One of the most remarkable figures in modern European history is the Swedish scientist, philosopher, and religious thinker Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). An Enlightenment intellectual who combined a genius for invention with an incisive theoretical mind; an inveterate traveler who combed Europe in search of scientific and philosophical knowledge; a statesman who was also a student of the Kabbalistic arts and who wedded a fascination with mystical eroticism to the machinations of a secret agent—these characteristics alone would qualify him as a figure of great interest. Yet Swedenborg’s most remarkable claim to fame was the series of profound psychological and spiritual crises he experienced in his mid-fifties, which resulted in an encounter with Jesus Christ and the first of many journeys to heaven, hell, and the “spirit world,” described in his book Heaven and Hell. Such claims usually lead to a stint in the madhouse, but the many creative men and women influenced by Swedenborg include Charles Baudelaire, August Strindberg, W. B. Yeats, Aldous Huxley, Helen Keller, Jorge Luis Borges, Czeslaw Milosz, Arnold Schoenberg, Honoré de Balzac, and C. G. Jung. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, Swedenborg was a “mastodon of literature”; and the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Svante Arrhenius recognized that his contributions to science included, among other things, the nebula theory of planetary and solar formation.
Yet most people, if they’re aware of Swedenborg, know vaguely that he was the inspiration for an eccentric form of Christianity that numbered among its followers William Blake and that usually gets placed on the cultural map just beyond Jehovah’s Witnesses. Or that he provided some of the most convincing examples of precognition, telepathy, and communication with the dead, bravura displays of psychic phenomena recounted in practically every history of the paranormal. This was more or less my own take until I became more acquainted with Swedenborg’s life. While writing A Dark Muse (2005), a book about writers and the occult, I discovered that many of the occult ideas permeating modern Western literature had their source in Swedenborg. This discovery struck me as important—important enough to accept a commission to write a book about this little-known genius. What I found out along the way was surprising. With any luck, this brief account of the “other” Swedenborg will prompt some readers to make some similar discoveries for themselves.
Swedenborg was born Emanuel Swedberg to a prosperous Stockholm family on January 29, 1688; the family later changed their name to Swedenborg when they were ennobled in 1719. Emanuel’s father, Jesper Swedberg, was a regimental chaplain who would later be appointed a bishop. His mother, Sara Behm, a wealthy mine owner, was the daughter of an official in the Swedish Board of Mines. Swedenborg had a happy childhood, but he also had experiences he couldn’t share with his siblings. As a child Swedenborg had visions. His unseen “playmates” spoke to him, and when he repeated what they said, his parents were astounded. When asked who had told him these things, Swedenborg answered that he had heard them from the boys he played with in the family’s garden house. His parents knew he had been alone and decided that angels must be speaking through him, a presage of the extraordinary communications to come.
The young Swedenborg developed a skill he would put to great use throughout his life. During his morning and evening prayers, he learned how to control his breath so that it seemed he was hardly breathing. This later became an awareness of the intimate relation between breath and concentration, or, in physiological terms, the lungs and the brain, one of his many intuitions about the functioning of the body that would later be established by medical science. Swedenborg’s “search for the soul,” the scientific pursuit that occupied the first half of his life, led through the brain, and through it he arrived at several insights that modern science has since discovered, one being the “coincidence of the motion of the brain with respiration.” It’s also more than coincidental that regulated breathing, and the chemical changes in the brain accompanying it, has for centuries been a tested means of entering altered states of consciousness.
When Swedenborg was fourteen, his father was made a bishop, and in 1703 the family moved to Brunsbo. Emanuel, however, didn’t go. He was enrolled at Uppsala University, and it was decided he should stay and continue his studies. He moved in with his older sister Anna and her husband, Erik Benzelius. Benzelius, the university librarian, was a brilliant man, and he became the boy’s mentor. He introduced Swedenborg to science, and it’s also possible that Swedenborg had his first encounter with the occult tradition through his brother-in-law. Benzelius was an Hebraist, and he knew F. M. van Helmont, who had annotated Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala denudata (The Kabbalah unveiled), a central occult text. Hebrew was highly prized among Benzelius’s peers, not only because it was the language of the Old Testament, but also because it was the language in which the books of Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, communicated the secrets of the Divine. Benzelius had also met the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, who, it is alleged, had become a member of a secret Rosicrucian society in 1667; years later, Swedenborg would try unsuccessfully to meet Leibniz himself. (Curiously, one of the most noted scientist-philosophers of the time, René Descartes, was suspected of being a Rosicrucian.) Benzelius was a strong supporter of Descartes’s ideal of free inquiry. Jesper Swedberg, however, vehemently opposed it, and for much of his student years, Swedenborg was torn between his growing love of science and duty to his father’s beliefs.
