Of Interest: Swedenborg

Emmanuel Swedenborg (Swedberg 2/8/1688 - 3/29/1772) was a Swedish scientist and prolific writer turned mystic. He had a prolific career as an inventor and scientist, having mastered every known science of the time (and creating a few new ones). At the age of fifty-six, after failing to discover when in the body the soul resided, he turned his search inwards and thereby began his journey into mysticism in which he experienced profoundly revealing dreams and visions. During one of his extended meditations, which sometimes would last for days, he experienced a spiritual awakening wherein the thin veil between dimensions was removed so that he coud learn the truths of human existence and the work of souls here on earth. He was guided by various Angels and ArchAngels through the various realms of existence, including heaven and hell where he was allowed to communicate with Angels, Demons and other spirits. Some of the things he claims to have experienced are that there are Jews, Muslims and people of pre-Christianianity times in Heaven; the fundamental issue that love of self or of the world drives one towards Hell, and love of God and fellow men towards Heaven.

For the remaining 28 years of his life, he wrote and published 18 theological works, of which the best known was Heaven and Hell (1758), and several unpublished theological works.

Swedenborg's theological writings have elicited a range of responses. Toward the end of Swedenborg's life, small reading groups formed in England and Sweden to study the truth they saw in his teachings and several writers were influenced by him, including William Blake, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Baudelaire, Balzac, WB Yeats and Carl Jung. Many people during Swedenborg's time considered his writings, which were published anonymously to be absolute rubbish and in 1768 a heresy trial was initiated in Sweden in 1768 against Swedenborg's writings and two men who promoted these ideas.

By the early 1800's, the first Swedenborgian Church had been built in America. In addition to his legendary sowing of seeds in the Midwestern wilderness, Johnny Appleseed carried with him all of the Swedenborgian publications he could procure and distributed them wherever the opportunity was presented. Hellen Keller was also a follower.

The Swedenborgian movement is still active today (Peter Gyllenhaal father to Jake and Maggie, was raised within it), though mostly through the Retreat and Renewal Centers and maintaining the Emmanuel Swedenborg Library.