Emanuel Swedenborg Research Articles

The Presence of Other Worlds: The Psychological/Spiritual Findings of Emanuel Swedenborg

The Presence of Other Worlds: The Psychological/Spiritual Findings of Emanuel Swedenborg

Text Books for Innocence: Moravian-Swedenborgian Infant Education and William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience

Abstract: Documents discovered in Moravian Archives reveal that William Blake's mother and her first husband were members of a controversial, heterodox Moravian church in 1749–52. She and her second husband, James Blake, attended Moravian services before moving on to Swedenborgianism. The discovery provides a new historical context for William's Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789–94). Count Zinzendorf and Emanuel Swedenborg presented radically new ideas for the education of "infants" (ages one to seven). Though political repression frustrated their early agenda, it was later fulfilled by Swedenborgian educators.

Emanuel Swedenborg's Conjugial Love and the Erotic Politics of William Blake's Epics

ABSTRACT This article argues that Blake draws upon and revises aspects of Swedenborg's theology, especially the concept of “conjugial love,” to construct an erotic universe that objects to the regressive politics of his age. Situating Milton and Jerusalem in the epic revival of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the article argues that Blake's incorporation and revision of Swedenborgian ideas help him to challenge some forms of misogynistic, militaristic politics that writers of Blake's day were supporting with appeals to the classical and Miltonic epic traditions. While many Romantic-era writers call upon these traditions to endorse patriarchal oppression, Blake's deployment of both Swedenborgian concepts and epic tropes allows him to launch a trenchant critique of empire. He revises Swedenborg to extend Milton's critique of classical epic and, through it, the politics advocated by many of the period's epic writings. He does so in part by reworking Swedenborg's doctrines into a vision of eroticism that explodes the hierarchical, misogynistic, chaste conception of sexuality underlying the warrior ethos promoted by the worst aspects of the Romantic-era epic revival.

Comments on S.G.Semenova's introductory article "Russian Cosmism" (changing the optics of comprehension)

The article discusses two main topics: Russian cosmism and the attitude towards it of Svetlana Semenova, who wrote the introductory article to the book "Russian Cosmism". Interesting considerations are given regarding the Russian cosmism of the philosopher A.P. Ogurtsov. The author problematizes the statements of Semenova, who distances herself from the views of cosmists and shares these views. He sees a similar ambivalent attitude in the polemic of I. Kant with the great scientist and esotericist of the XVIII century Emanuel Swedenborg. An analysis of the esoteric Christian teaching and the personality of the latter shows that Swedenborg simultaneously accepted two realities of spirit and nature, removing contradictions, bringing them into line with each other; at the same time, his psyche changed under the influence of work confirming the new picture of the world he had built. The author suggests that, like Swedenborg, cosmists and Semenova built a reality in which their dreams, intentions and actions received a place and meaning. He believes that in order to properly understand this type of creativity, a turn is needed to the problems and aspirations of the individual, to the built reality in which these problems are resolved (albeit in virtual terms for now), to the historical tradition of thinking. In his opinion, cosmists, Semenova and some modern ideologists like A. Dugin or Yu. Gromyko continue to move in line with the Russian tradition, outlined by Chaadaev, Dostoevsky and Russian religious philosophers. Another tradition characteristic of the creativity of these thinkers is esoteric, which allows you to create realities, omitting the problems of realization, following one ‒ constructing the world for your own personality.

Enslaved by African angels: Swedenborg on African superiority, evangelization, and slavery

ABSTRACT This article provides the first extensive study of Emanuel Swedenborg’s (1688–1772) views on Africans and slavery. Although significant scholarship has been devoted to Swedenborg’s influence on the British abolitionist movement in the 1780s-1790s, comparably little has been written on the ideas and context which inspired this influence in the first place. This article explores Swedenborg’s ties to networks and debates about African evangelization, colonization, and slavery during the neglected period of the Swedish Age of Liberty (1719–1772). It shows that Swedenborg was the first Swede to condemn slavery, as early as 1741, explains why he regarded slavery as a divine punishment in the afterlife for European missionaries, and why he presented sub-Saharan Africans as superior, in contrast to the dominant dismissive views of Linnaeus, Bäck, Kant, or Buffon. Like most Lutherans of his time, Swedenborg did not advocate the abolition of slavery, yet within a generation his provocative views about African superiority and spiritual emancipation were used by his followers to articulate their abolitionist agenda. Swedenborg’s millenarian doctrines more broadly re-harnessed biblical traditions about Africa and tropes about the bon sauvage, in a counter-example to narratives about the trope’s decline in the second half of the eighteenth century.

