this was due to a kind provision of the Lord's, for if evil spirits knew they were with human beings they would set out to destroy them directly, so great was their hatred and cupidity.

But in Swedenborg's case he claimed he could live consciously in both worlds. He could so change his plane of awareness that he knew of the presence of his motley companions, and they of his. His faith in the Lord kept him from being hurt by them, he said, though he often lamented their attempts to hurt him.

His life was not always "double." One morning he noted some facts about that in his diary. He said that this morning he was in his former familiar state, before he began to converse with spirits; that is, he was vividly thinking about some subject, "so that I spoke, as it were, with myself." He was like this too, he said [not aware of spirits] when he was talking with his friends, or at table, or writing letters. In short, while his attention was directed closely to the business at hand.

But then, he said, his state changed, he became aware of spirits, and was told by them about the state in which they were when he was, as he thought, alone with himself. They thought they were he, thinking his thoughts. This illusion depended, however, on the "nearness" of the spirit—that is, Swedenborg explained, on the spirit's degree of affinity with the subject on which he was meditating. And, he added, with people who think abstractly there are many spirits present, but with men who are only led by the senses of the body and who cannot keep their minds on any one thing there are only a few spirits associated.³³

Corresponding to the encyclopedic range of his interests and knowledge, Swedenborg felt conscious of almost the entire hierarchy of discarnate beings. At the beginning especially, he studied the ways in which they affected his life in the world. He was evidently not a little preoccupied by whether a spirit could enter into and possess or obsess a man's body, and one catches glimpses of his crisis period in London in 1745. Among the gossip collected by his enemy Mathesius in later years from a former landlord was some to the effect that Swedenborg had once run out into the street in his shirt, had been delirious and spoken strange things about angels, had spent an undue length of time washing his feet, and in general behaved very queerly.³⁴

Exaggerated as this undoubtedly was, some of it had a basis in fact, as can be seen from what Swedenborg wrote in an aside of The Word Explained about the spirits having persuaded him to wash his feet "when I was in that state." ³⁵ And in his diary he speaks of hypocrites in the world who can be very persuasive, as "when they persuade others that I was insane." ³⁶ Did he think he had been? No, but he was apparently aware that he might have been thought so. He said he had chanced several times to have spirits "act out their insanities" through him, but "it was granted me to know that it proceeded from spirits and not from me," and he was "told" that a man who had "faith" might sometimes "appear to men not like another," or that he might be "insane in the body but not in mind or thought." ³⁷

"It is wonderful," he comes right out and says, "that I have been obsessed, and yet nothing has ever injured me—further, I could enjoy my rational mind, just as if they were not present." ³⁸

Although in the above entries, from 1748, he speaks as if that state of occasional obsession no more occurred, he continues to note that certain spirits who cannot get used to the new existence try to get a kind of bodily satisfaction through his senses. One in particular was told by Swedenborg that he should desire to be free of physical desires, but the spirit said that he was a young man and wished to return into the world. Swedenborg did not oblige him, as he said he was a wicked young man, but elsewhere he complains that spirits wanting bodily experience try to make him eat greedily, seeking to make him take up his "almonds, cakes, pears and pigeons" ³⁹ with his hands and shove them into his mouth, or to make him buy or steal something they covet. But by this he usually means that they excite his desires.

He often repeated that spirits could not "see" the objects around him unless he directed his attention to the objects, thus forming an image in his mind which then became visible to them. In fact, he said, even if he were only thinking of certain persons or places the spirits would be sure that he really was with those people or in those places.

Of so-called "physical phenomena," that is, the alleged influence of mind or of "spirits" on actual material things, Swedenborg has not much to say, but he does make references to them. In a diary entry he says that the inhabitants of the world of spirits have "peculiar skill in these things" which have an "effect on material and corporeal objects." He calls them "magical arts" and says they could easily "induce the minds of men to believe they were miracles." ⁴⁰

From his personal experience he mentions that "spirits have produced on my body effects entirely perceptible to sense . . . have scattered disagreeable and sweet odors often enough," and "they have maltreated my body with grievous pain . . . have most manifestly induced cold and heat, and cold more frequently; have as it were driven along blasts of wind; I have felt the wind plainly, yea so as to cause the flame of the candle to flicker," and papers too have been moved, he says.⁴¹

From these phenomena, familiar to the modern investigator, especially the sensation of cold, Swedenborg deduced that although spirits were not "material," yet they were "real substances" and not "mere thought," and such "substances in man are conjoined to the material body."

Other semiphysical "mediumistic" phenomena mentioned by him are for instance that he sometimes felt lifted up by spirits when passing over steep places.⁴² (Levitation.) He tells furthermore that sometimes when he looked into a mirror and at the same time spoke with spirits his actual physical face would be changed so as to resemble the faces of those he spoke with. "Nevertheless my face remained, but the changes seemed to belong to theirs . . ." This happened several times, he says, "sometimes to their indignation, sometimes to their delight. They perfectly recognized themselves." ⁴³

It is clear that Swedenborg conceived of the role now played by mediums. He says (January 26, 1748): "I have already said and shown that spirits, who are the souls of those who are dead as to the body, whilst they are with man stand at his back thinking they are altogether men, and if they were permitted they could through the man who speaks with them, but not through others, be as though they were entirely in the world, and indeed in a manner so manifest that they could communicate their thoughts by words through another man, and even by letters, for they have sometimes and indeed often directed my hand when writing as though it were entirely their own, so that they thought that it was they themselves who were writing—which is so true that I can declare it with certainty, and if they were permitted they could write in their own peculiar style, which I know from some little experience, but this is not permitted." ⁴⁴

He tells himself why he disliked to function as a medium. After mentioning that he had seen and spoken with many of his friends, he says: "They have desired me to tell their friends that they are alive and to write and tell them what their condition is, even as I had related to themselves many things about that of their friends here. But I replied that were I to tell their friends such things . . . they would not believe but would call them delusions, would scoff at them, and would ask for signs and miracles before they would believe, and I should merely expose myself to their derision. For at heart men deny the existence of spirits, and even those who do not deny it are unwilling to hear that anyone can speak with spirits." ⁴⁵

So he continued for a long time at least to keep his strange new experiences as his private field of study. But as he had a correct idea of how the "learned" would regard these studies, he did not bother much with what is now called "evidential" material. He noted his own mental and physical states when he seemed to himself to be in communication with the other world, and he considered its chief features and in what it differed from our world. He gave especial care to the study of time and space, a great deal to memory and "speech," and some to "spheres" or "auras"; and if he had not unfailingly insisted that he was making these observations on another plane than ours, their keenness and suggestiveness would have attained recognition even here.

It is no loss of time to follow Swedenborg's probing excursions into these unorthodox fields.