Benzelius advised Swedenborg to travel and study science abroad; England, in particular, was the place to go. Swedenborg’s father, however, wouldn’t finance the trip. With his schooling finished, Emanuel had moved to his father’s house, but he found the place deadening. He was fascinated by the work of Sweden’s most famous scientist and inventor, Christopher Polhem, and believed that his destiny lay in following his path. Benzelius agreed, and he convinced Polhem as well, who was willing to accept Swedenborg as an assistant. The only problem was that Swedenborg was nowhere to be found. Soon they discovered he was in England.
Aside from his first taste of travel and freedom, Swedenborg’s English adventure, the first of many journeys, provided an experience that left a lasting impression. Just outside London, some Swedes boarded the ship and persuaded Swedenborg to accompany them. But the plague had broken out in Sweden, and the English had commanded the passengers to remain in quarantine. Swedenborg broke the quarantine, the penalty for which was hanging. He was caught and just barely escaped the noose, but the virtue of a “bill of health”—an essential item in those days—stayed with him and would return in the context of a very different crisis many years ahead.
London became an important place for Swedenborg. He lodged in the city on six occasions and spent his last days there. London was also the scene for his initial entry into the spirit worlds and for a peculiarly eerie vision in which he was advised by an angel “not to indulge the belly too much.” It’s possible that during his first visit, Swedenborg was initiated into a Jacobite Masonic lodge and became involved in a Franco-Swedish Masonic conspiracy to restore the Stuarts to the English throne. It was also in London that Swedenborg may have come under the influence of the rabbi Samuel Jacob Chayyim Falk, who numbered among his other students the famous mage Alessandro Cagliostro. Falk is a mysterious figure; it may be that he is one of the “unknown superiors” that W. B. Yeats, in his reminiscences of his time as a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, refers to when speaking of the order’s history. Falk was at the hub of occult life in London at the time Swedenborg made his later visits, as well as during his last days there. Falk set up an alchemical laboratory on London Bridge and, from his house in the East End, ran an esoteric school. An occult community of Freemasons, Kabbalists, Rosicrucians, and alchemists, as well as the followers of the eccentric Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf, leader of the Moravian Brethren, gathered around Falk, and it is very possible that Swedenborg moved in this circle.
One aspect of the Moravians seems to have interested Swedenborg very much. Some of their doctrines were borrowed from Kabbalah, as well as from the followers of Sabbatai Zevi, the false Messiah. Part of the Sabbatian worship involved sex, and it’s possible that the several erotic entries in Swedenborg’s diaries reflect his participation in Count Zinzendorf’s Sabbatian-Kabbalistic rites. Although Swedenborg remained a bachelor, sex was always an important ingredient in his philosophy, and he had some very liberal ideas about it: he kept mistresses and advocated concubinage and pre- and extramarital relations. One of his last books, Conjugial [sic] Love, or Marriage Love, was written when he was eighty and depicts the delights of heavenly eroticism. In Swedenborg’s heaven, men and women find their true partners, who are not always the ones they knew on earth, and their sexual lives continue; in fact, they’re supposed to get even better.
Along with his Kabbalistic studies, Swedenborg devoted himself to mathematics, mechanics, and astronomy. In his travels he tended to take rooms with craftsmen so that he could learn their trades: watchmaking, cabinetry, brass working, marble inlay. In London he invested in many scientific instruments: prisms, microscopes, scales, quadrants, a camera obscura, an air pump. His letters to Benzelius were read by the Guild of the Curious, the first Swedish scientific society, who wrote back asking him to make contact with John Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal. Later, Swedenborg’s letters would help him become the editor of the first Swedish scientific journal, Daedalus hyperboreus (The northern Daedalus). It was also in London that he began what would become an almost lifelong pursuit. Swedenborg had a burning desire for fame, and he was determined to win the prize offered by Greenwich Observatory to devise a method of establishing longitude at sea; he lost out when John Harrison produced the chronometer. After London he went to Oxford, where he met the astronomer Edmund Halley, discoverer of the comet.