A Language of Things: Emanuel Swedenborg and the American Environmental Imagination , by Devin P. Zuber

A Language of Things: Emanuel Swedenborg and the American Environmental Imagination , by Devin P. Zuber

“The Book Of eternal brass”: The Bible and the Laws in William Blake’s The [First] Book of Urizen and Emanuel Swedenborg’s The Last Judgment

William Blake was an artist and thinker whose character was as controversial as it was misunderstandable, even in his own time, let alone after his death. His works reflect a philosophical and theological system that is very diff erent from what we are used to in connection with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, more precisely, from our usual assumptions about the periods of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The universe he created out of contemporary and earlier philosophical systems, the influence of religious movements like the Moravians and theologians like Emanuel Swedenborg or thinkers like Johann Kaspar Lavater, together with his own personal faith and idiosyncratic interpretations, might seem to be chaotic: a form of disorder, at least for the fi rst encounter. However, this apparent disorder is not a chaos, but the result of a new way of seeing the world, which is grounded in a unique understanding of the relationship between language and thinking.

A Language of Things: Emanuel Swedenborg and the American Environmental Imagination by Devin P. Zuber (review)

A Language of Things: Emanuel Swedenborg and the American Environmental Imagination by Devin P. Zuber (review)

The American Religion and the Rhetoric of Theophany

Abstract James Darsey has argued that a primitive source of reform rhetoric in America is the Old Testament. We argue that the discourse of American reform has another rhetorical ancestor that originates from the prophetic tradition of the American Religion, a scholarly term for the democratic religiosity of nineteenth-century America. By performing a comparative analysis of three theophanies, recorded in the personal narrative accounts of Emanuel Swedenborg, Joseph Smith, and Ellen G. White, we present a theory of the rhetoric of theophany. We then analyze Eugene V. Debs’s “How I Became a Socialist” as the reformer equivalent of a theophanic conversion myth, discussing how the experientialism, polarization, and subversiveness of theophanic rhetoric enables prophets and reformers to launch their careers, even from places of marginalization.

A Language of Things: Emanuel Swedenborg and the American Environmental Imagination

A Language of Things: Emanuel Swedenborg and the American Environmental Imagination

A Language of Things: Emanuel Swedenborg and the American Environmental Imagination, by Devin P. Zuber

A Language of Things: Emanuel Swedenborg and the American Environmental Imagination, by Devin P. Zuber

From the Guest Editor: The Legacy of Poe’s Graphicality in the Expanded Field

From the Guest Editor: The Legacy of Poe’s Graphicality in the Expanded Field

Thrilling Vagueness and Pure Abstractions: Swedenborgian Correspondence and Edgar Allan Poe’s Graphicality

Abstract If we are to position Poe’s concept of “graphicality” as hovering at the juncture between the verbal and the visual—a gesture toward painting at the same time that it indicates a literary art of description, or ekphrasis—criticism has tended to overlook the centrality of Emanuel Swedenborg’s so-called “doctrine of correspondences” within American art discourses of the 1830s and ’40s. This essay explores the corresponding Swedenborgian valences behind Poe’s own graphicality, putting his work in context of three critical figures in Poe’s orbit who respectively mediated, to one degree or another, Swedenborgian theories: George Bush, the mesmerist and New York University professor of Hebrew and Oriental languages; Thomas Holley Chivers, the southern poet, and close friend of Poe’s; and finally, Christopher Pearse Cranch, the landscape painter. The essay concludes with a brief close reading of Poe’s iconic tale “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the only published work in Poe which explicitly mentions a book by Swedenborg (his “spiritualist” classic from 1758, Heaven and Hell).

