Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic/Chapter 20

by Signe Toksvig

 

CHAPTER TWENTY

Speech, Odors, Auras

THE different kinds of memory levels described by Swedenborg could roughly be said to resemble a pyramid in shape. This would then have the corporeal memory at the thin top and the others progressively spreading wider and going deeper, not only in accumulation of impressions but in understanding and in sympathy. They tend to correspond to the different levels of consciousness, with which psychic research is familiar. It will be remembered that in order to account for the facts of so-called "psi" phenomena, the supposition has been made that some deeper level (or levels) of the mind can enter into communication with other minds either directly without the aid of the senses or through a common subconscious of mankind.

The cross-correspondence cases (see page 197) seemed to furnish evidence that there could be interaction between the minds and memories of men and those of "spirits," at any rate they furnished the "subconscious" with powers akin to the miraculous. "Mrs. Willett" was one of the principals in this experiment, and Lord Balfour's report on her mediumship¹ contains interesting parallels with some of Swedenborg's descriptions.

Like Swedenborg this lady did not ordinarily go into complete trance; no "control" alleged that it took possession of her faculties. Like Swedenborg she remained fairly well in control herself, more or less conscious of the voices she heard and at whose dictation she felt she wrote.

Of especial value are the explanations given by her "communicators" of the process by which they telepathized the information to the mind of the automatist.

They admitted that remembering was difficult. "Wonderfully similar is our condition in regard to knowledge of reaching back, as yours of reaching up . . ." ²

The quotations which were used by the "communicators" to hint at the information to be conveyed were such as were known to the normal self of Mrs. Willett, even though she had no idea what the "communicator" was driving at—just as Swedenborg said that his memory was tapped by the "spirits" who then used the topics for their own purposes.

But the process described by the Willett "communicators" was also said to be one of mutual selection. The "communicator" said he selected from the contents of both the "conscious and unconscious self" of the sensitive, and insisted that the sensitive selected "from such part of the mind of the communicating spirit as she can have access to."

Putting it briefly, the partially entranced Mrs. Willett is "shown" a number of ideas in visual form by the communicating "spirit" ("representations," as Swedenborg would say), and, say, ten of those stick in her subconscious memory. Telepathically the "communicator" then selects two of those and "pushes them up" to where they will be "grasped and externalized" by automatic writing or speaking. Incidentally, they say, the risk is run that some of the sensitive's own ideas will accompany the ones that have been planted in her telepathically, so to speak, hence the difficulty in disentangling such messages.

There was also the difficulty of language. Mrs. Willett became quite indignant when she had to repeat a long and abstract word with which she was unfamiliar, and even more worried if a Greek and Latin phrase had to be conveyed. "I can see the thoughts," she said once, "but it is so difficult to get the words."

Swedenborg would have diagnosed the trouble as consisting in the fact that the Latin or Greek verbal form of the thought was not already a part of the vocabulary in her memory. He believed that you can have thought without words; that thoughts are really images, mostly visual; and that this was how conversation was possible in the spirit world between people of different languages.

It should by now be clear that Swedenborg in relation to what he considered the spirit world did not sit with bated breath and his attention like a wide-open funnel ready to receive without objection whatever "spirits" told him about matters which he had studied for years.

As to speech, for instance, he stressed that in the spirit world it was only apparent. It was really transmission of ideas; obviously spirits had no "real" vocal apparatus and no real air to set in motion. He had no hesitation at all about setting them right on this point. Not without a certain satisfaction he tells that "When a certain spirit who had been known to me in the life of the body conversed with me he appeared to be as though he moved his lips and as though he spoke with his lips; which, when I mentioned it to him, he said that so he did speak with his lips to me; but when I told him in reply that spirits have no lips and that consequently he could not speak with them, he nevertheless persisted, until he was instructed by a lively demonstration . . ." ³

Swedenborg does not explain how—but one has a faint feeling that it was perhaps the spirit of one of those members of the Board of Mines who kept him so long from becoming a full Assessor.

Perhaps he very soon explained to the said spirit that, if the deceased is "utterly unconscious" that his sensations are not physically "real," then, in spite of the absence of "any organ or member of sense" they are real.

When "spirits" spoke with him, however, he noted they did have a reason for believing their speech to be one of real sound—that is, of pronounced words. Among themselves, he soon found out (being as curious as when he first went to England) they had a universal way of communicating by means of ideas, or clusters of images, and in using this they attended only to "the sense of the words"—not reflecting, he said, on "the words or articulations" any more than a man does when he speaks. But, Swedenborg maintained, when a spirit turned to him and transmitted its image-ideas, then "their ideas fall with me into words, and thus they suppose that the words and tone of voice are from them." ⁴

That is to say (using the Willett report terms) the "spirit" telepathizes its message in image form to that layer of Swedenborg's mind which is receptive to it and which can retransmit it to the conscious part either as an image or by using the vocabulary in his memory, and the machinery of his physical brain for writing or for hearing.

Swedenborg's reply presumably seemed to him to return in the same way, while the "spirit" heard and understood the words as if they were in its own language, although he might be speaking another language.