One of Swedenborg’s letters contained a list of proposed inventions, including a submarine, an aqueduct, a machine gun, a do-it-yourself home entertainment center, an automobile, and an airplane. The Europe Swedenborg was intent on conquering was awakening to a delight in mechanized marvels, such as Jacques de Vaucason’s flute-playing android and mechanical excreting duck, and Wolfgang von Kempelen’s mechanical chess-playing Turk. Philip James de Loutherberg, Swedenborg’s friend and later the acquaintance of William Blake, would become famous for the lighting and sound effects he created for David Garrick’s theater in Drury Lane. However, none of Swedenborg’s ideas got beyond his imagination: true to form, his father mislaid all of the drawings and calculations for his machines.
In January 1716 Swedenborg went to work with Polhem, staying with him for three years, putting his mechanical skill to great use. In 1717 the Swedish king Karl XII commissioned Polhem to build a dry dock at Karlskrona; Swedenborg met the king and, at Polhem’s request, Karl XII appointed Swedenborg a special assessor on Sweden’s Board of Mines. Other important projects Swedenborg tackled were the locks on the Trollhättan Canal, linking Stockholm with the North Sea; Sweden’s first salt works; and a remarkable feat of engineering, in which Swedenborg managed to move the king’s navy some fifteen miles across land in order to defeat the Norwegians at Fredrikshald. In 1718 Karl XII died from a bullet to the head during the siege—it’s unclear whether the shot came from a Norwegian or a Swedish gun—and with the king’s death, Swedenborg’s career as an engineer, and his association with Polhem, ended.
Swedenborg’s real passion, his “ruling love” as he would later call it, was for something larger than invention and applied science. He was obsessed with the big questions: the meaning of life, the structure of the cosmos, where infinity ended. His work as assessor of mines seems like something of a cover. After leaving Polhem, Swedenborg took up his responsibilities as a member of the Swedish Diet. In 1719 the new queen, Ulrika Eleonora, ennobled the families of Sweden’s bishops (this was when the Swedbergs became Swedenborgs) and Emanuel took his seat in the House of Nobles. He contributed important papers on a number of issues, fulfilled his duties as a statesman, and was an exemplary assessor, but his heart and mind lay elsewhere.
In 1734, when he was forty-six, Swedenborg published his first major scientific work, a three-volume opus entitled The Mineral Kingdom. Parts two and three were technical mineralogical treatises, dealing with the mining of iron and copper. Part one, The Principles of Natural Things, or The Principia, was devoted to more metaphysical pursuits. Here Swedenborg offered a theory about the nature of the universe. He also explored the question of how the finite, physical world can originate in an infinite, immaterial source, that is, God. This was the beginning of Swedenborg’s long quest to find a scientific proof of the soul.
Swedenborg saw the limitations of the new science rising out of the work of Newton and Descartes. Newtonian science was content to formulate laws out of the evidence offered to the senses, but Swedenborg was determined to get behind sensory phenomena in order to arrive at their causes. “The sign that we are willing to be wise,” he wrote, “is the desire to know the causes of things, and to investigate the secret and unknown operations of nature.” For the next decade Swedenborg did just that.
Swedenborg was aided in this quest by a strange psychological quirk. In his next major work, The Economy of the Animal Kingdom (also translated as The Dynamics of the Soul’s Domain), Swedenborg speaks of a peculiar inner experience. Whenever he felt he was approaching some discovery, Swedenborg saw a “certain cheering light and joyful confirmatory brightness” that played around the sphere of his mind, “a kind of mysterious radiation that darts through some sacred temple in the brain.” This “confirmatory brightness” returned to Swedenborg whenever his meditations brought him closer to the truth, and he referred to it as “the sign.”
Some of Swedenborg’s speculations seem well ahead of their time. In The Principia, Swedenborg posited “dimensionless points” as the building blocks of the universe. Having no dimensions, they have no extension in space. Not limited to one location, they are universally present, existing everywhere. Given this, every portion of our spatiotemporal world can serve as a starting point for a process of inference, which will then lead to the infinite. Within this, all of the apparently separate elements of our world exist in a kind of seamless unity. In recent times, a similar idea was developed by the physicist David Bohm, with his notion of an “implicate order” formed of “unbroken wholeness.” Another similar contemporary development is holograms. Like Swedenborg’s points, the image in a hologram isn’t localized: it’s contained in every part of the whole.
