Swedenborg

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) spent the first half of his life as one of the most accomplished scientists in Europe. He was a mining engineer for the Swedish crown, published on metallurgy, geology and anatomy, proposed a nebular theory of the solar system before Kant, and located the seat of the mind in the cerebral cortex before anyone else did. He was fifty-five, and looking for the soul in the brain, when the visions began.

In 1743 he started recording dreams. In April 1745, at an inn in London, he saw Christ, who told him he had been chosen to explain the spiritual meaning of scripture. He set his science down, learned Hebrew, and for the next twenty-seven years wrote, anonymously and in Latin, what he said he had seen and heard in heaven and hell. The Arcana Coelestia began appearing in 1749; Heaven and Hell, the most read of his books, followed in 1758. He claimed to converse with angels daily and to have visited the inhabitants of other planets. He remained, throughout, a courteous, sober member of the Swedish House of Nobles who kept his own accounts.

His teaching has two pillars. The first is correspondence: everything in the natural world exists because it answers to something in the spiritual world, and scripture is written in that language throughout. The second is the Grand Man: heaven as a whole has the form of a single human being, every angelic society an organ within it, and God is the divine Human at its centre. There is no devil in his system, only hells made by the self-love of those who choose them, and no judgement from above; the soul after death simply goes where its ruling love takes it. He read no Kabbalah, though the parallels with Adam Kadmon were noticed at once, and he founded nothing. He said he expected the churches to reform themselves from his books.

They did not, so his readers did it for him. A London Theosophical Society, the first body of that name, formed in 1783; the New Church followed in 1787, with William Blake among the early attenders. On the Continent the Illuminés d'Avignon fused him with alchemy and Masonry. But the line that matters for this map runs through Mesmer's followers, who found that people in magnetic trance described a spirit world exactly as Swedenborg had. Andrew Jackson Davis, the Poughkeepsie Seer, claimed Swedenborg's spirit as his guide in 1847. A year later the Fox sisters heard rapping in Hydesville, New York, and Spiritualism was born. From there the line continues to Blavatsky and Theosophy, and through them to most of what is now called the New Age.

You can recognise this branch by its temperature. It is gentle where the Rosicrucian branch is severe. It has no grades, no oaths, no circle and no command; it has a heaven that looks like a person, an afterlife governed by love, angels who were once human, and a spirit world that can be visited in trance. Wherever a school teaches that the departed are near, that the other world mirrors this one, or that the divine is fundamentally human in form, it is drawing on Swedenborg, and quite often it has never heard his name.