Swedenborg had many arguments with spirits on this ticklish point, proving to them they were wrong "from this single fact that they speak to me in my vernacular as well as though born to it, although they were born thousands of years previously or in quite another region . . ." ⁵ Nor, except in a few cases, did they speak to him, he noted, in languages that he did not know. If they tried Latin or Greek, he pointed out ruthlessly that it was again a case of picking his memory, translating their idea-thought into his speech-thought.

He tried to show that man, being a spirit in a body, also possesses this universal language of spirits, though he is usually not aware of it. It has its origin in the interior memory—that all-recording reservoir—and the speech is "pictorial"; it is formed, he said, "from the visible objects in the world." ⁶ The pictorial ideas of the interior memory are the very origin of language, Swedenborg insisted, and when man wants to speak these ideas fall into the language he has acquired. Then, when spirits speak with a man, that picture-speech falls into the words of the man's language, just as his own "interior ideas fall into the speech of his words." ⁷

The light so to speak was the same, but the globes gave it different colors.

Among themselves, he said, the more developed spirits who knew what was what did not of course try to spell thought out into words, and Swedenborg despaired of expressing the rapidity of this mode of communication. The thought of man, he said, is infinitely quicker than his attempt to put it into speech or writing; the speech of spirits infinitely quicker than that of man; and the angels can think infinitely more quickly than spirits, seeing all the branching implications of an idea in all its complexity at one and the same time.

It is understandable that Swedenborg thought spirit "speech" a very rapid one as he considered that man's "interior memory" (or subconscious) was made up of clusters of associated ideas any one of which could be simultaneously presented in the other world in a visible form.

All things whatsoever that a man or spirit has known about a subject, he said, appear as if in the middle of a sphere and in the light, and the rest is around at a distance from the middle, in the shade. Those at the circumference of the subject, he said, are "like objects of sight . . . when the sight is strained to a certain object." ⁸

Then, as if searching for the useful word "telepathy," Swedenborg said that this common speech of spirits "is in every man whatsoever, and would become of the same character, if one man should enter into the thought of another with his own thought . . . thus he can bring forth more in a moment than by his words during half an hour."

It was so, he maintained, in the other world, one spirit entered into the thoughts and affections of another "and then knows what he had not known, just as if he knew it of himself." But there were exceptions since the "full communication" could only take place if the participants were "in like truths and in like affection from truths"; since all spirits were not equally endowed with receptivity; and since—mercifully, one would suppose—all one's ideas were not necessarily visible. A spirit could, Swedenborg said, "think in silence" when with other spirits of a similar quality.⁹

Many notes in Swedenborg's diaries are concerned with ways of communicating in the other world. These notes are not always consistent. It is not as if he had sat down and been "inspired" to write a systematic account that always fitted in with his own previous ideas. In this case, as in the case of most of his descriptions in that strange realm, it is more as if a traveler in a foreign country had listened to many of the inhabitants and put down some of what each had told him, contradictory though it might sometimes be, interpreting it in the light of his own preconceptions where he had no other light. Like Marco Polo, one might almost be tempted to say; a man whose observations were good enough, but whose interpretations were colored.

As he divided the denizens into spirits (of several kinds), spiritual angels, and celestial angels, so he distinguished between their ways of conveying thought. What spirits were able to say to man was only a small part of what they knew, "for it does not fall into the words, neither into the sensual ideas of the thought which is with man in the body." ¹⁰ Nor could spirits understand the greater part of the language of the spiritual angels, and these again could not always grasp the infinitely wise and loving speech of the celestials. One has a slight shock when Swedenborg mentions that the editor of the London Spectator (identified as Addison) had doubts whether there really was such wisdom in celestial speech that he couldn't grasp it. As all reasonable wishes are granted, he was "let into the company of the celestials, and then he perceived those things which they spoke; but when he went back to his fellows who were spiritual, he was not able to express anything, not even by ideas of thought. He said that the things spoken were most replete with wisdom." ¹¹

Swedenborg noted that in changing from one spiritual realm to another the language of one's own state is forgotten, nor is it always possible to remember what was heard and understood in the superior state—something to which many rapt but inarticulate mystics bear witness.¹²

Angelic thought when visible, he said, was like a transparent wave or a surrounding sphere in which all things were seen in order.¹³

He frequently despairs when he tries to give an inkling of angelic language, because angels have the power, he says, of expressing myriads of things either by visible representation or in a few words made eloquent by the inflection of the voice. He cites the case of a certain hard-hearted spirit who wept when an angel spoke to him, saying he had never wept before, but this was love speaking.¹⁴ The innermost angels can tell a person's whole life from the sound of his voice in a few words, since in it they hear his ruling passion and hence know the details of his life. Yes, Swedenborg said, they can even tell all about a person from a single sigh, "because a sigh is a thought of the heart." ¹⁵

Just as in this world, Swedenborg observed, there are other ways of perceiving what a man is like than by what he says. "There is a sphere, as it were, of spiritual effluvia, which exhale and produce a perception of the life of one's mind. This sphere I recollect myself to have perceived and it has rarely if ever deceived me. Nor need this appear wonderful, when a shrewd and intelligent man is aware from the face, speech and actions of another, of what quality he is, whether stimulated or sincere, and many other things which are manifest to a man's internal sense." ¹⁶ (Swedenborg had used this sense of his in spotting a dishonest servant.)