Swedenborg’s points are also reminiscent of fractals. Swedenborg saw his points as the connecting link to the infinite; as such, they had access to infinite energy, an intuition echoed by later insights into particle physics. This infinite energy is constrained by the points, and the points themselves suffer a further constraint by being compelled to move in definite directions. The movement of Swedenborg’s points over time forms a particle, and its collective movements are seen as an atom. The atoms eventually form larger bodies. Swedenborg continues to repeat this pattern, eventually arriving at very large bodies like the sun, which he envisions as being made up of many smaller images of itself, much like a hologram or fractal. This reiterative element in Swedenborg’s system is an example of “like-partedness,” and we can just as easily say that, for Swedenborg, the sun is made up of innumerable infinitesimal suns as we can that, for him, the sun is really just an immense particle. This idea would repeat itself in Swedenborg’s later theological writings, when he speaks of the universe as a Great Man, of which we are all parts. Similarly, Swedenborg’s heaven is made up of angels. This is an idea common to Hermetic thought, its basic formula being the alchemical maxim “as above, so below.”
Swedenborg’s hypothesis produced other remarkable anticipations. He projected the spiraling of his dimensionless points out into the cosmos, and his picture of the Milky Way as a great wheel of stars anticipated our modern concepts of the galaxy. The French mathematician Pierre Simon de Laplace is usually given this honor, but there’s a good chance that Swedenborg should be credited with first positing the nebula theory of solar and planetary formation. His other suggestions include the ideas that the earth and other planets have gradually removed themselves from the sun and received a lengthening time of revolution; that the earth’s rotation has been gradually increased; that the galaxies themselves are arranged in greater systems; that stars have axial rotation; that planets are formed by the ring of stellar material given off by novae; and that some stars, which we now call pulsars, emit pulses of radiation.
In later years, Swedenborg spoke about life on other planets. This suggests one further contemporary cosmological anticipation, the “anthropic cosmological principle.” In its strong form, it argues that, in our universe, intelligent life forms like ourselves must arise. Swedenborg takes this even further: the universe was created in order for beings like ourselves to exist. This is so because it is through beings like ourselves that heaven is populated. The inhabitants of one planet alone wouldn’t suffice for this purpose, so the cosmos is littered with other planets harboring human life.
In 1737 Swedenborg traveled to Paris and Italy to study anatomy and physiology. He also read widely in the anatomical literature of the time. This study produced his writings on the brain, posthumously published as The Cerebrum. Another product was The Economy of the Animal Kingdom. This work has nothing to do with animals in the wild: the “kingdom” is the human body and the “animal,” the animating energy, or soul. Here Swedenborg made his final assault on locating the elusive “seat of the soul.” This was not an uncommon pursuit; Descartes himself had argued that the soul was lodged in the pineal gland. But Swedenborg had his own ideas, and his work shows how ahead of his time he was. In The Cerebrum, Swedenborg made his most important contribution to neuroscience: the recognition that the gray matter of the cerebral cortex houses higher psychic functions like consciousness and thought, something that wouldn’t be “officially” recognized until more than a century later. Some of Swedenborg’s other insights include the existence of the cerebrospinal fluid, the circulation of the cerebrospinal fluid through interstices between the fibers and nerves of the body, and the existence of the central canal of the spinal cord. He also perceived that the central ganglia and spinal ganglia take over some of the movement initiations of the cerebrum (conditioned reflexes); that the optic lobes are connected with the sense of sight; that the function of the brain is partly as a “chemical laboratory” distributing chemicals through the pituitary gland; that the blood is being continually broken down and replaced; that the quality of the blood depends upon the organ and the person; that the smallest organic particles (what he called “fibers” and “cortical elements”) are independent centers of forces endowed with individual life; and that each organ and “fiber” selects its own requisite nutrients from the blood supplied by the heart’s pumping action—i.e., the blood plasma is not forced into the tissues but rather is drawn in selectively by the tissues themselves.
We can add that Swedenborg was the first to recognize the existence and importance of neurons and that early on he emphasized the significance of the frontal lobes for the higher psychic functions. A further insight into the brain appeared in Swedenborg’s later career, when the doors of the spirit world were opened to him and he observed that the geography of heaven corresponds to that of the human body: Swedenborg anticipated the findings of split-brain research, delegating the “rational” to the left side of the brain and the “affections or things of the will” to the right. Swedenborg also gave importance to the cerebellum, a kind of proto-cerebrum located in the back of the skull. It is through the cerebellum that the influx from the divine enters the soul. (That’s why, in heaven, no one is allowed to stand behind an angel.) Swedenborg’s suggestion that the cerebellum is a contact point between the human and the divine was echoed centuries later by the psychologist Stan Gooch, who saw the cerebellum as the seat of paranormal and mystical experience. Gooch’s suggestion that Neanderthal man possessed a larger cerebellum and was hence more “mystical” than we are parallels Swedenborg’s belief that, in an earlier time, humankind was closer to the Divine and could perceive its presence directly. Gooch suggested that individuals with psychic powers would possess larger, more active cerebellums, and he came across one individual who “reported actual conscious experience of the cerebellum during…paranormal activity.” (Emphasis here and in other quotes are in the original unless otherwise noted.) The individual was Swedenborg.