Thrilling Vagueness and Pure Abstractions

Abstract If we are to position Poe’s concept of “graphicality” as hovering at the juncture between the verbal and the visual—a gesture toward painting at the same time that it indicates a literary art of description, or ekphrasis—criticism has tended to overlook the centrality of Emanuel Swedenborg’s so-called “doctrine of correspondences” within American art discourses of the 1830s and ’40s. This essay explores the corresponding Swedenborgian valences behind Poe’s own graphicality, putting his work in context of three critical figures in Poe’s orbit who respectively mediated, to one degree or another, Swedenborgian theories: George Bush, the mesmerist and New York University professor of Hebrew and Oriental languages; Thomas Holley Chivers, the southern poet, and close friend of Poe’s; and finally, Christopher Pearse Cranch, the landscape painter. The essay concludes with a brief close reading of Poe’s iconic tale “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the only published work in Poe which explicitly mentions a book by Swedenborg (his “spiritualist” classic from 1758, Heaven and Hell).

From the Guest Editor

From the Guest Editor

“Eternity roll’d wide apart”: The Creation of the World and Man in William Blake’s The [First] Book of Urizen in Light of Emanuel Swedenborg’s The Last Judgment

Beginnings are usually regarded as either hard or energizing times that set our inner world in motion. However, there is a beginning that is more important for humanity than any other: the origin of human life and of the world. The knowledge of our origin and the mystery concerning the beginning of the world have been the most intriguing and most engaging issues since man became aware of their own physical and spiritual existence. For many centuries, it was the duty of religion to provide humanity with a teaching about their origin and the foundation of human dignity. However, the 18th and 19th centuries were critical in the treatment of the biblical creation stories in Europe. The debate between misinterpreted creation myth accounts and scientific theories led to a sharpening confrontation between religion and science, but it also divided the believers and resulted in the birth of new theories. Emanuel Swedenborg, an influential theologist of the period, wrote detailed commentaries and genuine tractates related to the topic that influenced the ideology and art of William Blake, a versatile and ingenious artist and thinker of the era, whose influence is still significant today. The aim of this study is to highlight the parallels and contrasts between Blake’s Genesis myth and Swedenborg’s teachings, mainly through the unusual pairing of The [First] Book of Urizen and The Last Judgment, to show the connection between Swedenborg’s unorthodox views and Blake’s ideas about the creation of man and the world.

The painter Meri Genetz and the endless quest for spiritual wisdom

Meri Genetz (1885–1943) was a Finnish painter, esotericist, and a spiritual seeker. Around 1925, she began truly dedicating herself to spiritual seeking and started to make notes of her studies in black notebooks. This article will go through four of those notebooks which today offer a vivid picture of Genetz’s seeking between the years 1925 and 1943. In the beginning, Genetz acquainted herself with Gnosticism, Theosophy, and Kabbalah, as well as the works of Christian mystics, such as Emanuel Swedenborg and Jakob Böhme, the writings of, for example, Paracelsus, and texts attributed to the mythic figure Hermes Trismegistus. Gradually Genetz started to outline her own views, ideas, and theories regarding higher truth and spiritual wisdom. In the beginning of the 1930s her main quest came to be to find her ‘other half’ and become whole. She started attending Spiritualist séances, where she would ask about her other half and discuss the state of her soul, the souls of others, her art and marriage, and the books she had read. In time, Genetz’s quest for true wisdom and self-fulfilment became more and more restless and impatient. When she died in 1943, she was still seeking.

A Comparison of Wolff’s and Kant’s Receptions of Emanuel Swedenborg

Abstract Kant’s Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766) did not provide the sole perspective through which Emanuel Swedenborg’s work was known in Germany in the eighteenth century. Before Kant, another German philosopher was interested in Swedenborg from a completely different perspective: Christian Wolff. On the one hand, this paper analyzes the meaning of Wolff’s anonymous reviews of Swedenborg’s early writings published in Acta Eruditorum, the authorship of which was only recently discovered, in order to show Swedenborg’s intertwinement with German scholars during the 1720s. On the other, I juxtapose Kant’s and Wolff’s evaluations of Swedenborg’s work at the origins of their different attitudes towards fundamental problems such as the nature of the soul and immortality.

