CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Swedenborg in Daily Life
EMANUEL SWEDENBORG no longer cared whether he should be thought insane if he told people about their friends and relatives in the other world. "I have related a thousand particulars respecting departed spirits, informing certain persons that are now alive concerning the state of their deceased brethren, their married partners and their friends." 1 But he did not tell everybody. His friend Robsahm, for instance, reports how Swedenborg "with great firmness" refused to have anything to do with the great ruck of the curious, people who thought "that he was a fortune-teller and could reveal wonderful secrets, thefts, etc." Nor did he receive all the disconsolate widows who wanted to know the state of their husbands. He was careful to have one of his servants in the room when he gave other-world information, for, as he said, "it is well known that such people misrepresent, because they do not properly understand what they hear." 2
However, such misrepresentation of course overtook the true stories about him as they flew from mouth to mouth. He often complained of this, characterizing some stories as only partly true, others as wholly untrue. Foremost was, of course, the story of the Queen of Sweden and the secret known only to her and her dead brother. Besides that story, the one of finding the receipt for the Dutch ambassador's widow and the one about the Stockholm fire perceived by him clairvoyantly in Gothenburg were those he was most often asked about, and which he always confirmed. But first the questioner was asked to tell Swedenborg what he had heard and Swedenborg would tell him if it were true.
Of the many people who came and went in his large garden and in his simple house, one or two have left their recollections. Robsahm, the aforementioned treasurer of the Bank of Stockholm, writing his memoirs of Swedenborg in much the same neat cursive hand3 that Swedenborg used in the manuscript of the Principia, said that the latter "worked without much regard to the distinction
