sance and even later. Swedenborg was acquainted with their writings, and even with the fountain itself, the Kabbalah, itself at least partly derivative from older occultisms.8
According to these doctrines, when God, the Unmanifest, manifested himself, he flowed or emanated into the form of a giant man, this becoming the shape of the universe, and when man was created each member of his body "corresponded" to a part of the universe. The world was the macrocosm and man the microcosm, and the two interacted.9
Swedenborg, through what he was "told," took what he liked of these interweaving symbolisms, and what he especially liked—what took root most speedily and deeply in his background of experience and preference—was the physiological symbolism. As it solved many problems for him, especially those of "location," very soon he saw it as real.
As he tells it in Arcana Celestia, it is heaven that has the form of the Grand Man, and "man is so formed as to correspond to heaven in regard to each and all things in him."
Now, if there was anything which Emanuel Swedenborg felt certain he knew about it was nearly each and everything in the human body—where it was, and what was its function, its "character." So when he was "told" that a certain society of angelic spirits was located in "the province of the kidneys" 10 of the Grand Man, he was not surprised to learn that the function of these spirits was to separate the false from the true; in a manner of speaking that is what he knew the kidneys did in the physical body of man.
Another instance: certain "interior angels" (the best kind) belonged "in the province of the eye." This, he said, was because the eye "is in the face and proceeds from the brain," evidently the noblest part of the Grand Man. Whereas those who are in "the province of the mouth" were less esteemed, because the mouth was indeed in the face but it was an entrance to the stomach.11
This Grand Man whose body was heaven was no small affair. No angel of Swedenborg's acquaintance had ever seen Him, though some claimed to have seen one society in Him, which though itself made up of innumerable individuals also had the general shape of a man. Not only our little earth contributed. "Unless there were innumerable worlds or earths, which together constitute such a