Now the sneaking serpent walks: diabolic as a creation force in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, by William Blake

: In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-1793), William Blake offers a trail to fly through the Universe. His muse, the “sneaking serpent”, elucidates the concept that diabolic does not contain in itself the idea of evil – nevertheless it is an active springing from Energy, for every existence is holy. This study understands the prophetic trip narration to mystery as a way that the poetic voice erects against Reason (Good), to empower himself in the Energy of Devil (or of Hell). Hereby, it was adopted the idea of devilish as a vital force, avoiding dogmatic and religious definitions of the term, a thematic often struggled by the author, mainly concerning his rupture with the thoughts of Emanuel Swedenborg. Another point that was researched was in relation to distinct visual representations of the serpent myth in Blake’s illustrations, as in “The Serpent Attacking Buoso Donatin” (1826–7, reprinted in 1892), and in “The spiritual of Nelson guiding Leviathan” (1805-1809). Both in written and pictorial artworks, the author asserts that the serpent symbolizes the sacred that lives in all profane things.

Speaking with the Dead in Early America by Erik R. Seeman

Reviewed by: Speaking with the Dead in Early America by Erik R. Seeman Kirsten Fischer (bio) Death, Protestantism, Spiritualism, Cult of the dead, Religion Speaking with the Dead in Early America. By Erik R. Seeman. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. 344. Cloth, $39.95). When the Protestant Reformation abolished purgatory, the place between heaven and hell where the majority of souls were cleansed of sin before ascending to heaven, it also eliminated the ability of the living to [End Page 310] use prayer to aid the souls of their beloved dead. Communication between the living and the dead ceased for Protestants, or so we have thought. In this delightfully surprising book, Erik R. Seeman shows that Protestants were not so easily separated from their dead. Through imaginative literature and material culture, they retained their relationships with the deceased, speaking to the dead and sometimes, although less often, with them. Seeman initially set out to explain the 1850s boom in séance Spiritualism whose sudden popularity seemed as odd as the rapping sounds on parlor tables with which the dead communicated with the entranced living. But he did not write the pre-history of Spiritualism as he had intended because the archives revealed a much broader and less known phenomenon: long-standing customs of communication with the deceased within many strands of Euro American Protestantism. Seeman makes clear that the practice of sustaining active relationships with the dead—he calls this the "cult of the dead" and its followers "cultists"—did not require two-way communication. Even imagined conversation, he argues, served as a deeply meaningful way to retain relationships with those who had died. Granted, some Protestants believed they actually interacted with and could influence the fate of the dead. Swedenborgians, for example, understood that their founder, Emanuel Swedenborg, conversed with people who in death had become angels. Shakers made communication with the dead a central part of their religious practice, and Mormons used proxy baptism, baptizing a live person on behalf of someone deceased, to bring the dead into the Mormon fold. These believers claimed a direct exchange with the dead. Seeman, however, is more interested in indirect (because imagined) relationships, making the case that these, too, belong in our conception of the Protestant "cult of the dead." In eight loosely chronological chapters organized by type of source material, Seeman introduces the reader to the different means by which Protestants spoke to or imagined hearing from the dead. Some texts come from a familiar yet overlooked archive: the cemetery. "Talking" headstones with carved messages from the departed held visitors in suspended moments of imagined connection. In this way, Protestants experienced cemeteries as sites of immanence that supported communion with the dead. Graveside elegies, like those written by Phillis Wheatley, gave voice to the dead in verse and prose. Popular literature, especially Gothic fiction with its interest in the supernatural, helped Protestants explore the [End Page 311] boundary between the living and the dead. Seeman makes especially creative use of material culture, namely the objects that expressed and maintained post-mortem connections. Corpses, most immediately, became sites and means of communication. More lasting were household objects with spiritual significance, such as hair jewelry made with locks from the deceased, daguerreotypes and portraits made shortly after the death of a family member, and mourning embroidery that ventriloquized the dead. Bringing home the larger argument, Seeman shows that Protestantism—frequently described as a religion of creeds rather than embodied practice, of interiority rather than materiality, and of the absence rather than presence of spiritual beings—was not as self-contained as scholars have thought. In fact, Seeman says, a full "three centuries of Protestant popular belief in burial grounds as sites of haunting, two centuries of talking gravestones, a century of Graveyard School poetry, and many decades of sentimental and Gothic literature" had prepared the way for a bereaved Protestant in the mid-nineteenth century to think her mother's spirit hovered in the cemetery or might coming knocking at the parlor table (227). Many kinds of religious texts and objects, "taken together, point to the emergence of a cult of the dead decades before the advent of séance...