Yet for all his discoveries about the brain, Swedenborg’s search for a proof of the soul was coming up empty. The soul eluded all his efforts to locate it. Rather than accept this as proof that it didn’t exist, as most scientists would, Swedenborg recognized the inadequacy of one of science’s most cherished beliefs: the continuity of nature. Nature, this concept says, is of a piece, and the same laws accommodating physical reality should be applied to anything else. Swedenborg jettisoned this dogma and instead developed what he called “The Doctrine of Series and Degrees.” There were, he saw, “breaks” in nature, “jumps,” the kind of “explanatory gaps” that some contemporary philosophers see between the physical structure of the brain and the immaterial phenomena of consciousness. (No one has yet shown how we get from a neuron to a thought.) The idea also has some resonance with the notion of “punctuated equilibrium,” which suggests that evolution doesn’t operate gradually, but in sudden “leaps.” For Swedenborg this was a tremendous insight, and it initiated a period of much soul searching of a different kind. For all his brilliance and questing intellect, he saw that science would not lead him to the soul, and this led to a protracted struggle between the heart and the head. This conflict between the religious and rational sides of his psyche, begun years before, reached a momentous climax on the night of April 6–7, 1744. Swedenborg had already gone through a long period of strange dreams and trance states in which he “heard speech that no human tongue can utter,” and felt agonies of “wretchedness as of final condemnation.” He experienced spells of swooning, fainting, and uncontrollable trembling and days of “double thoughts,” when an idea was immediately countered by its opposite. When Swedenborg went to bed that night, he heard a noise under his head; then, suddenly, a violent shuddering and a sound like thunder shook him. A great rush of wind threw him to the floor, and he seems to have had an out-of-body experience. He asked Christ to make him worthy of his grace, then he felt a hand grasp his, and he found himself in Christ’s bosom. Christ asked Swedenborg if he had a “bill of health”—an allusion to Swedenborg’s close shave with a hangman’s noose on his first trip to London. Swedenborg answered that Christ knew the answer to this better than he did, to which Christ answered, “Well, then do.” Later, this figure appeared again and told Swedenborg that he had chosen him to reveal the true meaning of scripture. In his last years, Swedenborg described this encounter to a friend:
That same night were opened to me so that I became thoroughly convinced of their reality, the worlds of spirits, heaven, and hell, and I recognized there many acquaintances of every condition in life. From that day I gave up the study of all worldly science, and labored in spiritual things, according as the Lord commanded me to write. Afterwards the Lord opened, daily very often, my bodily eyes, so that, in the middle of the day I could see into the other world, and in a state of perfect wakefulness converse with angels and spirits.
Whatever we make of this transformation—and the arguments for Swedenborg’s madness are no more eloquent than those for his spiritual genius—it is clear that, even without his journeys to heaven and hell, Swedenborg remains a figure of fascination and well worthy of discovery. His life and work, it seems to me, are emblematic of the need today for science to push beyond its artificial boundaries, erected by a willful limitation of its criteria for “evidence.” Swedenborg was not the only scientist to recognize that science alone could not account for the mysteries of human existence. Alfred Wallace, codiscoverer with Charles Darwin of the theory of evolution through natural selection, believed that random mutations and environmental pressures by themselves could not account for man’s moral urges and posited some “overruling intelligence” slowly guiding human beings in their spiritual development. Like Swedenborg, William James, who practically invented the science of psychology, devoted years of effort and energy toward discovering some “proof” of the soul. And John Eccles, who won the Nobel Prize in 1963 for his work on the brain’s synapses, agreed with Swedenborg that the mind could not be reduced to some epiphenomenon of gray matter and argued, along with the philosopher Karl Popper, in favor of the irreducible reality of the Self. All these men were rigorous scientists, yet they all discovered that the most important things about human existence—consciousness, the mind, the self, free will—eluded even the most methodical investigation. Yet, unlike other scientists, they took this as evidence, not of their nonexistence, but of science’s own limitations. Swedenborg surely went further in his spiritual pursuits; and the moral and existential value of his visionary ideas, which I have not even touched on here (I discuss them in my 2012 book Swedenborg: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas), may, for some, be what is truly important about him. We may take or leave them as we wish. For me, Swedenborg is worth discovering for the example he gives of a truly remarkable mind refusing to abandon its quest for the spiritual in man.