This power was, he said, much more perfect with spirits, with whom the quality of another spirit could be at once revealed "even from his mute presence." He explained this by saying that the "interiors" of either man or spirit "are in a kind of unconscious activity" and that this forms a kind of sphere which "not only extends itself to a distance but that sometimes also, when the Lord permits, is in various ways made perceptible to the senses." ¹⁷

As spirits, worse luck, generally have an exquisite sense of odor (according to Swedenborg), they were very sensitive to those spheres of other spirits which manifested themselves through smell. There was a definite smell-register. When the sphere of hypocrites was "turned into an odor" there was "a stench of vomit." "When the sphere of those who have studied eloquence in order that everything may redound to self-admiration, is made odoriferous, it is like the odor of burnt bread." ¹⁸ (One of the heavenly odors, he said, was like good bread freshly baked.) Mere pleasure hunters who had neither believed in nor loved anything had a sphere as of excrement in odor; that of the adulterous was even worse. If the sphere of the revengeful and cruel were offered to the nose, the stench was cadaverous. The sordidly avaricious smelled like mice, and those who persecute the innocent like lice.¹⁹

The stench of a certain woman who though fair was evil was perceived as "deadly" he said, yet she knew nothing of it. Certain spirits were sometimes surprised when others fled at their approach; their circumambient perfume was unknown to them.

Swedenborg developed a whole doctrine of odors. The societies of the other world had their own general spheres which also could manifest as odors. The "infernals" love stenches; they cannot bear the heavenly odors of fruit and bread and flowers and frankincense. In fact it makes them sick. "Once I saw," Swedenborg tells, "an astute devil like a leopard ascending a high mountain where there were celestial angels encompassed by a hedge of olive trees; after he had drawn in a full breath of that odor, he was seized with spasms, became stiffened in all his joints, writhed like a snake, and was cast down headlong. Afterwards he was lifted up by his associates, and taken into a den and into his own odor, where he revived." ²⁰

That poor devil was better off, however, than another (here one suspects humor) whom Swedenborg said he saw scourged by his associates in hell, because he (though without meaning to and because he had a cold in his head and couldn't smell) "had approached such as were in a heavenly odor and had brought back some of their perfume in his garments," ²¹ which seems unjust but what can you expect of devils!

But life in the spirit world did not all smell like London in the eighteenth century. Swedenborg perceived a pleasant vinous odor and was informed "that it came from those who compliment one another from friendship and rightful love, so that there is also truth in the compliments. This odor exists with much variety, and comes from the sphere of fine manners."

The spheres of "charity and faith," or, as he sometimes called them, of love and wisdom, when they were perceived as odors smelled of "flowers, lilies and spices" of infinite variety.

"Moreover, the spheres of angels are sometimes made visible as atmospheres or auras, which are so beautiful, so pleasant and so various, that they cannot possibly be described." He did, however, sometimes try to describe the visible spheres or auras, not only of angels but of men, animals, plants, and minerals, for he saw them all as having their own sphere around them, "even the minutest particle." Man in the body he saw as "solid" as to his "terrestrial parts" inside his spiritual sphere, and both men and spirits he sometimes saw as surrounded by spheres of various colors, having spiritual significance, the darker colors pertaining to selfishness, the lighter to better qualities. They could be muddy; they could be rainbowlike.²²

How those spheres were acquired which could sometimes be represented visually or via the spiritual equivalent of smell Swedenborg also tells. "Take as an example," he said, "one who has formed a high opinion of himself and of his own pre-eminent excellence. He at last becomes imbued with such a habit, and . . . wherever he goes, though he looks at others and speaks with them, he keeps himself in view; and this at first manifestly but afterwards not so manifestly so that he is not aware of it, but still it is regnant . . . . . . Men can see this in others. And this is the kind of thing that in the other life makes a sphere . . . as it were the man's image extended outside of himself, the image in fact of all things that are in him." ²³

Swedenborg mentions that he had known a man in the world who appeared in the spirit world with such a sphere of high opinion of himself that all other spirits fled away and he was left alone. Another person known to him had "contracted a sphere of supereminence and authority" surrounding him like a mist that crept over the other spirits, so that they wanted to go away. But those who had been born to a sphere of high authority and who were also good soon strove to put it off.

As among men so among spirits there were spheres tranquil and pleasant, others disturbing and depressing. Each soul, so to speak, carried its own climate with it favorable or unfavorable to those near it. Worst of all Swedenborg found those spirits in the nearness of whose spheres it was almost impossible even for him to believe in the good and the true; under whose influence in fact evil seemed good and false seemed true; spheres they had carried with them from their life on earth. But he was not undefended. Once, he says, when he was surrounded by such spirits, "an angel came, and I saw that the spirits could not endure his presence; for as he came nearer, they fell back more and more." They could not "endure the sphere of mutual love." ²⁴